Did medieval cities have street names and numbered addresses for locations/properties?

Question

I'm curious when numbered/personalized addresses came into common use, and how people gave directions or found addresses (either important places or private residences) prior to the creation of a numbered address system.

Answer 1

Not an Anthropology question - more suited to history.

Answer 2

i came from a place where street names and house numbers are not used. when you send mail to anybody living in that place, the address on the envelope looks basically like this one:

Mr. So and so

c/o Mr. Estanislao

Barangay Captain

Rosmerta Village

(name of town, name of province)

sometimes if the person is quite known in the locality, the mail could be directly sent to him without putting the captain's name on the envelope.

since everybody knows everyone in the village, the mail would be delivered to the right person but it would take a month or a few weeks. when i was a kid, it took my sister 3 months to reply to my mails.

maybe medieval cities have the same way of locating people's address.

Answer 3

what do you think? they need it to do something to find the way to places

Answer 4

Yes and no. They certainly had street names. Numbers are a different story they probably appeared at different times in different places. Normally, people could easily find a place if they knew the street and local landmarks. For example, so-and-so lives on River St. next door to the Boar's Head Tavern in a house that used to be the Yellow Inn.

Strangely enough even in the modern world not all places use street names or numbers for example in Nicaragua they only use landmarks. see the link below.