These factors, and perhaps particularly the last, allowed the market network to extend, at a time when the economy began to falter, well beyond the needs of stimulating commerce and keeping the populace fed. Notwithstanding controls built into the licensing system to limit excessive growth in the number of markets – though these only really came into play when specific complaints arose – and despite the quo warranto process by which Edward I attempted to reverse the market proliferation of his father's reign – the very tentative county chronologies constructed within this study reinforce existing impressions that Henry III's lengthy reign was a particularly lively period in the fleshing out of regional market networks through the establishment of new communities of urban or proto-urban character – it was left more to an evolutionary process to thin out the numbers.
It is clear that by the early fourteenth century the growth in the number of markets was resulting in casualties among some of the weaker. Urban markets were not immune from the pain felt within a more competitive environment; a number of petitions to the king, direct or through parliament, from towns such as Rochester, Carmarthen, Grimsby, Berwick, and Dunwich complained that their own markets were being devalued by others arising, licensed or unlicensed, within the circumference of a few miles, and this additional economic hardship became part of a growing urban clamour for relief from fee farm or royal taxes. Even some of the more prosperous and commercially vibrant towns had problems with neighbouring competitors, as for example in the case of Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, or that of Newcastle and Gateshead, sitting on opposite sides of the Tyne and both trying to control the river trade, perhaps especially in coal. Yet at the same time we can encounter complaints – albeit far fewer – of a lack of markets, such as from the tin-miners of the stannary town of Chagford (Devon), who bemoaned their difficulty in obtaining food supplies and so endorsed the Bishop of Exeter's application (ca.1310) for a market license there, an earlier informal market having apparently been suppressed after a Mandeville earl of Essex alleged (1220) it was damaging to his own market at nearby Moretonhampstead.
Historians remain uncertain whether the illusion of network represented a set number of markets that, at any given time, were all in full operation; issue of a market licence does not necessarily document an institution that was functional then or shortly afterwards, nor do we usually have robust data to show for how long, or at what periods, any market remained operational or profitable. On the other hand, we cannot be certain that silence on the matter is a clear indicator of cessation of licensed operations – which are characterized not merely by the conduct of commerce, but by the application of seigneurial taxation and administration of commercial activity. It does seem likely that the number of market licenses issued by the Crown gives a slightly exaggerated impression of the size of the market network; but this is surely counterbalanced by the number of unlicensed markets, which are harder to detect, though perhaps lesser players in the commercial environment.
On the whole, however, we might say that the network of markets grew because it was something almost everyone wanted. Markets and fairs were, for the greater part of the Middle Ages at least, win-win institutions that gave structure and organization to a good deal of the commercial activity taking place, although much remained private or what would today be considered black market. For buyers and sellers markets meant opportunities to carry out trade and a relatively secure environment in which to do so (as regards public and official oversight and a mechanism for dispute resolution). For owners markets provided a means of capitalizing on the growth in regularized trade behaviours, increasing the profitability and value of selected manorial holdings, and supplying those manorial bases at which they were most often, or periodically, resident. For the Crown markets became a revenue stream from the grant and reissue of franchise licences, were a vehicle for administering commodity standards prescribed for quantity and quality, and helped meet the royal household's own consumption needs – bearing in mind that the king was highly itinerant and therefore required supply sources across the country. Furthermore, as the leading landowner, the king had his own surplus agricultural produce and livestock destined for market; an estate at Binston (Norf.) was held on the serjeanty of selling the king's cattle in Norwich's marketplace, and certain lands in Kent held by similar service [W. Carew Hazlitt, Tenures of Land and Customs of Manors, new ed., London, 1874, pp.26, 180], although such instances are scarce. Some of the foregoing can also be said of his greater subjects, who owned estates in various regions, and to a lesser extent of most manorial lords – including that it was common for many to task one or more of their tenants with the obligation of carrying demesne crops to regional markets. Nor must we forget that the castles, palaces, or religious houses established by members of this landed aristocracy had dedicated communities (albeit mostly residents and servants) that also had to be supplied, along mostly existing land and water routes that had, for centuries or even millennia, played a key role in the spread of settlement and trade. To some extent the spread of the market network was a natural concomitant to the evolution of networks of manorialism, christianization, and economic and political relations within medieval English society.
Despite all that, we can hardly say that there was any explicit Anglo-Saxon, Norman, or Plantagenet master-plan for developing a nationwide network of markets and fairs in England; this even though the Anglo-Saxon kings appreciated the utility of urban markets as foci for legitimate trading of livestock, the Normans brought to England a useful experience with market towns, and the Plantagenets were also very familiar with continental circumstances related to the revival of commerce. A circumstantial case might perhaps be argued that the period of Hubert de Burgh's influence, as Chief Justiciar to John and Regent during his son's minority, over national affairs saw particular liberality in granting market and fair rights; but it cannot yet be ventured to what extent this was driven by economic planning, by the need to bolster royal revenues, or by the practicalities of itinerant kingship. Apart from the use of burhs in the struggle of the Saxon rulers to reclaim territory from Norse invaders, the closest we might come to imagining any kind of 'urbanization policy' is perhaps in the decades following the Conquest, when the Normans strove to consolidate miltary control by reshaping the urban landscape through a somewhat standardized practice that incorporated elements of colonization, commercialization, and indoctrination. Yet we must beware of thinking that the development of the market network was a strictly linear, strategic, and consciously-directed process; any historical study (such as the present one) that seeks to impose a chronological framework on the process stands at risk of misrepresenting something rather complex and constantly in flux.
Nonetheless we can still argue, as one perspective on the subject, that the expansion and intensification of that network of commercial institutions proceeded in a largely evolutionary manner: initially with an increasing momentum as changing elites – Saxon, Viking, and Norman – consolidated their holds on English, and subsequently Welsh and Scottish, territories, fostered the spread and growth of population, sponsored the development of networks of religious communities, fortifications, and towns, and stimulated long-distance trade – import through demand, export through agricultural production surpluses; subsequently through contraction, as an over-abundance of markets in some regions, the undercutting of income from tolls on commerce by grants of exemption and of income from stallage by the emergence of shops as sites of commerce, magnified by the demographic crisis of the fourteenth century, first reduced supply and demand, then provided a wider section of the surviving population with improved income for discretionary spending. It is not that there was a paradigm shift from market-based to shop-based commerce, for these two dimensions of commerce overlapped, both chronologically and spatially; but certainly medieval shops, whether based inside or beyond marketplaces, enabled a wider range of consumption and retailing behaviours and options, reducing local consumers' reliance on markets, and foreshadowing the more heavily shop-based commerce of the modern era.
We cannot blame shops, however, for the difficulties that many medieval markets faced. Rather, it was the very fact that the market network was constantly changing, in size and shape, along with the location of consumer and producer centres, production efficiencies, consumption demands, and other factors such as improvement or decline in transportation routes, and the sustained or interrupted local presence of large-scale consumers (notably aristocratic households or ecclesiastical communities) – not to mention various exogenous factors, such as health and weather crises, foreign wars, and internal power-struggles, impacting on the viability of entrepreneurial commerce – that resulted in fluctuation in the fortunes of individual markets. Some markets may have failed relatively quickly, not having achieved a hoped-for level of business that generated at least enough seigneurial profit to cover the costs of administering them, while others declined more gradually, losing out in an increasingly competitive environment; many small towns underwent periods of market suspension and revival, but this is better evidenced in the post-medieval centuries. There is reason to think that at least a few markets were established with the intention of stealing away trade frequenting one or more other markets of the region; but on the whole market licensees seem to have made some effort to avoid overt competition by chronological distancing of events. Yet it was hard for founders to foresee how the initiation of a new market (or fair) might influence established patterns of mercantile travel, even though they might attempt supportive ploys such as upgrading a river crossing or diverting a road. Success or failure was determined by a number of variables – not simply, though pre-eminently, widespread and sustained participation by buyers and sellers – and must have been difficult to predict with confidence in advance – although of course what we see in surviving medieval records are the attempts that were made, not decisions against setting up markets.
While some markets achieved initial success, at least temporarily, others may never have got off the ground, slowly declined over a lengthy period, or limped along on the modest amount of local and hinterland business they could attract with regularity. Owners sought alternative income by renting out parts of marketplaces for the expansion of homes or erection of shops. On the whole, urban markets were more persistent than rural counterparts; for, as population centres with a large percentage of residents not engaging in subsistence production, but reliant on their hinterlands for foodstuffs, commercial exchange was that much more essential to towns. Yet the history of the market networks shows that markets were not primarily an urban phenomenon, but that manorialism and commerce could be bedfellows, even if sometimes uncomfortable ones.
'Town-founding', as an historical trend, and 'urbanization' are the constructs of academics. Albeit that they characterize real phenomena, these are phenomena perceived through a modern lens focused on a predominantly urban society, and one heavily commercialized. To have expressed such concepts in the Middle Ages would surely have mystified medieval listeners, who show no overt awareness of any such trends, except through causative legends drawn from a misty past, and perhaps as a natural response to population growth and the economic opportunities this opened up for that strata of society controlling the principal resources of land, livestock, and labour. The same could be said about the development of market networks, regionally and nationally, which took place on a piecemeal basis, even though each piece was put in place with careful, and often strategic, consideration; there were, on the part of some (perhaps many) market founders, the understood aims not simply of providing a service to their manors – especially those where they themselves frequently resided – and manorial tenants, and of augmenting manorial revenues, but of carving out a niche within a commercializing economy. Just as commerce, as a habit and as a central strand of socio-economic activity, emerged over time through a vast multitude of individual actions and interactions, small and large, forming, and conforming to, behavioural patterns, market networks were the unconscious product of multiple decisions – not directly interconnected, but often one prompting or inspiring another, and sometimes seemingly indicative of family policy (in terms of a strategy for estate improvement) – little of which was conspicuously driven by any deliberate intent to add vitality to the economy as a whole, although such may be perceptible at a regional level (e.g. in Cornwall).
It may be that our modern perspective has somewhat overblown the emergence of new towns in the Middle Ages. In the effort to compensate for an initial over-emphasis, within the study of urban history, on the administrative and constitutional characteristics of towns, as opposed to seeing them more as social and economic organisms, we have assumed that markets were subservient to towns – for by the twentieth century most English markets were in urban settings. Whereas, as a number of the cases studied here suggests, newly-founded settlements, or settlement components, with burghal characteristics could just as easily be understood as subservient to markets. That is, while the proliferation of markets supported the growth of an artisan and trader segment of the population, able to earn a livelihood without resorting to agriculture or ownership of farmland, nor relying on agriculture, occupationally, as anything more than a source of raw materials, the establishment of marketside settlements – whether new communities or just expansions of existing rural communities – whose inhabitants were relieved of many feudal constraints on artisanal or mercantile lifestyle, improved the prospects that their market would flourish, or at least endure. It is doubtful that medieval founders of either disentangled the two in their minds: each was simply an element in developing an estate so as to diversify revenue generation. These were less towns, as we would understand the concept, than the seeds from which towns might grow. In any study of urbanization during the Middle Ages, the historian needs to take into consideration not only those communities which were integrally urban from either the outset or from the grant of a charter of borough liberties, but also the burghal components within larger settlements, some of which, in time, became the predominant or characterizing element of their community, albeit that most of these fall into the category of 'small towns' or 'market towns'. More work needs to be done to ascertain whether burghal components were usually morphological units, though it seems likely enough.
Despite all that has been said above, we can reasonably postulate some saturation of awareness within the ruling class that the proliferation of commercial institutions, or events, throughout England would act as a supporting, perhaps even indispensable, element of broader military and economic policies, and could only act to the benefit of the monarchy, the manorial lords who were the backbone of national administration and social control, the growing class of native merchants, the producers of consumables, and the needy populace as a whole. Further, that the kinds of problems that might arise from ungoverned spread of markets and fairs could be held in check through application of some simple principles combined with a process of natural selection stemming from supply and demand.
The example of William Brewer shows that just one individual, backed by a like-minded king, could through the direct and indirect effects of his actions, make a significant contribution to enriching the urban fabric and expanding the market network of medieval England. Brewer was exceptional, admittedly, but not unique. This study identifies any number of land-holders, male and female, whose cumulative activity – along with that of farmers, fishers, miners, artisans, retailers, merchants, financiers, administrators, and a host of others, but perhaps most of all shoppers – slowly but surely brought to realization the infrastructure and the habitual behaviours necessary for a national economy. Market history is dominated by a relatively small number of individual investors within the upper echelons of society; but in reality it is the story of a vast cross-section of the population, most of whom we can never know as individuals.
The construction of a commercial system institutionalized in the form of markets and fairs may be said to be largely over by the fifteenth century. The licensing of such institutions was much lower in that century – insufficient to compensate for the numbers of older institutions that had foundered, were fading away, or had at least greatly reduced in their value to seigneurial owners – and a greater volume of trade activity was once more being channelled through informal or non-public avenues and outlets. Yet the market network continued to play a prominent and important role in commerce; markets were far from redundant institutions, though the network had, arguably, acquired a density no longer needed given the reduction of population, output, and demand consequent to plague – a setback to economic growth from which England, on the whole, recovered, partly through adaptation to altered circumstances, better than many other parts of Europe [Christiane Eisenberg, The Rise of Market Society in England, 1066-1800, New York: Berghahn, 2013, p.21]. Markets remained useful as redistribution nodes, whether for supplying local needs or long-distance trade. The market network settled into a new, post-plague form, following centuries of continuous, though rarely dramatic, restructuring resulting from: trial and error initiatives; contests to capture a sustainable share of regional trade; battles between rivals both in and out of court; and adjustments of timing and location in response to changing behaviours of traders and consumers, to changing opportunities, to changing economic trends, and to competitive threats.
Royal licences for markets and fairs are imperfect as a reflection of the shape of this network, for network development was well underway before the monarchic administration developed a systematised approach to regulating it; besides, commerce could only be regulated to an extent. It tended to be the later-licensed markets, and particularly the rural markets, that were numerically highest among the casualties of competition and change; urban communities, with their greater occupational diversity and socio-economic breadth, were more adaptive and resilient, though how much they were the causes and how much the beneficiaries of the decline of their rural cousins remains a matter for debate among historians. Surviving fairs remained of some regional significance, but not the attractors of long-distance and even international trade that they once had been. Although fairs had the advantage of attracting luxury goods and wealthy merchants inclined towards large-scale deals, weekly markets were better in responding to the cycles of availability of a wide range of goods, which spread across the year and overlapped, so that winter could be almost as busy a trading season (at least for overland trade) as the others. As a number of examples examined in this study shows, small towns could be as vulnerable to economic contraction or changing consumer demands as villages But by the fifteenth century the over-saturated market network had been thinned down and, to an extent, the ancient primacy of towns as market centres had been restored within a 'leaner and meaner' network.
Moreover markets were no longer the principal alternate focus of commerce to private trading; shop-based commerce, providing goods and services on a daily rather than weekly basis, were coming to the fore, along main streets, at street-corners, beside and on bridges, and intruding – often substantially – into marketplaces themselves. Some of the remaining open-air market vendors were being corralled into market halls. These trends are perhaps more pronounced, at earlier date, in London, where shops lined Cheapside and bazaar-like selds could be considered the precursors of provincial market halls (for instance, the building called the 'broad seld' in West Cheap was said, in 1457, to accommodate 12 stalls, as well as having three upper rooms); it has been noted that the wardrobe agents of magnates who maintained households in London, such as Bogo de Clare,obtained more luxurious goods (e.g. wine, spices, textiles) from shopkeepers or other businessmen located within the neighbourhoods of their wardrobes, while basic foodstuffs and domestic supplies (e.g. fish, meat, fuel) were obtained closer to his principal London residence, often at markets or on the riverside [Derek Keene, "Wardrobes in the City: Houses of Consumption, Finance and Power," Thirteenth Century England, vol. 7 (1997) pp.69-71]. The distributive function of markets remained valuable, but London and a few other ports were now playing a greater role as collection points for foreign export of goods. We may think of these changes as an evolutionary process playing itself out in order to reshape commerce into something that better responded to the needs of traders and of consumers.
The 'gold rush' of market foundation gave way to a better organized, more mercantile/entrepreneurial approach to mining commercial opportunity. But the latter might not have come about except for the former, for markets and fairs stimulated long-distance commerce by providing outlets for it, rewarding the investment of time and labour, as well as ways to move raw materials across the country in a cost-efficient manner, sometimes adding value to those materials through industrial repurposing. At the same time – as a spin-off – this process was a stimulus to the urbanization of England, enabling the rise of numerous small towns interspersed between older and larger provincial centres. This development entailed: greater geographical mobility, as men and women left ancestral villages, hamlets, or farms to seek better opportunities in new market settlements; greater occupational mobility, stimulating the growth of certain industries (notably cloth-making) and encouraging more specialized occupations; greater socio-economic mobility, as the more capable built wealth and could use that wealth to rise through the social hierarchy, occasionally even into the ranks of the aristocracy, though some of this wealth was also spread across a larger segment of the population as a whole. It also stimulated growth of consumer demand – particularly for what had once been considered luxury materials, in part because of their scarcity – and contributed to expectations for, and improvements in, the standard of living. The 'gold rush' era of the market network may thus be seen as one of the driving forces behind the transition from the so-called feudal Middle Ages to the Early Modern period.
Over-competition, combined with other factors, led to many markets fading into obscurity, and the towns planted alongside them diminishing into villages; some were not well enough positioned within the more nebulous network of commercial opportunity, others insufficiently robust or diversified, economically, and a few just unlucky, perhaps particularly in their lords, but also
in falling victim to natural disasters. A devastating fire in Beccles (Suff.) in the sixteenth century could prompt a slightly later balladeer to memorialize :
My Market so served, with corne, flesh, and fish,
And all kinde of victuals, that poore men would wish,
That who but knewe Beckles, with sighing may saye,
Would God of his mercie, had sparde my decaye.
But 0 my destruction, 0 most dismall day,
My temple is spoyled, and brought in decay,
My marketsted burned, my beauty defaced,
My wealth overwhelmed, my people displaced
[quoted by J. Fowler in "Ripon Minster Library and its Founders," Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol.2 (1873), p.400]
Yet, putting aside the extravagance of such lamentations, it might be argued that, in general, markets, licensed or unlicensed, are one of the most flourishing of those antiquated institutions characteristic of the Middle Ages to survive into modern times; market towns are still an integral part of the English landscape and economy. For the market was an institution that responded well to needs, particularly those of growing communities which had eschewed self-sufficiency and replaced it with the notion of a corporate organism in which component parts contributed in different ways to the health and continuity of the whole – a metaphor as quick and apt to the medieval as to the current world-view.
To sum up. There are a number of causal factors underlying the accelerating spread of a market network – or diverse regional networks, although this concept is perhaps primarily an analytical tool of historians – throughout post-Conquest England. That which this study has particularly attempted to elucidate is the trend for not a few members of the new class of landlords to undertake multiple, concrete, and entrepreneurial initiatives in developing some of their best-placed and most promising manors into commercial foci (though not necessarily into towns), by formalizing existing market activity, and by attracting ambitious or talented immigrants whose efforts would contribute to the supply and services role of a market community. The bait for newcomers was principally available land and favourable tenurial conditions (i.e. freer than those of villein tenure), but also the provision of mechanisms or facilities for the conduct of secure commerce and expression of social imperatives (such as divine worship). These market planning initiatives, whether new foundations on virgin soil or expansions to established communities, were prompted by a natural enough desire on the part of manorial lords (though also imitation of the example of their leaders) to assess and manage the fiscal value of their new dominions and to enhance the multifarious benefits extractable therefrom. A minority of these planned settlements were accorded or would acquire, if they had not already, the status of towns, and might so endure, if able to maintain market share in the face of intensifying competition or economic downturns. In some cases such status was evidently the intent of seigneurial founders, whose continental heritage had familiarized them with cultures riddled with small urbanizing settlements. In other cases it seems to have been a more incidental outcome over time. Whichever, the history of towns is closely tied to the history of markets, and indeed had been since well before the Norman period. Medieval monarchs – especially those neediest for money or loyalty – were happy to endorse and (to an extent) manage these phenomena, whereby a network of markets was diffused across the landscape and the urban sector of the nation likewise expanded, even though those processes may not then have been closely defined nor their eventual transformative effect on English society foreseen.
