‘Town and country’ is among the most abiding metaphors of economic and social development in the past. Relations between town and country are central to several of the most significant ‘grand narratives’ in economic history, including the extension of markets, the rise of capitalism, and the growth of modern manufacture. The metaphor's success is partly dependent on its deceptively simple dichotomy, which is apparent in the very etymology of the term ‘country’: originating in the late Latin contrata, meaning ‘that which lies opposite’, the term subsequently took on in opposition to ‘town’ the meaning of ‘those parts of a region distant from cities or courts’. From its very origin, country came to signify what ‘townness’ was not – a residual meaning, so to speak, which raises the fundamental problem of defining what a town is.

The considerable geographical and historical variation between towns in terms of size, function (industrial, commercial, administrative and cultural), and political and institutional features, makes clear and unambiguous definitions hard to come by. Most historians have chosen either a demographic or a functional definition depending on the questions they wished to answer. The approach pioneered by E. A. Wrigley, Jan de Vries and Paul Bairoch defines urbanity in strictly demographic terms as centres with more than 5,000 or 10,000 inhabitants.