In Frankfurt in 1481 the pigsties in the town had become such a nuisance that the Rath had to forbid them _in the front_ of the houses by a formal decree.

In Ulm there was a regulation of the bakers' guild to the effect that no single member should keep more than twenty-four pigs, and that cows should be confined to their stalls at night.

In Nuernberg in 1475 again, the Rath had to interfere with the intolerable nuisance of pigs and other farm-yard stock running about loose in the streets.

Even in a town like Muenchen we are informed that agriculture formed one of the staple occupations of the inhabitants, while in almost every city the gardeners' or the wine-growers' guild appears as one of the largest and most influential.
It is evident that such conditions of life would be impossible with town-populations even approaching only distantly those of to-day; and, in fact, when we come to inquire into the size and populousness of mediaeval German cities, as into those of the classical world of antiquity, we are at first sight staggered by the smallness of their proportions.

The largest and most populous free Imperial cities in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Nuernberg and Strassburg, numbered little more than 20,000 resident inhabitants within the walls, a population rather less than that of (say) many an English country town at the present time.