The figures of its population are now between 8,000 and 9,000.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century they were between 6,000 and 7,000.

A work written and circulated in manuscript during the first decade of the sixteenth century, "A Christian Exhortation" (_Ein Christliche Mahnung_), after referring to the frightful pestilences recently raging as a punishment from God, observes, in the spirit of true Malthusianism, and as a justification of the ways of Providence, that "an there were not so many that died there were too much folk in the land, and it were not good that such should be lest there were not food enough for all." Great population as constituting importance in a city is comparatively a modern notion.

In other ages towns became famous on account of their superior civic organization, their more advantageous situation, or the greater activity, intellectual, political, or commercial, of their citizens.
What this civic organization of mediaeval towns was, demands a few words of explanation, since the conflict between the two main elements in their composition plays an important part in the events which follow.

Something has already been said on this head in the Introduction.