The characters you create have to live somewhere. Well, unless they’re chronically nomadic, that is, which includes many of my main characters, but even they are probably going to visit communal dwelling-places at some point.
So what do you call these places? If you’re writing about a real place in the real world, it should be simple. You can look it up online and find out whether it’s officially a city, a town, a village etc. Well, apart from in the US, where anything bigger than two houses and a filling station seems to be referred to as a city.
This becomes rather more difficult, though, in a secondary world. I’ve frequently come across fantasy writers who seem uncertain how to refer to settlements, and I thought it would be useful to give a general guide.
Very general, because not all cultures are the same. In particular, it’s impossible to go entirely by size or population, because this can vary considerably. Somewhere that would be regarded today as a village might at some periods of history qualify as a city — though this is by no means always the case.
Function and facilities are a much more accurate guide, but these too will be approximate, depending on the culture. For example, in Europe churches have traditionally been a barometer of the settlement’s importance, but another culture won’t necessarily treat its religious buildings in the same way.
Nevertheless, I’ll try to give a rough outline of what traditionally constitutes the various types of settlement.
Hamlet
No, nothing to do with a prince of Denmark. The smallest type of settlement is simply a diminutive of ham, an old word for a village that’s found in many placenames (Birmingham, Hampstead etc.).
Typically, a hamlet is a small, informal gathering of dwelling-places. They’re built close together, perhaps for mutual protection or company, but the place has no community structures, such as a church.
In a pre-modern setting, a hamlet could be four or five farmhouses built in the centre of a district where their fields spread out in different directions. Or it could be a few houses built together in a clearing in the forest, with a stockade around them.
Village
A village, on the other hand, is the smallest type of settlement with a genuine community structure. It’s typically focused on farming (though more rarely it might be connected with industries, such as mining, or fishing if it’s on the coast) but not everyone in the village will directly work on the land.
A village will have the buildings and institutions necessary for community life. In a traditional English village, for instance, that would be a church and a pub, and perhaps one or two other specialist buildings. But the exact details will vary according to the culture.
There may be a shop or a very small market, but it’s more likely that neighbours will trade directly with one another. On the other hand, there’s certain to be a few specialists — a blacksmith and a miller, for instance, and maybe others.
A village serves as a centre for the farms in the district, even when people don’t actually live in it. It probably has a primitive political and legal structure, with a council led by a headman and a simple court to resolve disputes. There wouldn’t be special buildings for these activities. In the traditional English village, they were normally held in the pub.
Town
Just as a village serves as the centre (both literally and functionally) for the farms around it, so a town is the centre for the villages around it. The extent of a town’s influence will probably depend on how densely the area is populated, but it’s unlikely to extend to more than a day’s journey around — a journey on foot or by horse, that would be.
Unlike a village, a town’s economy isn’t agricultural, although there may be some agriculture going on around the outskirts. Most people living in a town will tend to work in trade, crafts or services, and these may be organised in guilds or similar institutions.
There’ll be shops with various specialities, and there’ll certainly be a market, where villagers can come for any buying or selling that can’t be done at home, perhaps including trade in farm animals. There may also be less-frequent fairs, which would draw people from further afield. And the town would offer a range of drinking establishments.
Although the town is likely to offer the basic crafts that can be found in the villages, such as blacksmiths, it will also have more specialised ones. Villagers would come to the town, perhaps, to have a cart built, or to have farm tools made that are too specialised for the village blacksmith.
Services would depend on what point the civilisation has reached, but they might range from offering accommodation to public scribes. And, if it’s a fantasy town, it might have sorcerers for hire peddling their services. It may also have some degree of professional entertainment on offer, although probably on a basic level.
A town would have a more sophisticated political structure than a village, perhaps with a mayor (though not necessarily under that name) and there might be a castle of some kind associated with the town. It would have courts dealing with cases that can’t be heard in the village, although these might just play host to visiting judges on a circuit. And its church, or other place of worship, will be bigger and more elaborate than those in the villages, and there may be more than one.
City
And a city is, again, the centre for the towns around it — its catchment area might cover several days’ travel. The important thing about a city isn’t so much its size (although it’s normally larger than the surrounding towns) as its political, commercial, religious and cultural importance.
A city is the seat of a significant level of both local government and religious organisation. In European tradition, for instance, the main church in a city is a cathedral, and its bishop has authority over the churches of all the surrounding towns and villages. A culture with a different religion may have a broadly similar structure.
Whereas a town may or may not have a castle, or equivalent, a city very probably will, although again its nature will depend on the culture. The city will also probably have fixed courts that try the most serious cases, unless they’re of national importance, such as trials for high treason.
Commercially and culturally, a city is a town on steroids. It’s likely to host multiple markets and fairs, and will be a place where you can access rare and specialised goods and crafts, in addition to plenty of the more basics. And the same is true of entertainment, which will probably range from the highest to the lowest.
In a city, specific districts may specialise in a particular type of retail or craft, or else be devoted to a particular service. Unless it’s a very unusual culture, of course, this will certainly include a red-light district, and if the city has docks (whether on the sea or a river) that’s likely to be the most disreputable area.
Speaking of rivers, if the city is on a river (as most cities are) the direction of its flow probably determines the status of its various areas. Since the river tends to become dirtier and smellier the further it goes through the city, the posh districts will be upriver and the slums downriver.
Capital City
The capital* is the main city of the country (kingdom, republic or whatever), although the word can also be applied to the main city of a state, province or prefecture. This is the main seat of power — whether that’s the king or queen, or whether it’s the officials and assembly of a republic. The provincial capital is normally the seat of a governor, a role that can be known by many names.
The capital is most often the largest city, although some aren’t, especially in the modern world. It may have been chosen for convenient location, or even built as a planned capital.
Nevertheless, it usually provides the focal point for many aspects of the country, such as religion or commerce. There are always exceptions, though, such as in England where, for reasons of Anglo-Saxon politics, the religious centre is in Canterbury, rather than London.
Do I Have to Stick to This?
If you’re making a world, needless to say, you’re entitled to make it to suit your own requirements. Perhaps you have an unusual civilisation where the population units are organised in a radically different way.
However, this is the kind of pattern that civilisations tend to fall into. For most fantasy worlds, at least for those inhabited by humans, the structure of hamlet, village, town, city and capital provides a useful template. And getting the terminology right will help your readers to picture it all.
* Not capitol. This is a mistake I’ve often seen. Capitol is a distinct (though ultimately related) word originally denoting the Capitoline Hill in Rome and the Republic’s government building on its summit. It also applies to similar set-ups elsewhere, most notably Washington DC, but it doesn’t mean the country’s main city.
The Fantasy Worlds of Nyki Blatchley 