I am sensible that this study is deficient in a number of regards – some of the minor ones explicable as intra-indexer inconsistency – not least the lack of statistical analysis, tabulation, and graphic representation of the findings embedded in a narrative. This work has been underway for some years, since illness and disability cut short my career. I will not say that it has taken an additional toll on my health, but documenting the passage of time does not make one immune to it, and infirmity and mortality catch up to everyone in due course. It is my hope that some of the wants of this study may be supplied by future historians who further extend our understanding of the medieval market network.

Postscript 2020
Social dislocation and self-isolation consequent to the pandemic of this year has afforded opportunity to extend my examination of market towns to Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, and Yorkshire. In part this has been to find additional examples to illustrate points made in the study; which has proven fruitful. And in part to ascertain if broadening the geographic scope of research might necessitate adjustment to conclusions or generalizations in my original study. It has not done so in any significant way, the one observation I might make about Yorkshire, and other northern counties, being that the category of castle-towns seems slightly more noticeable there, for a number of reasons – particularly its vulnerability to assaults from Scandinavians and Scots, the need for the Normans to enforce assertively their control in the region, the proclivity of the northern nobility to participate in rebellions, and the prominence of certain noble families (perhaps most notably Lacy, Percy, Neville, Mowbray, Thweng, and Scrope), along with the Duchy of Lancaster and Archbishops of York, in developing the region and establishing administrative centres for their dispersed estates. Otherwise, Yorkshire shows much the same influences on urbanization (even though most towns tended to be small) and the growth of a market network as in other parts of England: the importance of exploiting and improving communications by land and water; the need to provide an infrastructure for commerce and settlement in a part of the country where many communities were somewhat isolated; the foundation of monasteries (relatively few of which existed before the Conquest) which participated in efforts to bring more land into agricultural use and to raise the flocks that fed the wool export trade; and the expansion of population in what had once been, prior to the Saxon immigration, a sparsely populated region.