 |
|
CJH/ACH on-line articles appear in full text except for footnotes and illustrations. Footnotes have been stripped from the articles and an asterisk (*) indicates where the footnote appears in the published version.
Peer-reviewed scholarly article published in:Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire XXXI, April/avril 1996, pp. 17-35, ISSN 0008-4107 © Canadian Journal of History
David Farmer made his name as a historian of the most austere of subjects prices, wages, grain yields and his fellow workers will remain in his debt for many decades because of the thoroughness and accuracy with which he collected and presented the evidence. His achievements stand in comparison with those of Thorold Rogers and Beveridge, and confer on his name a measure of immortality. In the last years he was also gaining a reputation for his research into trade and transport.* For the chapter in the Agrarian History of England and Wales on marketing he gathered together a mass of information from manorial accounts for the destination of goods which were sold, and the places from which purchases were made. He could accordingly reconstruct patterns of trade in dozens of items, from lambs to millstones. His able analysis of these data reveal the complexity and flexibility of the marketing patterns, which varied with the commodities, with the remoteness and transport facilities of each manor, with the price of goods from year to year, and with the trading venues available, whether they were towns, village markets, fairs, or simply bargains struck at the farm gate. So, to take two contrasting examples, between 1296 and 1346 the grain from the Wiltshire manors of Longbridge Deverill and Monkton Deverill was usually sold within seventeen km (10.5 miles) in such local markets as the tiny town of Hindon or the more significant, but still small centres of Frome and Shaftesbury. But the reeve of Elham in Kent in 1326-27 sent an expedition to Winchcomb fair in Gloucestershire, a road journey of more than 300 km, to buy horses.
Farmer always emphasized the human side of the transactions. The people of the time had to make decisions about where, when, and how to trade, and historians must use their imaginations to reconstruct the thinking behind the decisions. Indeed, we are drawn to conclude that the Elham venture was probably a mistake, because the horses were sold at a loss. Farmer was not impressed by laws and rules. Just as medieval traders, supposedly hemmed in by restrictions, often failed to observe the trade regulations, so their behaviour also differed from that predicted by deterministic modern theories.
This article tackles the same questions that Farmer addressed about the organization of medieval buying and selling, but from the vantage point of the town rather than the manor. It presumes a general acceptance of a now well-established definition of a town as a place with a dense, permanent and relatively large population, in which the majority of the inhabitants follow a variety of non-agricultural occupations.*
This definition excludes market villages, where agricultural occupations predominated, and industrial villages, which lacked occupational diversity. But it certainly includes the category of market towns or small towns, because although they might provide a living for only a few hundred inhabitants, with a bottom limit as low as 300, they fulfil all of the other characteristics.* The definition deliberately avoids any reference to legal status or tenurial privileges, like those associated with boroughs, whereby the tenants owed a fixed cash rent and were given freedom to sell or subdivide their burgage holdings. Boroughs cannot be equated with towns because some boroughs failed to develop an urban economy, and some places succeeded as centres of commerce and manufacture although they lacked borough privileges. Market towns often possessed borough status, but many did not. Some of them enjoyed considerable autonomy in government, through a guild merchant which allowed the leading townsmen to regulate trade and to decide who could be admitted to the privileges of full membership of the trading community, while the great majority were governed by their lords through bailiffs and a seigniorial court, either a special borough court or a manorial court. There were about 600 market towns in England by the mid-fourteenth century, and for the majority of country people they provided their main point of contact with the world of commerce.
A theoretical framework for examining the market operations of medieval towns can be derived from work on modern urban systems.* According to central place theory each town has a "complementary region" or a "sphere of influence" which defines the rural area from which people travel to trade or use urban facilities. Towns are stratified into hierarchies, in which the larger and more important centres deal in the more expensive goods and services, provided by the more specialized and large-scale traders, often for wealthy or high-status customers. The cities which act as the capitals of regions or provinces, in addition to providing superior shops, will be equipped with hospitals, colleges and universities, financial institutions, and administrative offices, which will cater for large populations in more extended areas than those served by the smaller market towns. The different strata of the hierarchy interlock to form a whole urban system, in which the larger places, as well as serving their own immediate district, extend their supply of goods and services like an umbrella over the smaller towns. Small town retailers obtain their goods from big city wholesalers, while high class consumers who live near the small towns, or even ordinary customers making an unusual or specialized purchase, will make the longer journey necessary to go straight to the larger urban retailers. Many variables will affect the operation of the system, such as ease of communications and variations in the cost and speed of transport. Now these theories are much debated by those who see them as being too mechanical and static. Empirical investigations show that the ideal urban system is rarely found in the real world. And critics point out the need to take into account cultural factors or mentality, such as people's subjective perceptions of the relative merits of the nearby towns. The behaviour of consumers often varies from that predicted by the theories. For all of the adverse comment, these notions still inform our views of towns, of relations between one town and another, and of their dealings with the surrounding countryside.
If we are apply these ideas to our medieval market towns we must firstly seek to define their "sphere of influence," for which we can use two approaches. The first involves looking for evidence outside the town, notably references to the location of sales and purchases in manorial and household accounts, and lists of the debts of country dwellers.* This evidence shows patterns in the type of town or market used, but cannot define the influence of any single place because there are insufficient documents to provide enough observations. The other technique, which is the one to be used here, is to comb the records of borough courts (or manorial courts in the case of towns which were not accorded special status) for the place of residence of people involved in pleas of debt, detention of chattels, broken contract, and trespass. To indicate the nature of the evidence in detail, an entry in the portmote rolls of Westminster Abbey for its part of the town of Pershore (Worcestershire) tells us that in December 1329 Thomas de Crowle of Worcester was impleading Alexander de Stannford of Pershore for debt.* More circumstances are sometimes revealed, as in a case in the same series of records for October 1335, when John de Pendock of Pershore complained that five years earlier he had sold cloth to John Bynethetoun of Bricklehampton, a village four km outside the town, but that 16d. which should have been paid was "unjustly detained."* The first type of entry with its lack of detail is unfortunately much more common, and we are usually left in ignorance as to the goods or services being sold or the sum of money owed. Indeed the entries do not always mention the place of origin of the litigants, and we depend for information on chance, or on the diligence of the medieval clerk, rather than on any fixed rule that the village or town of residence must be named. In order to identify a few dozen places hundreds of records of litigation need to be examined. Ideally we could collect sufficient data to allow us to trace changes over time, and to define the effects of the demographic decline of the mid-fourteenth century on trade patterns. But our evidence is spread so thinly that we have to use information from many decades to gather a sample of any size. Even then the quantity of references is unsatisfactorily small, but is enough to begin to indicate the size and distribution of a town's trading connections.
In the majority of pleas, especially those involving debt, we presume that a sale has been contracted between two parties. Purchases of quite small value would often involve delayed payment. To take two examples from the records of Hedon in Yorkshire in 1473, the purchaser of a shirt promised to pay the price of 6d. within six weeks, while a sale of cattle was to be completed after three months.* There were numerous reasons for the purchasers' failure to pay, not just their lack of money, but also their discovery, real or imagined, that the goods were defective. Transactions other than sales could result in litigation, notably disputes over the payment of wages, or over loans, or arising from a wide range of social interactions, such as marriage. It seems reasonable to assume that pleadings which did not themselves result from a commercial transaction can still reflect the trading zone of the town, as social contacts would be most likely to occur in places where town and country people were accustomed to meet through their regular business dealings. Additional direct evidence for commercial relations between country and town is provided by the payments made by country dwellers to acquire trading privileges, whether by joining a guild merchant in the case of a self-governing town, or by paying a fine to the lord of the manor through the court of a seigniorial borough.
This study is based on the borough and manor court records of five adjacent towns in the west midland counties of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, from west to east, Droitwich, Pershore, Alcester, Stratford-on-Avon, and Shipston-on-Stour, together with two places chosen for the high quality of their records, Andover in Hampshire and Hedon in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Reference will also be made to market towns studied by other researchers where there is information about commercial contacts based on court records Atherstone and Nuneaton in north Warwickshire, Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, and Newmarket in Suffolk. These relatively small towns can be compared with larger places where debts have been analysed Exeter, Gloucester, and Grimsby (Figure 1). Comparable evidence can be found for many other towns, but I hope that the places studied here provide a sample which is neither too small, nor unrepresentative.
The populations of these market towns are not known precisely, and varied a good deal within our period, between 1280 and 1520. Alcester, Atherstone, Newmarket, and Shipston came near to the bottom of the scale for market towns with perhaps 300-500 inhabitants each. Nuneaton and Pershore must each have had at one time within the period about 1,000 people, with Andover, Hedon, and Henley accounting for rather more, while Droitwich and Stratford came nearer to 2,000. At their peak of growth in the early fourteenth century Gloucester probably exceeded 5,000 inhabitants, and Grimsby had more than 2,000. Exeter grew from about 3,000 in 1377 to 7,000 in the 1520s. Population is only one guide to a town's position in the urban hierarchy, but gathering information about the number of occupations is
We will now examine the hinterlands of our towns, beginning with their size, and then turning to the distribution of places with which they traded. Then we can analyse the relationship between urban centres, and look for short-term and long-term changes, ending with a consideration of cultural influences on towns' trading patterns.
One might expect that maps of the hinterlands, and the calculation of the distances between the town and the place of origin of its trading partners, would show a hierarchy in the size of hinterland coinciding with the hierarchy of town size. Table 1 appears to indicate that this was not the case, as the similarities are more striking than the differences. In most cases the proportion of contacts falling within a radius of ten km came near to 50 per cent, or expressed in a different way the median distance between the town and the villages where buyers and sellers lived varied between eight km and 12.5 km. The three smallest towns do not seem to have traded over a notably more restricted area than the large cities. At Newmarket, which is not included in Table 1, the median distance between this very small town and the places of residence of its customers in the early fifteenth century was as much as 12.5 km, while at Exeter, with a population approximately ten times larger, 62.9 per cent of the litigants in the borough courts in 1377-88 lived in villages less than six miles (9.6 km) from the city.* The most limited of all the hinterlands recorded in Table 1, that of Pershore, belonged to a place in the middle rank of market towns. Perhaps too much should not be made of figures based on samples of different sizes, and using varied types of evidence some relate to payments for licence to trade, and some come from courts with especially extensive jurisdictions. But the explanation for the puzzling uniformity of our figures must surely be that the limited
|
__________________________
Alcester, 1424-70 |
Number of Reservations
36 |
Up to 10 km
19 (53%)
|
10 km or more
17 (47%)
|
median (km)
10.0
|
maximum (km)
31.5
|
Sources: Alcester: Warwickshire County Record Office, CR 1886/141-170; Andover: Hampshire County Record Office, 37M85 2/HC/8; 2/HC/13; 2/HC/14; 3/GI/8; 3/GI/11; 18/AH/10; Charles Gross, The Gild Merchant (Oxford, 1890), pp. 289-351; Atherstone and Nuneaton: Andrew Watkins, "Society and Economy in the Northern Part of the Forest of Arden, Warwickshire, 1350-1540," (diss. Univ. of Birmingham, 1989), pp. 361-64; Gloucester: Victoria County History of Gloucestershire, 4, pp. 46-47; Grimsby: Rigby, Medieval Grimsby, op. cit., pp. 62-63; Hedon: Humberside County Record Office, DD HE/20, 21A; J.R. Boyle, The Early History of the Town and Port of Hedon in the East Riding of the County of York (Hull and York, 1895); Pershore: W.A.M. 21937-21942, 21944-21946, 21949-21951; Public Record Office, SC2/210/71,72; Shipston: Worcester Cathedral Library, C787-C788; E1-E91. All distances are measured in a straight line the actual journey travelled would have been longer.
power of the courts, which in most cases could deal only with debts below 40s., made them ill-suited to the needs of merchants trading on a large scale or at long distances. They therefore do not reflect the major commerce of ports like Hedon or Gloucester. Henley-on-Thames has local court records which contain few debts contracted by people living more than twelve km from this small river port, but other evidence shows that the quayside was busy with boat traffic from London, carrying grain from Oxfordshire and Berkshire to the capital, and returning with cargoes of wine, fish, spices, and cloth for the local gentry.* Our borough court records therefore are giving us a partial view of the trade of the towns, confined to local transactions of low value. This does not rob the court records of their validity as historical evidence, because they do reflect the trade between the town and its surrounding countryside. The approximate equality in the size of the various hinterlands tells us that the primary area of retail trade in items such as foodstuffs did not vary greatly from town to town. The median distances travelled by customers and goods according to Table 1 come uncannily close to the figure of 10.7 km (6.66 miles) regarded by thirteenth-century lawyers as a normal journey (in a single day) to market.* The court records do reflect the urban hierarchy and the great inequalities in the commerce of towns of different size and importance, but that emerges as we will see from a more careful interrogation of our sources.
More variety is found in the spatial pattern of trade. To begin with the illustrated examples, Shipston's hinterland seems to be quite evenly distributed around the town (Figure 2). This small place was evidently dealing with a considerable number of villages within a ten km radius. Its district had a relatively homogeneous agricultural economy, in which grain combined with sheep played a big part. The town was sited at a cross roads which gave it ready access to all points of the compass. At a greater distance Shipston had dealings with traders from a ring of larger market towns, such as Banbury, Chipping Norton, Chipping Campden, and Stratford. Alcester's rather irregular marketing pattern is much more typical of our towns (Figure 3). This place can be described as a gateway market between districts with contrasting topographical and economic characteristics to the north lay wooded, pastoral country, and to the south large villages depending mainly on cereal cultivation. Southward from the woodlands came timber, fuel, cattle, cheese, and hides, to be sold to southerners with surpluses of wheat, barley, sheep, and wool. The road system played a vital role in enabling such exchanges to take place, and in the case of Alcester one can see that the important north-south road (of Roman origin) allowed access to relatively distant places well into the woodlands to the north, and near to the Cotswold edge to the south. The roads to the north-east and south-west also exercised some influence on the town's trading pattern. Alcester's sphere of influence was given an elongated appearance because it was squeezed on both sides by powerful rivals Worcester and Droitwich to the west and Stratford to the east.
The factors which affected the form of Alcester's hinterland are found everywhere. A position as a gateway between different types of countryside (pays) was characteristic of many market towns. Atherstone and Nuneaton lay on the frontier where the northern edge of the Forest of Arden met the corn-growing clay lands of western Leicestershire and (for Nuneaton) north-east Warwickshire, and their trading territory straddled the two distinct pays. Roads were often an important influence, sometimes when the natural topography dictated certain routes, like those along the Avon valley which linked Pershore with Evesham and Tewkesbury. The bridge across the Thames at Henley ensured that town's connections with both the Oxfordshire Chilterns and north-east Berkshire. One might have expected to find that the dominant influences on Newmarket's local trade would have been the main roads which connected London and Cambridge with Norfolk, but judging from the clutch of villages on the Essex/Suffolk border with inhabitants indebted to Newmarket people, the road to the south-east also served as an important route. A navigable river greatly extended the trading horizon of a market town, so that Hedon people were able to make contact with villages twenty or thirty km up the Humber estuary at South Ferriby (Lincolnshire) and Blacktoft (Yorkshire), and indeed trade flowed via the Humber up the Trent as far as Newark in Nottinghamshire; when road transport was used, Hedon traded usually within a twelve km radius in the Holderness district. Major rivers without convenient bridges could act as barriers, as is evident at Droitwich, which did not have much contact with villages across the Severn. In the case of Grimsby the uplands of the Wolds had a similar effect, in discouraging contacts with north-western Lincolnshire (see Figure 1).
The activities of rival towns had at least as much effect as the local topography in setting limits to hinterlands. Hedon's pattern of contacts was distinctly lop-sided, with almost all of its trade directed to the north and east, as Hull and Beverley exercised a dominant influence to the west. Pershore was hemmed in from the north by Worcester's trading area, and Andover's territory extended only four km to the south, beyond which presumably the traders of Winchester and Salisbury held sway. The relationship between neighbours can be seen most easily if there is information about adjoining places, which we are fortunate to have in the west midland region, where five contiguous market towns in the Severn and Avon valleys have some surviving court records (Figure 4).* The quantities of evidence vary, and the records cover different periods of time, but there are unlikely to have been
radical changes in the trading patterns within our period. To some extent each town can be seen to have had its own commercial area, and they could be regarded as complementary. One can see from the gaps how the undocumented places, such as Evesham, would fit into the picture. We know that in the sixteenth century Worcester dominated an elliptical zone with a radius that varied from eight to sixteen km, and its eastern end coincides closely with the space in our period between Droitwich and Pershore.* On close examination the superiority of Stratford at the eastern end of the map is apparent from the way in which its trade intruded into the spheres of influence of other towns. This impression is reinforced by manorial and household accounts, not shown on this map, which reveal that officials at Bidford (near Alcester) and Radbourn (between Warwick and Banbury) to take two examples, preferred to buy and sell at Stratford.* No territory was exclusively controlled by one town, and there were large frontier areas where people could choose between two, three, or more market towns.
The choices made by customers are well documented, and we can exercise some informed guesswork to explain their behaviour. Consumers in this period as in any other were looking for goods of the right price, variety, and quantity. The nuns of Westwood Priory, for example, bought wheat at Alcester in 1332-33, which must be a puzzling decision as their house was situated two km from Droitwich, and the grain had to be carried twenty-two km by road.* Alcester served as a distribution point for the corn-growing villages of the Avon valley, so this particular commodity would be found in more abundance and perhaps at a lower price than in Droitwich market. We can more easily appreciate the thinking of the officers of the Holy Cross fraternity at Stratford when they were buying food, utensils, and building materials, who found wine, venison, pewter, and lead in short supply in their own town, and went instead to Coventry, Warwick, and Worcester. Less easy to explain is why they should on one occasion have bought wine at Henley-in-Arden, a very small town with a restricted range of luxury goods, one would expect.* Did lords constrain their tenants in choosing markets? No doubt they sometimes wished to do so. The monks of Worcester Cathedral Priory attempted to order their tenants at Shipston and Blackwell to sell their animals at Shipston. When in 1423 a serf called Thomas Lette sold four pigs at the rival market of Brailes, they insisted that he pay a penny toll to them.* But blanket prohibitions would have been ineffective, especially when the power of lords was eroded after the mid-fourteenth century. Well before that, in 1299, the customs of the bishop of Worcester's manor of Ripple presumed that the servile tenants would choose the best market, either Evesham or Pershore, and the lord's concern was only that he should receive a payment.* Perhaps seigniorial influence was felt indirectly by tenants, for example when lords negotiated toll exemptions for their tenants, as Worcester Priory did for its peasants at Stratford market.*
Figure 4 seems to represent the urban system as a network rather than a hierarchy, although the towns are clearly exercising unequal degrees of influence over the countryside. Lines go out from the market towns to two much larger cities, Coventry and Worcester, and they in turn depended on ports such as Boston and Bristol, and above all on London. Worcester's links with London had become so routine by the 1520s that the Prior of Worcester was able to buy luxuries from London through a carrier who went on a regular carting journey, probably loaded with cloth on the outward run, and returning with such commodities as spices.* The merchants of Coventry and Worcester supplied imported and specialized goods to the small-scale traders of the market towns. For example, in 1421 a dyer, John Essex, one of the Coventry elite, was renting a market stall at Shipston, his most likely purpose being to sell dyestuffs for use in local cloth manufacture.* Litigation at Alcester in 1468 reveals the activity of another Coventry dyer, Thomas Pulter. He did not occupy such a prominent position in Coventry society as John Essex, though he must still have seemed important to the traders and artisans of a small town.* William Dee of Alcester claimed that he had entrusted Pulter with a silk belt worth six shillings, perhaps so that it could be dyed, or as a pledge, and this rather superior garment (by Alcester standards) had not been returned. In fact Pulter won his case, but the picture of an Alcester man dependent on a Coventry trader either for a loan or specialist services would surely have seemed a plausible one to the court.* The superiority of Coventry in the trade of the region is readily apparent in the records of debts under Statute Merchant, which covered much larger sums than an ordinary borough court. A dyer of Bengeworth (a suburb of Evesham) was in debt to a Coventry man for ,16 in 1394, and two years later a spicer from Kineton, a small market town to the east of Stratford, owed ,40 to another Coventry supplier.*
Just as we can detect the economic subordination of the small towns to large provincial centres, so we can glimpse dependence among the market towns. The debts in the borough court of Alcester, for example, which resulted from the sale of goods to an outside customer tended to be revealed by pleas initiated by Alcester traders. If we find, however, that the action was begun by an outsider this would often indicate that goods or services had been bought by the Alcester resident. Litigation of the second type came from the larger market towns of Chipping Campden, Tewkesbury, and Winchcomb, suggesting that Alcester stood below them in the pecking order. The same relationship lies behind the activities at Shipston of ironmongers and drapers from Chipping Norton and Chipping Campden, who, like John Essex the Coventry dyer mentioned earlier, rented market stalls to supply the shoppers of Shipston with a better range of goods than the local smith or weaver could provide. They may even have been selling "wholesale" to local retailers.*
Down the chain of commerce we can identify below the market towns another tier of petty traders operating in the countryside. An Andover tanner earned the disapproval of his colleagues in the guild merchant by buying and selling in the nearby village market of Thruxton.* Buying in the country was evidently standard practice for dealers in produce such as grain. In the 1380s court cases from villages of the Severn valley in Gloucestershire involved a score of cornmongers assembling hundreds of quarters of grain.* Robert Clerk of Preston in Holderness was able to sell in Hedon, apparently in a single transaction in 1415, 60 quarters of drage (barley and oats mixed). The most likely source of this quantity (which filled 15-20 carts) would have been numerous parcels, a few quarters at a time, bought from local peasants.* In the villages small-scale retailers proliferated, the best known being the ale wives who obtained their malt near at hand. However even in the supply of basic foodstuffs townsmen sometimes traded into the country. Urban bakers commonly carried their wares into west midland villages in the fifteenth century.* At Hedon "common victuallers" sold both bread and ale to rural customers, often in such quantity (for example, bread worth 6s. and ale worth 12s. in one transaction) that the purchaser must have been retailing the goods in his village.* Even quite specialized commodities were handled by village traders, like the hundred ropes of bast (lime bark), much more than any individual peasant would need, which John Vicarye of Charringworth (Gloucestershire) bought from Peter Lyrcok of Shipston in 1424.* Regions with developed rural industries would have seen some especially lively local commerce, judging from the number of retailers interspersed with cloth workers in late fourteenth-century Essex, for example.*
So we can see that behind the network of "spheres of influence" of the market towns lay a hierarchy of towns and traders which extended down from London and the major ports to the provincial capitals, to a tier of larger and small market towns, and then to the traders of the countryside. The stratification of the market was reflected in the value of the goods and the customers who bought them. In Exeter's trading region the further the transactions were conducted from the city, the larger the debts, and the more socially elevated the debtors.* The records used for this study are not sufficiently consistent in their details to demonstrate this, except that at Hedon the cargoes sent to Newcastle-on-Tyne were worth more than 30, while typical dealings in the town's local hinterland of Holderness involved buying a shirt for 6d. or a pair of shoes for 3d. In all towns a very high proportion of the recorded local commerce involved selling quite small quantities of food and drink.
Occasionally even a market town developed a speciality which gave it access to wider markets. The small town of Thaxted in Essex became famous for its knives, and cutlers made up a very high proportion of the inhabitants. The products were distributed by London merchants, who probably played a part in financing production.* In our sample of towns the only specialized industrial centre, Droitwich, also exported its salt beyond its normal hinterland. At the time of Domesday its products were travelling as far as Buckinghamshire, but that reflects manorial distribution rather than a marketing network.* In the later middle ages debts recorded in the borough court from as distant a place as Derby probably resulted from the salt trade, and we encounter two salters at Middleton on the north Warwickshire border carrying eleven sacks of salt on six pack horses in 1391, recorded because they were killed and their property stolen.* Alcester had a small scale specialism in that glaziers figured among its artisans. A local glazier was employed to work on the Alcester manor house in 1466-67, but the town's craft had a sufficient reputation to persuade the prior of Worcester to hire an Alcester man to work on the windows of his mansion at the More, at a distance of forty km.* Stratford, a gateway market for funnelling the trade of the forest of Arden to the open country to the south and east, became widely known as a centre for the sale of building timber and wooden implements, and customers travelled forty km from Heyford in Oxfordshire to buy boards and rafters in the 1380s and 1420s.*
Small towns extended their sphere of influence if they could make a success of their fair. Almost every town had a fair and most never developed into important commercial occasions, but some could achieve great things, even when held in a relatively small town, like the international event at St Ives.* Fairs held in market towns which attracted trade from a considerable distance include those specializing in livestock, like that held at Winchcomb which brought buyers from as far as Kent. Although the conventional belief is that English fairs declined in the later middle ages this does not accord with the continued success of those at Chipping Campden which were attended in person by the cellarer of Worcester Priory in 1396-97.*
Short-term grain shortages provided the opportunity for a temporary extension of a market town's trading horizons. In the famine of 1438-40, which hit the north of England especially severely,* traders from York appear in the records of Hedon buying enormous quantities of grain. On one occasion two York bakers were said to have purchased 700 quarters, and later a baker from York in partnership with one from Beverley acquired 500 quarters. Their offence was to have forestalled the market, for example by buying a rector's tithe corn outside Hedon. Such activities may have occurred all the time, and were only noticed in a year of shortage, but perhaps normally the grain would have been bought by cornmongers, and sold to bakers. In their anxiety to make profits and secure supplies in a crisis year the bakers extended their operations.*
How did the hinterlands of market towns change in the long term? Our detailed records of debts come too late to reflect the upheaval of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There must have been a period of great instability in Holderness in the twelfth century with the simultaneous development of Beverley, Hedon, and Hull, apparently as no local trading centres of any size are recorded before c. 1115. Worcestershire's urban network had developed earlier, so that by 1086 Worcester, Droitwich, and Pershore were all called boroughs, and Evesham was already growing. In Warwickshire, however, at the time of Domesday the county town was apparently the only market serving the south of the county, and the growth of Alcester, probably in the twelfth century, and the foundation of Stratford in 1196 would have been the cause of much commercial rivalry. The new foundations of the mid-thirteenth century would have had to carve a hinterland out of the territories of existing market towns. There would have been much alarm among the established centres at the appearance of rivals, like that occasioned by the mushroom growth of the port of Ravenserodd at the mouth of the Humber.* Perhaps similar disquiet was caused by the rise of market villages that almost became towns, like Feckenham in Worcestershire. The only hint of shifting hinterlands in our records comes from Andover, where traders from Wallop make their appearance in the early fourteenth century, and disappear thereafter. This may be an accident of documentation, but more likely reflects the contraction of Andover's southern territory in the face of competition.
For the thirteenth century we can reconstruct the catchment areas for migration from locative surnames, when names were still being formed and therefore reflect the movement of individuals. It has been suggested that the places from which migrants came may coincide with commercial hinterlands. The only town for which a direct comparison has been made is Grimsby, where the surnames recorded in 1297-1340 derive from a much larger area than the zone of trading contacts implied by the records of debt, which mainly belong to the fifteenth century. The median distance travelled by immigrants to Grimsby was between twenty-four and thirty km, compared with 8.4 km for debtors.* This could well reflect a tendency for the hinterland to shrink but migrants and commerce may have followed different patterns, and more research on this theme is clearly needed. In general we would expect shifts in commercial patterns in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as rural settlement patterns changed, as production moved from arable to pasture, and as industries proliferated in the countryside, but our debt records are insufficient in both quantity and quality to reflect these developments.
Finally, the market towns acted as social, cultural and religious centres and we must consider the contribution that these functions made to the definition of the hinterland. Pershore provides a good example of a monastic borough, though with the unusual feature that part of the town lay under the lordship of another monastery, Westminster Abbey. We might expect to find that the monks of Pershore Abbey benefited the town by their local purchases, but this is not borne out by their accounts, which show them buying goods in Bristol, Coventry, Gloucester, Worcester, and even in the market town of Evesham, but scarcely at all from their own tenants.* The market must have been too restricted and its traders too petty to be able to supply a wealthy institutional consumer with its requirements of wine, fish, and spices. The monastery helped the urban economy more by attracting a stream of officials, rural tenants, pilgrims, and worshippers. By a quirk of local custom at Pershore the inhabitants of the rural estates were expected to bury their dead in the abbey churchyard, compelling country visitors to come frequently into the town. Some towns created their own religious institutions in the form of fraternities, with a combination of social and religious functions. Often, like the St Mary fraternity at Andover, these organizations counted among their members mainly people from the town itself and from the neighbouring villages.* But a highly successful fraternity like that of the Holy Cross at Stratford attracted not just hundreds of people from its local hinterland, but also individuals from places far beyond the town's regular commercial reach, including Bristol, Salisbury, and London.* The guild feasts and processions brought together distant brothers and sisters, and they spread the fame of the town. The institutions were themselves consumers of the products of the hinterland. So we find the officials of the Stratford fraternity scouring the countryside for food for their feasts, buying pigs at Quinton and calves at Beoley, both villages on the fringes of the town's sphere of influence.* The wardens of St Augustine's church at Hedon bought a lead vessel and stone in the Holderness villages of Burstwick and Tunstall.* Fraternities and chantries often ran schools, so that market towns were acting as educational centres for their hinterlands. In addition to the conviviality of the fraternities and other well-documented institutions, the less formal socializing of the drinking establishments, and the entertainments of pipers and fiddlers should not be forgotten. Country people must often have been drawn to the market towns by late-night carousing, gambling, prostitution, and bull-baiting.*
The presence of the local gentry in market towns is well-known, but their impact on the townspeople less easily assessed. They sometimes disrupted markets with their violence, but less well-publicized activities included membership of fraternities, thereby adding to the dignity of civic life.* A concrete example of the practical benefit that could come from gentry interest concerns a Worcestershire esquire, John Vampage, who lived in the town of Pershore in the late fourteenth century. He acted as steward for the wealthy rector of Bishop's Cleeve in Gloucestershire, and when building work was being carried out on the rectory, we find Vampage making a contract with a Pershore mason, though there were plenty of qualified craftsmen living nearer to the job.* Many informal networks based on migration, kinship, marriage, patronage, and conviviality must have helped to create links between towns and their rural surroundings, of which our documents only occasionally provide a glimpse.
We must conclude by recognizing that theories of central place and urban hierarchy provide an appropriate framework for understanding the role of the medieval market town. We can identify "spheres of influence," and when these are examined in a region they seem closely packed, indicating a high degree of urbanization. Although the local retailing hinterlands did not differ greatly in size, the varying functions of towns at different levels in the urban hierarchy emerge from a close examination of debts and other evidence for trade. Larger places provided more specialized goods and services, and either sold these directly into the territories of the smaller towns, or supplied the small town retailers with their wares. Just as large towns provided political, social, and religious facilities of a high order, such as county courts, cathedrals, and friaries, so the market towns had their fraternities, processions, and schools. When we can observe the urban system at work in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it seems stable and well established. It had however been through a period of much upheaval and fierce competition in the previous two centuries. The apparent maturity achieved by the urban network after 1300, and the fact that we can apply theories devised for nineteenth and twentieth-century cities to our towns, reinforces our view that we are observing a society which had already reached a high degree of market orientation. The towns could function as they did because of the high level of production for the market in the countryside, and at least small scale commercial activity had permeated through all levels of society.* Relations between market towns and the countryside were not conditioned solely by economic laws. The eccentric shape of hinterlands, the unpredictable choices of consumers, the unexpected development of small-town specialisms, and social interactions together produced an idiosyncratic variety of market towns.
University of Birmingham
Current Issue | Tables of Contents | Abstracts | Indexes | Order Back Issues
About CJH | For Authors | For Reviewers | For Subscribers | Issues | Contact Us
| Canadian Journal of History / Annales canadiennes d'histoire | |
| Department of
History University of Saskatchewan 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 |
Telephone: 306-966-5794 Fax: 306-966-5852 cjh@usask.ca www.usask.ca/history/cjh |