How grievous, then, were the complaints when, while wages had risen either not at all or at most from half a groschen to a groschen, the price of rye rose from six or seven groschen a bushel to about five-and-twenty groschen, that of a sheep from four to eighteen groschen, and all other articles of necessary consumption in a like proportion![16] In the Middle Ages, necessaries and such ordinary comforts as were to be had at all were dirt cheap; while non-necessaries and luxuries, that is, such articles as had to be imported from afar, were for the most part at prohibitive prices.

With the opening up of the world-market during the first half of the sixteenth century, this state of things rapidly changed.

Most luxuries in a short time fell heavily in price, while necessaries rose in a still greater proportion.
This latter change in the economic conditions of the world exercised its most powerful effect, however, on the character of the mediaeval town, which had remained substantially unchanged since the first great expansion at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries.

With the extension of commerce and the opening up of communications, there began that evolution of the town whose ultimate outcome was to entirely change the central idea on which the urban organization was based.
The first requisite for a town, according to modern notions, is facility of communication with the rest of the world by means of railways, telegraphs, postal system, and the like.

So far has this gone now that in a new country, for instance, America, the railway, telegraph lines, etc., are made first, and the towns are then strung upon them, like beads upon a cord.