Short answers, pulled from the story.
A town is generally larger than a village but smaller than a city, though the distinction varies globally and often depends on population size, economic character, administrative status, or historical significance. In many languages, such as German, Russian, and Polish, no linguistic difference exists between town and city at all.
The word town shares an origin with the German word for fence, the Dutch word for garden or enclosure, and the Old Norse word for an enclosure such as one for a homestead. Its original sense in both Germanic and Celtic was that of a fortress or an enclosure, and cognates in many Germanic languages still mean fence or hedge.
Neolithic Catalhoyuk, now an archaeological site, was considered the oldest inhabited town or proto-city, existing from around 7100 BC. It is inscribed as a World Heritage Site and remains a depopulated town with a complex of ruins.
The meaning of the term town differs in each US state. In Alabama a municipality of 2,000 or more is a city while less than 2,000 is a town, in Pennsylvania only Bloomsburg is officially designated a town, and in the six New England states a town is a municipality governed by a town meeting and a board of selectmen.
Australian geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor proposed classifying towns by their age and pattern of land use into five types: infantile towns with no clear zoning, juvenile towns with an area of shops, adolescent towns where factories appear, early mature towns with high-class housing, and mature towns with defined industrial, commercial, and residential areas.
Rochester in Kent had been a city for centuries, but when the Medway district was created in 1998, a bureaucratic blunder meant Rochester lost its official city status and is now technically a town. In England and Wales, city status is reserved for places that hold letters patent, historically associated with possessing a cathedral.