It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Swiss historians began to turn their attention to the relationship between town and country. The first systematic studies by Frantisek Graus on the late middle ages and Jean-François Bergier on the early modern period focused on the ambivalence of the concept of a ‘town’, the demographic differences between town and country, the shifting legal relationships between town- and country-dwellers, the economic dependence of farmers and handicraft workers on town markets, and urban territorial policy. Whereas Graus stressed the underlying persistence of the feudal hierarchy, the development of rural resistance to urban domination and the unstable antidynastic alliances between peasants and townsmen, Bergier set out a series of analytical contrasts – espace rural versus tissu urbain, symbiosis versus dependence – to express the townsmen's economic domination of rural areas through control over the labour market and over foreign mercenary services, over the putting-out system and rural credit, and, more generally, their legal and administrative centrality. Both authors drew attention to the fact that the sources tend to show us the countryside through urban eyes rather than vice versa. Late medieval observers tended either to idealise or to demonise the urban environment, while descriptions of Switzerland by early modern travellers often failed to distinguish clearly between town and country.