Forget the later city entirely: medieval Glasgow was a single long street with ambitions. From the cathedral on its hill, the High Street ran down to the crossing at the Cross and continued as the Saltmarket to the river; the Trongate and Gallowgate ran off east and west; and that, with a scatter of vennels and backlands, was the town — perhaps two thousand people at its medieval largest, entered through gates called ports that were shut at night.
It was a town of two masters. At the top of the hill lived the church — canons in their manses, the bishop in his castle, friars in their precincts, students after 1451 — and at the foot lived trade: burgesses and craftsmen in timber-fronted, thatch-roofed houses on their long narrow plots, workshops to the street, kail-yards, pigs and middens behind. Weekly life turned on the market at the Cross, where country people brought grain, cattle and fish to the tron to be weighed; yearly life peaked at the July Fair, when the town filled with traders, drovers, jugglers and trouble.
Living was close and pungent. Water came from wells, meat from the flesher’s stall, ale — the universal drink, brewed largely by women — from dozens of household brewhouses; the Molendinar turned the town’s grain mills and carried away its refuse; and salmon from the Clyde was so plentiful it was poor man’s food. The kirk supplied the calendar’s colour — saints’ days, processions and the great Kentigern celebrations — and misbehaviour met public correction: the jougs (an iron collar) at the kirk door, the tron for cheating traders, the gallows road east for worse.
Disaster was a neighbour. Fire ran fast through timber and thatch; the plague arrived with the Black Death around 1350 and returned repeatedly, met with quarantine huts on the muir and the shutting of the ports; and famine years emptied the market. Yet Glasgow’s smallness was a kind of mercy — the crowded catastrophes of the great burghs generally passed it more lightly.
What the little town possessed, out of all proportion to its size, was status: a cathedral of the first rank, an archbishop by 1492, a university by 1451 — institutions belonging to a place ten times bigger. Medieval Glasgow was, so to speak, a mitre worn by a village; the extraordinary thing history had in store was that the village would grow to fit it.