12
Chris Briggs
Western Europe in the later Middle Ages (between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries) was an overwhelmingly agrarian society. Most people lived in the countryside and made their livings from the land. It was common for households to provide many of their own needs, in terms of food and raw materials, from their own landed holdings, and these were often processed in the home. Yet while few historians would argue with such generalizations, equally it has always been recognized that no rural household or community of this period was entirely self-sufficient.2 Markets for goods existed in the countryside, and most countryfolk engaged in them to one degree or another. Most importantly, by the thirteenth century rents, dues and taxes were often paid in cash, so in order to raise the necessary sums villagers were required to sell goods or labour in the market. Many households, and especially those with small or non-existent landholdings, and craftsmen and artisans, were increasingly unable to support themselves from their own limited resources, and had to purchase their food and other essentials. Meanwhile, wealthier peasant households were in a position to resort to the market through choice, rather than need, and to exploit opportunities for profit by supplying growing rural and urban demand for the products of agriculture. Such households accessed the market as buyers, too, sometimes even to obtain non-essential or ‘consumer’ goods.3
While awareness of such small-scale commerce affecting the countryside has a long pedigree in medieval studies, since the 1990s such topics have been explored more intensively by historians than ever before. As part of this development, which is often labelled the ‘commercialisation’ approach to the medieval economy, a prior focus on long-distance exchange, big cities and wealthy merchants has waned in favour of closer attention to petty domestic trade and everyday commerce. Research by historians of England such as Britnell, Dyer, Masschaele and others generated a raft of studies that explored such matters as exchange in small town and rural settlements, the establishment of markets and fairs, and the economic connections between towns and their hinterlands.4 Until recently, such issues have tended not to receive as much attention from historians of other European regions, but this has now begun to change, especially among specialists working on the regions of the western Mediterranean littoral. Explicitly inspired by the English work on commercialisation, historians of these areas are now undertaking their own innovative studies of markets, fairs, small towns and their commercial networks, monetization, rural manufacturing and small-scale credit.5 Meanwhile, historians of England are taking the study of commercialisation in new directions, for example (as in the work of James Davis) by exploring the tensions contemporaries faced in reconciling society’s dependence on commerce with ideas about sin and correct moral behaviour.6
This chapter investigates the buying and selling of goods by members of rural households via a focus on the location, in the broadest sense, of those sales and purchases. Surveying the period between c. 1250 and c. 1450, it seeks to establish the range of contexts in which such households might enter the market, the freedom of choice they exercised in doing so and the factors shaping those choices. By ‘rural households’ we mean peasants, labourers and artisans; that is, virtually everyone resident in small, primarily agrarian settlements, other than landlords and clergy. Of course – and this is a theme that emerges strongly from the historical literature on medieval commercialization – a distinction between rural and urban is often hard to maintain. The attention paid in that literature to small settlements containing both rural and urban characteristics – such as the ‘bourgs’ and ‘bourgades ruraux’ of the French studies – is symptomatic of this. Residents of towns were often engaged in agriculture, villages always featured some non-agricultural occupations, and it is particularly misleading to draw a firm dividing line between towns and villages according to population size. Indeed, the discussion that follows is intended to underline the interconnectedness of town and country and the fact that trade and non-agrarian activities were not confined to particular types of settlement.
Yet, having acknowledged that, this chapter will nonetheless distinguish between rural and urban settings for exchange, since there were potentially significant differences between the two. The second major distinction to be made is between formal and informal trading locations. ‘Formal’ denotes public spaces, most notably markets and fairs, in which trade was conducted at set times. The holder of such a formal assembly, often a lord of some kind, had the right to draw revenue from it, but also an obligation to provide facilities for exchange. Trade in these assemblies was thus subject to various forms of regulation, and those who came to trade were liable to charges, such as tolls. The proliferation of such formal marketplaces, whose right to exist was often sanctioned by a ruler, was a key feature of this era. ‘Informal’ exchange, by contrast, refers to sales and purchases in any location or context outside the public marketplace and beyond the purview of the market authorities. The chapter will explore trade in these various settings via examples from (mainly eastern) England and France (both north and south), and with some glances at the Low Countries.7 As already hinted, an important theme that emerges from this survey is the intensity and frequency of urban contacts experienced by most country dwellers. Also, while many factors influenced the choice of marketing venue, it is important to emphasize the role of institutional constraints, in the shape of the widely varying rules and financial charges encountered in markets, as well as costs related to distance, terrain and transport.
Sources
Investigating the market transactions of villagers is not straightforward, however, due to the character of the available primary sources. When it comes to identifying, counting and mapping the formal assemblies that were potentially available for trade, as well as normative statements about rules and regulations in such assemblies, the sources are relatively abundant. Very useful in this regard are the many charters, especially royal charters, which record the granting of rights to hold a market or fair.8 Listings of the customs and charges that in principle applied to trade in a particular setting also exist for many towns and villages, such as the fourteenth-century examples relating to the market and fairs in the small settlement of Tilly-sur-Seulles, near Caen in Normandy.9 However, when we attempt to observe commerce ‘in action’, and to explore actual exchanges and their participants, the available sources are generally more scattered, or provide additional difficulties of interpretation. For England, the records of urban and manorial courts preserve important information about private trading disputes occurring in town and countryside respectively. For present purposes, a major limitation of these sources, and of the manorial court rolls in particular, is that they generally do not specify the location of the disputed transaction (i.e., whether or not it took place in a formal trading assembly). These records tend also to be most informative about sales involving credit which, while important, did not necessarily always feature. For southern Europe, notarial records represent the most promising source for sales involving rural households, though here we have the problem that a significant share of such transactions were not registered before the notary.10 Finally, we have records maintained by a market authority that detail the infringement of trading regulations within its jurisdiction. Such records are extant for many of the larger English towns, and have rough equivalents for France in records such as the registers of the échevinage of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, in Saintonge.11
Overall, in addition to their local variability, the extant records tend to be most informative about marketing in towns. Furthermore, each individual source tends to give a distorted picture of the trading situation within its locality. Thus debt litigation in a town’s court records, which concentrate on disputes occurring within that town, will naturally tend to understate the potential importance of other trading venues used by inhabitants of its hinterland. The available sources do not allow us to speak quantitatively about the trading locations used by rural households, but they do allow us to reconstruct the range and character of the choices available.
Formal markets: urban
The marketplace was clearly a central feature and performed a crucial function in all medieval towns. Most towns would have had at least one weekly market and many larger towns had more than one, in addition to a daily trade in foodstuffs.12 These were usually busy markets, offering both wholesale and retail opportunities, which were often large enough to be divided spatially into zones according to the commodity being traded. An urban market thus offered obvious attractions to members of rural households wishing to visit in person. By concentrating a large and varied number of buyers and sellers in a single, secure venue at a predictable time, the use of such a market had the potential to reduce many of the costs of trading, or transaction costs, faced by country people. Furthermore, towns could provide specialist services such as those offered by legal and clerical professionals, which gave rural buyers and sellers a further incentive to visit. To what extent, then, were towns the first choice for those in the rural hinterland wishing to dispose of their surpluses or acquire goods?
We can undoubtedly perceive peasants and other rural persons as an important group of users of markets in towns of all sizes. Some of the evidence for this comes from debt cases in town court records which, although they do not consistently specify whether a transaction took place in the formal market, are nonetheless suggestive of the scale of trade with parties from named external locations.13 Roughly 20% of the creditors and debtors who came before the Exeter borough courts in the period 1378–88 resided outside of the town, for example. These included villeins (unfree or servile tenants) like Geoffrey Paneys of Topsham, some six kilometres outside the town, who regularly marketed fish in Exeter.14 That the rural parties appeared most frequently in such cases as debtors rather than creditors shows that those persons were resorting to the towns as buyers as well as sellers. Elsewhere, peasant sales of wine and livestock recorded in the registers of Saint-Jean-d’Angély reveal the town’s role as a key market for the surplus of the surrounding countryside. Many of these sales were small scale; for example, in 1332–33 three peasants of the nearby village of Asnières sold a single barrel of wine each in the town.15 Other pieces of information confirm the presence of rural producers travelling to visit the urban market in person. For instance, trade of this kind lies behind the preoccupation of urban authorities with the offence of forestalling (i.e., of buying up rural produce before it could be offered in the public marketplace).16 Cases such as that of Robert de Sutton of Nottingham, ‘a common buyer and forestaller of eels that come to the market to be sold by strangers, before the proper hour’, provide evidence of external sellers’ presence in the marketplace, even if in this case their sales, because made outside customary market hours, were ultimately informal in nature.17 More generally, the fact that important small-scale consumption items, such as poultry, eggs, vegetables, fruit and honey are absent from those known to have been traded into large towns like London by manorial lords leads to the conclusion that these items must have been supplied by peasant vendors.18
One could argue that urban markets were frequented by rural households not because they had distinctive advantages in terms of the customers, prices or products, but rather because these markets simply happened to be the most convenient and cost efficient, with respect to location and associated transportation costs. Certainly most traders from outside the town came from within a radius of up to ten kilometres, a distance that represented a considerable yet manageable return journey in one day with a cart or packhorse.19 Many villages in a town’s immediate hinterland did not have, or indeed were not allowed to have, their own markets. The town market was thus the closest one available for many villagers.20 One should not necessarily assume that the rural vendors who visited urban markets were primarily wealthier peasants selling surpluses in bulk, or that rural buyers who did so were mostly seeking higher value manufactured goods available only in large centres. Incidental references in manorial court records can occasionally reveal the small-scale transactions of country dwellers in nearby towns, which may have been typical. For instance, in the manor court of Aldham (Suffolk) in 1340, Robert Aylwyn, a villein of the lord, successfully sued Nicholas Skyleman and his wife Margaret, complaining that Margaret had entered the marketplace (forum) in the town of Hadleigh, four kilometres from Aldham, and brought about the seizure of one bushel (0.35 hectolitres) of wheat that Robert had been offering for sale there. This seizure, the aim of which was to make Robert appear in the court of a nearby landlord, appears to have involved all the grain that Robert had on sale.21
On the other hand, it is true that many people did come to towns from a distance of more than ten kilometres to transact, and while some of those were regional merchants or high-status households, as in late fourteenth-century Exeter, that was not invariably the case.22 Towns did offer a superior range of certain goods, notably cloth, and this was clearly attractive to village buyers. Much of the cloth sold by urban merchants in the Provençal towns of Riez and Brignoles went to rural customers.23 Exceptional records of trade in the rural setting of Puyloubier in the same region reveal a focus on cereals and pastoral products in the fifteenth century. This implies that most peasants in this locality must have travelled to towns in order to obtain tools, cloth or any ‘luxury’ items.24 One historian has recently drawn attention to a range of items English peasants undoubtedly possessed, such as knives, copper alloy buckles and fittings, brass pots, handmills of lava and whetstones, many of which were objects of long-distance or international trade. It is rarely clear exactly where these were bought, but towns are a likely source. Therefore, towns did not always simply act as the closest market for the everyday trade of rural people, but sometimes must have been visited by peasants because they offered special opportunities that justified the extra time and expense required to travel there.25
When considering their options, rural households would also have had to bear in mind the impact of trading charges and regulations in the formal urban marketplace, in addition to matters of distance and transport. Across Europe, a bewildering variety of local regimes operated with respect to the incidence of toll, charges on the use of essential infrastructure such as stalls and rules about the timing and location of trade and the privileges of different groups of traders. It is not easy to draw clear conclusions about how far these regimes advantaged or disadvantaged the urban trade of countryfolk.
In some respects it appears that institutional disincentives affecting rural trade into towns were not significant. A discussion of Normandy, for instance, suggests that traders in formal markets in this region were divided into two broad categories. On the one hand there were the gens marchands, merchants who made a living from trade and were thus liable to pay charges on their transactions. On the other were the gens de pays, local residents whose primary occupation was not trade but who used the market for essential provisioning of their households. The transactions of this latter group were not subject to charges imposed by the market authority.26 For England, too, there are signs of a similar customary distinction between the dealings of merchants, which were subject to toll, and small consumption transactions, which were not. For instance, as Masschaele notes, in 1275 the burgesses (privileged townspeople) of Wallingford (Oxfordshire) were accused of taking toll on grain and other foodstuffs purchased by ‘the men of the area’, which was against the custom of taking toll only from merchants.27 With respect to toll, many towns therefore applied a distinction between the transactions of professional dealers and those aimed at household consumption, a category that is likely to have included many village customers. Some historians have taken a different and more pessimistic view of the evidence, however, emphasizing that visiting rural traders were indeed often subject to toll in towns, while the burgesses and others trading there were exempt.28 Some residents of a town’s hinterland did possess toll exemptions in the town, such as the tenants of the duchy of Lancaster in the villages around Melton Mowbray (Leicestershire).29 Where peasants and other countryfolk did not enjoy such exemptions, though, it clearly meant they were operating at a disadvantage in the urban market. Whether the tolls they had to pay were significant enough to make such trade entirely uneconomical seem less likely, however.30
In some parts of Europe, other institutional features, apart from the rules on toll, posed obstacles for outsiders, including local countryfolk, in urban markets. For instance, in Flanders and elsewhere, some trades such as the selling of meat were restricted to members of the urban guild.31 It must also be stressed how closely the prices in town markets of key foodstuffs, most notably grain and fish, were regulated by urban authorities, rather than reflecting the free play of supply and demand.32 For rural traders, therefore, access to urban markets was not straightforward, though the costs and benefits of trading in a formal town market clearly varied from town to town and from trader to trader.
Formal markets: rural
Formal trading assemblies, however, were not found only in towns in this period. Licensed trading venues also proliferated throughout the countryside.33 This development is especially closely associated with England, where most of the hundreds of chartered weekly markets were set up in villages. Here, the public space of the marketplace thus became just as much a feature of rural life as it was of the urban scene. The unusually comprehensive preservation of market charters in the records of a centralized bureaucracy means that the English evidence for small country markets is especially full and clear. However, a similar trend toward the emergence of dense networks of weekly public markets, many of them rural, has been identified by studies of other regions such as Normandy or the county of Toulouse.34 In the latter region, records show that out of a total of 252 markets recorded as existing during the period 1260–1340, some ninety eight were new markets established in these decades.35 Elsewhere, in regions such as Holland and Flanders, formal country markets were less common, a point that we return to below. Yet even in Holland there existed alternative formal settings for trade outside the towns, such as rural weigh houses and seaside fish markets.36 Thus in most areas, households enjoyed ready access to formal markets within their immediate locality, and did not necessarily need to visit urban centres of trade. How far was the buying and selling of rural folk concentrated in such local centres, and what were the advantages and disadvantages of such a trading pattern?
The scramble among potential market holders to acquire and define market rights, including those pertaining to markets located in rural spots, suggests that such sites were in demand among local populations as potential venues for exchange. However, our sources often make it difficult to determine just how much trade, what kinds of transactions and which traders were most likely to be found in such settings. Sometimes an unusual record survival allows historians to gain an exceptional insight into trading behaviour in a particular rural venue. For instance, the Thursday chartered market at Botesdale, Suffolk, granted to the abbot of Bury St Edmunds in 1227 on a rural site within his manor of Redgrave is perhaps not wholly untypical of other country markets set up in eastern England in this period. However, our knowledge of the fortunes of this market and those who held stalls and traded within it is exceptional, owing to the existence of detailed information on the market contained within a manorial extent of 1289, and the survival of a very full series of contemporary court rolls. One particularly noteworthy finding of the study of these sources, and one that bears upon discussions of the users of rural markets, is that of the sixty-three persons holding cottages, shops or stalls on or adjacent to the site of Botesdale market, thirty were landless.37 Unusual records relating to the village of Balsham, in Cambridgeshire also allow one a rare chance to observe a rural weekly market in action, and in particular to analyse the regulation of its trade.38 Yet such materials and the insights they provide are the exception.
As already mentioned, a characteristic limitation of the available sources is that records of disputes about debts incurred in the course of sales rarely tell one where those sales took place. Evidence of peasant debt is abundant in the English manorial records and the notarial sources of southern Europe, most of it taking the form of a deferred payments for goods sold. However, the historian is usually in the dark about whether the setting for such sales was formal or informal. In English manorial litigation over debts and contracts, parties were usually required to state the date and location of the disputed transaction, but it seems that the latter part of this requirement extended only to the name of the relevant settlement. Where a market was involved, plaintiffs apparently did not need to state this. Thus the comparatively detailed entries about debts and sales in the pre-Black Death court rolls of West Halton (Lincolnshire), sited in an ideal trading location adjacent to the River Trent close to its confluence with the Humber, mention several different settlements in the locality as the settings for those sales. However, none mentions a market.39 Some contested sales are said to have occurred in places known to have had important chartered markets, such as Burton upon Stather. Others, however, are reported as taking place in villages with no known formal market, such as Amcotts and Flixborough, though interestingly the latter is known to have had a long and significant history as a trading centre.40 In the case of Balsham, although manorial court roll entries about market regulation reveal an active market following its 1318 refoundation with a new royal charter, the cases of litigation over debt in the same records provide no explicit reference to sales in the market. A reference in the court rolls to a separate document recording ‘pleas of the market’ raises the possibility that market trading disputes were enrolled there instead.41 In the absence of many direct references to markets in rural court records, historians have been obliged to proceed by indirect inference. For instance, the author of the study of Botesdale market mentioned above analysed debt disputes in the Redgrave manorial court rolls and reported the striking fact that in over three-quarters of the debts that note the date of the original contract or agreement, the transaction is found to have taken place on a Thursday, which was market day.42 This is an approach to the evidence that might be applied to other well-documented locations.
Historians of medieval English rural marketing in particular thus face something of a contradiction. One the one hand, there is abundant evidence for a proliferation of new markets, many of them in the countryside, in the long thirteenth century. On the other, the local records are surprisingly silent on the actual use of and therefore vitality of these assemblies. Recently, commentators have increasingly sought to resolve this contradiction by suggesting that the importance of the formal marketing network has been overestimated in previous work.43 As James Davis has recently written, ‘the absence of even passing mentions for [sic] tolls, stallage, and specific marketplace regulation cannot be so readily dismissed as a mere consequence of the paucity of the sources. It rather suggests that many village markets were simply not operating in a way that justified their formalization’.44 This work suggests that many formal markets never really functioned as trading centres, and consequently it places greater emphasis on informal rural trade, a topic we consider in detail below. Although the evidence for formal rural marketing ‘in action’ is scantier for the other European regions considered here, there are nonetheless signs of the same contradiction between extensive evidence for market proliferation and minimal evidence of market use. At Puyloubier, there was undoubtedly a periodic market, and perhaps also a daily one. However, the suggestion that trading offences recorded in this unusual source took place in the formal market remains an assumption.45
In spite of the problems involved in assessing the scale of formal rural market use, it is possible to investigate some of its main characteristics. Clearly, in terms of transport and opportunity costs, the local village market would have been the most convenient option for most rural people. However, when considering the attractiveness or otherwise of a local market, the question of the range and variety of the buyers and sellers found there immediately arises. Did trade in small rural markets simply involve exchanges among neighbours from the locality, or was there a role for a wider range of visiting traders? Here we encounter another debate among scholars of rural marketing, one that has again been applied to the case of England in particular. In essence, the debate revolves around the issue of whether each local rural market was intended to function as a node within a larger regional marketing circuit or network, or as a largely self-contained entity. In the former model, local markets would be visited by outside merchants who travelled from market to market, buying up supplies of bulky primary commodities and facilitating the distribution of goods acquired in larger, higher-order centres. In the latter, by contrast, the main function of the market was to allow residents of the immediate vicinity to buy foodstuffs and other essentials provided from the surplus of other locals.46 Understanding the role of external traders or merchants is clearly important if we wish to grasp the part played by formal rural trade gatherings in the marketing decisions of the rural households that interest us here.
The extent to which external traders and middlemen visited rural markets to buy peasant surpluses, most notably in grain and wool, is a key consideration. The evidence provides occasional glimpses that suggest that this happened. For instance, the 1275 government enquiry investigated by Masschaele, discussed above in relation to toll exemptions, also provides indications of mercantile purchases of wool in rural Lincolnshire markets.47 Well-known court evidence from the 1380s reveals cornmongers of the town of Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire) handling large amounts of grain purchased in various villages of the neighbourhood.48 The notarial records of Montpellier in the south of France show that some of the grain sold in this large town was brought by individuals from the hinterland. However, the usual mode of supply seems to have involved the use of local commercial networks by large urban corn merchants, though their activities in this regard are poorly recorded in the surviving notarial records.49 A distinctive feature of the valuable Puyloubier records is the presence of external urban merchants as buyers and sellers. In 1438–39 one Trets merchant and his nephew together made nine appearances in the documents, selling oil and fish and buying oats and skins.50 Of course, the problem with all the above examples is one cannot always be certain that the transactions happened in the market itself. The Balsham records show that by chastising those who threatened the safety of the market and deterred visiting merchants, the market authorities certainly wished to attract outsiders.51 Indeed, as already hinted, some have argued that this was the larger aim of those wishing to set up formal rural markets.52 In Holland, the rural weigh house provided a rather different kind of formal marketing institution, and it is clear that these attracted visiting merchants who purchased the dairy produce of the local peasantry.53
As with urban trading sites, the institutional framework is important for understanding the decision-making of potential users of country markets too. That framework went beyond just the rules set by individual rural market authorities. Most notably, in some parts of Europe it is possible to observe the phenomenon of ‘urban coercion’, which involved large and powerful towns attempting to secure a monopoly on trade within their localities. Rural markets were suppressed from the thirteenth century onward as urban authorities attempted to force rural people to buy and sell in the towns. This trend was particularly characteristic of Flanders, but appears largely absent from England, where, as we have seen, new rural markets flourished.54 Clearly, such policies severely restricted the marketing choices and opportunities of rural people. One must also consider the potential effects not of urban coercion, but of lordly coercion, which may have been more of an issue in England. Some English landlords clearly did make attempts to force their rural tenants to use their own markets and not others. Such prohibitions were probably imposed on unfree or villein tenants in particular. The issue has yet to be thoroughly investigated, though there are doubts about the effectiveness of such attempts to coerce use of particular markets.55
Just like urban authorities, the proprietors of weekly rural markets had the right to charge tolls and rents for stalls, as well as an obligation to provide facilities, security, and the regulation of matters such as weights, measures, prices and the quality of goods on sale.56 In a rural market the advantages of buying and selling free from toll were most likely enjoyed by traders from the immediate locality. Although it is largely speculation, one may suggest that a household trading in its local rural market was there at an advantage in terms of rules and charges compared to operators from outside, which was the reverse of the case when that household travelled to transact in a medium-sized or large town. Thus at Puyloubier, transactions between residents do not appear to have been taxed at all, a provision that presumably covered trading within the market itself.57 A 1243 charter of customs from the village of Prissé, in Burgundy, notes that a resident or bourgeois paid half as much as an outsider in sales of grain in the market or on any other day.58 In setting out the charges payable on sales and purchases in the market, the early fourteenth-century terrier of the bourg of Tilly-sur-Seulles distinguishes between different groups, including the bourgeois of Tilly itself, various kinds of tenants from outside the bourg and external merchants. The bourgeois paid nothing on sales or purchases.59
However, as we have seen, many rural tenants in England were granted general toll exemptions, and these applied just as much in rural as in urban markets. Such exemptions were prized and closely guarded by rural tenants. This is shown by a case brought in 1299 before the royal justices by a group of four villagers from Hauxton (Cambridgeshire) who were tenants of the bishop of Ely.60 The men complained that although as episcopal tenants they ought to be exempt from toll throughout the kingdom, they had been charged toll when visiting the nearby market of Fowlmere by the bailiff of its market holder, Sir Giles Plaiz. The Hauxton men claimed that toll had been taken on the pretext that the bishopric was in the hands of the king during an episcopal vacancy. A jury found in favour of the Hauxton men and awarded them damages of 2s. The case provides an example of villagers journeying some eight kilometres from their home village to trade, perhaps drawn there by the fact that Fowlmere possessed a charted market, while Hauxton did not.61 Finally, the record also details the tolls falsely taken from the men: 2d in one case and 1d in the other three. Overall the case thus suggests that while the sums involved were not great, liability to toll could be a contentious and uncertain matter.
Fairs
Throughout Europe, the other main formal setting for trade beside the periodic market was the fair. In fact, until recently medieval fairs received greater attention than markets in French historiography, if not in the English, which is itself indicative of their considerable number and importance.62 Although the term fair covers a wide variety of trading assemblies, some general characteristics can be identified. Fairs were held annually, rather than weekly, and typically lasted a number of days. Some fairs tended to specialize in particular products, such as horses or wool, which was reflected in their timing. In England, early summer and autumn seem to have been especially popular times for fairs.63
Fairs are often thought of as high status affairs catering for elite customers and visited by leading merchants, and there were certainly many of that kind. Such international fairs included the famous Champagne fairs, and English fairs such as that of Boston, which were in their heyday in the twelfth century. Major fairs that hosted long-distance commerce involving high status goods also flourished in the later medieval period, such as Stourbridge fair outside Cambridge, which ran from 24 August to 29 September.64 Yet the period under consideration here was also characterized by a multitude of regional and local fairs sited in both town and country. In England, many royal grants included a fair together with a market. Indeed, the cumulative total of fairs exceeded that of markets in the late medieval period, though one cannot know how many of these were fully functioning.65 Saintonge in southwest France was home to small fairs in modest bourgades, and a multiplication of fairs took place in Normandy and in Languedoc also.66 Holland, too, featured ‘lesser fairs’, though the majority of these were situated in towns.67 In most places, therefore, countryfolk had ready access to local fairs, as well as the opportunity to travel further to regional fairs frequented by traders from further afield. The question that concerns us here is the extent to which and for what purposes ordinary rural households of peasants and craftsmen visited these various venue types.
Again, the available sources do not permit exhaustive answers, though there is a good deal of suggestive evidence. It shows, for instance, that the fairs of northern Holland were an attractive option for peasants wishing to sell their dairy products and cattle.68 In eastern England, the fairs of Ely in the Cambridgeshire fenland sold a range of different basketry products, such as fish traps, produced from reeds of the surrounding area.69 The availability of these products at the fair is known about in large part through the records of a major institutional consumer (Thetford Priory), but it seems highly likely that they represent the work of craftsmen of the surrounding area, and were just the kinds of items that local fenland peasants would have come to the fair to buy.70
Occasional references in English local court records allow us to observe peasants visiting fairs. For instance, in the manor court records of Great Waltham and High Easter (Essex), a series of entries dated 1288–89 record a tangled dispute between two men, Robert Fuke and Walter Utegate. Robert appears to have been a more substantial rural trader, and it is not clear whether he lived locally, but Walter undoubtedly did, and was clearly of peasant status, being described in the contemporary court rolls as a villein.71 Two of the court roll entries mention in passing that reasons for dispute between the two men had arisen at fairs. In one of these, Robert complained that he had been at Royston fair with ninety stones of wool (a substantial quantity) that he was about to sell to a merchant, when Walter had intervened, allegedly saying to the merchant that the wool ‘was marshland wool, and not worth his while’.72 Walter admitted being at the fair, but not disturbing the sale. In the other entry, Robert alleged a series of debts between the two men contracted in the fair at Pleshey (Essex). These cases are interesting, not least for the light they shed on the extent to which country dwellers were prepared to travel to visit fairs. Royston fair, in Hertfordshire, was over forty kilometres from Walter’s Essex home, and trading there involved a significant journey. The court roll entry reveals that the men were in Royston for at least two days. Pleshey, by contrast, was just a few kilometres from Walter’s home village. Interestingly, Pleshey is not known as the site of a chartered fair, and it is possible that this was a relatively small assembly.
This Essex evidence, if representative, suggests that villagers used fairs situated both in their immediate locality, and further afield. Like markets, fairs were formal trading centres with attributes that could reduce transaction costs. Yet like markets they were set up to provide revenue for a landlord or other authority, and as such trade in fairs was subject to similar charges and regulations. It is difficult to determine how markets and fairs compared in terms of facilities, regulations and charges, though there is evidence that in some locations tolls and fees were higher in the fair than in the market.73 Because they were held annually, fairs were perhaps not a preferred setting for regular purchases of basic foodstuffs. However, for certain other sales and purchases they were the ideal venue because of the ability of many fairs to attract traders from longer distances.74
Informal trading venues
The highly regulated formal markets and fairs were designed, among other things, to maintain a reliable supply of goods at just prices, and this broad objective generated the rules and records that are so eye-catching to historians. However, especially since the publication of a seminal article in 1992, we have become aware of the importance of transactions that took place entirely outside those formal settings.75 More recently that awareness has grown further. In 2006, Richard Britnell proposed that
taking town and country together, the share of total trade that passed through formal markets and fairs must have been much less than half of all commercial transactions necessary to sustain the medieval economy at any stage of its development.76
Noting England’s large number of official markets and fairs under close royal and seigniorial control, Dijkman wrote recently of the ‘early suppression of informal trade’ in that country. That observation is however rather at odds with recent historiography which tends to stress the continuing vitality of such trade. A focus on informal trade is evident on studies of other European regions also.77 Here ‘informal trade’ refers to exchanges undertaken outside public markets and fairs, whether in shops, private houses, inns or at the farm gate, sometimes deliberately avoiding the scrutiny of market authorities. Informal trade is thought to have been especially widespread in relation to particular agricultural commodities, most notably the key one of wool; there is considerable agreement that most wool was marketed via direct sales to woolmongers and middlemen.78 Frequently informal trade is even less visible to historians than trade in formal assemblies. But it can certainly be glimpsed in a variety of sources, and its outlines traced.
Records that summarize trading customs and privileges in a locality show that some sales were expected to take place away from the public marketplace. The Prissé customs, which are concerned partly with the Monday market granted by King Louis VIII, also note that ‘everyone may sell grain and wine in his house and possess measures’.79 As already noted, English manorial court reports of trading disputes normally mention only the name of the settlement where the deal took place. However, an example dated May 1277 from Heacham (Norfolk) is another revealing exception. In this case, Richard Marth’ sued Edmund Caperun. Richard claimed that shortly before the previous Christmas in his house at Ringstead some four kilometres from Heacham, he had sold stockfish worth 18s to Ralph le Vintner. This was a credit sale, with payment deferred, in which Edmund acted as a surety for Ralph’s payment to Richard (a payment that was never made, Richard alleged). The case provides valuable insight into informal trade taking place in private houses in rural contexts.80
English manorial court rolls can shed light in other ways on trade outside markets. The most obvious example of this is the abundance of evidence they provide on the administration of the assizes of bread and ale, laws that sought control the price and quality of these staple foodstuffs. Historians agree that much bread and ale was sold in villages on a daily basis, often in private houses, and not solely in public on market day.81 Using manor court rolls it is also possible to trace trading offences that occurred in villages not known to have possessed a formal market or fair. For instance, the records of early fourteenth-century Meldreth (Cambridgeshire), a village with no formal market, report that ‘John Gos is a merchant of grain and has a bushel measure that is not sealed’, and that Agnes Bateman, ‘a common merchant of grain’, had committed a similar offence.82
Towns, too, yield abundant evidence of informal trade.83 As noted already, town ordinances against and prosecutions of the offence of forestalling were very common. These reveal the regularity with which traders, many of them women, resorted to deals outside the public markets, apparently in an effort to avoid tolls and increase profits.84 Urban shops provided a further manifestation of informal trade in our period. For instance, the Riez merchant and notary Jean Barral, who had many rural clients, sold cloth and wooden and metal goods from two shops.85
Informal marketing was obviously rather different from formal marketing in terms of the transaction costs involved in doing business. Those who traded informally did not enjoy the obvious advantage offered by a large concentration of buyers and sellers assembled at predictable points. They might therefore have spent a relatively large amount of time and money searching for trading partners, though for some that problem could be alleviated by permanent shops. A lack of public oversight of prices could have posed problems, by increasing the exploitation of vulnerable traders and thereby confirming contemporary fears about middlemen and excessive profits. On the other hand, the chance to make a profit unconstrained by price-setting authorities may have attracted many sellers. Moreover, trading informally avoided the costs represented by tolls and hiring space in the market. Transacting outside the formal market certainly did not mean that buyer and seller were without legal protection. As we have seen, many of the rural trade deals recorded in the notary’s records or the local courts took place outside a formal market setting, yet this did not prevent the parties to such deals from accessing structures of contract enforcement. Informal trading may simply have encouraged the use of witnesses to provide evidence should anything go wrong.
Conclusion
All rural households in late medieval western Europe depended to one degree or another on markets for commodities, and many needed them for daily essentials as well as irregular purchases. Such growing market dependence could be a problem in certain circumstances, especially in a world in which the output of agriculture varied from year to year.86 It has been argued that in periods of extreme dearth, food markets in some areas failed entirely to function, leaving those who relied on them vulnerable to hunger.87 Even in normal years, the local availability and physical accessibility of effective formal marketplaces must have had a bearing on a family’s well-being. We must not forget that rural economic differentiation and inequality of opportunity was closely bound up with the development of markets. For many wealthy peasants, the high grain prices of the early fourteenth century often represented an opportunity for profit and a consolidation of their dominance within village communities, while for their poorer neighbours such conditions had much more negative implications.88 Yet at the same time, formal markets could play a role in providing for the subsistence needs of the rural poor, if they were regulated with the objective of securing reliable food supplies for the communities in which they were situated.89
Whatever their marketing strategies and objectives, most peasants and other country people enjoyed a choice of formal trade settings, both rural and urban, because the number of markets and fairs was so large. Important early investigation of peasant commerce adopted the assumption that spatial proximity to a market was a key variable shaping a household’s degree of market orientation.90 However, the institutional framework of formal trade, controlled in large part by powerful lordly and urban authorities, clearly also had a profound impact everywhere. The package of tolls, charges, rules and local privileges in a formal market or fair could vary a great deal from place to place. In setting the tariff of charges on trade and the rents levied for market space, much depended on the particular balance of extra-economic influences and customs in place in the setting concerned, as well as on variables such as the size of the market, and the degree to which it enjoyed an economically advantageous location.91 As a result, different formal markets could offer different advantages for different households, depending on the time of year and the commodities to be bought or sold. Negotiating these options successfully required rural households, like specialist merchants, to gain access to up-to-date information about trading rules and privileges, as well as prices and transport costs. In many circumstances, informal exchange away from the public marketplace proved a better option for rural people needing to buy or sell.
Notes
1. I am grateful to James Davis and Judicaël Petrowiste for assistance in preparing this chapter.
2. E.g. C. Dyer, ‘Were peasants self-sufficient? English villagers and the market, 900-1350’, in E. Mornet (ed.), Campagnes médiévales: l’homme et son espace (Paris, 1995), 653–66.
3. For a good introduction to these issues in an English context, see P.R. Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England 1200-1500 (Basingstoke, 2003), chapter 7.
4. R.H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society 1000-1500 (2nd edn, Manchester, 1996); R.H. Britnell and B.M.S Campbell (eds.), A Commercialising Economy. England 1086 to c.1300 (Manchester, 1995); J. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants and Markets. Inland Trade in England, 1150-1350 (Basingstoke and London, 1997); C. Dyer, ‘The hidden trade of the Middle Ages: evidence from the west midlands of England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 18 (1992), 141–57; C. Dyer, ‘Market towns and the countryside in late medieval England’, Canadian Journal of History, 31 (1996), 17–35.
5. M. Bourin, S. Carocci, F. Menant, and L. To Figueras, ‘Les campagnes de la Méditerranée occidentale autour de 1300: tensions destructrices, tensions novatrices’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 66 (2011), 663–704; M. Bourin, F. Menant, and L. To Figueras (eds.), Dynamiques du monde rural dans la conjoncture de 1300. Échanges, prélèvements et consommation en Méditerranée occidentale (Rome, 2014); J. Ángel Sesma Muñoz and C. Laliena Corbera (eds.), Crecimiento económico y formación de los mercados en Aragón en la edad media (1200-1350) (Zaragoza, 2009); J. Petrowiste and M. Lafuente Gómez (eds.), Faire son marché au Moyen Âge: Méditerranée occidentale, xiiie–xvie siècle (Madrid, 2018).
6. J. Davis, Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200-1500 (Cambridge, 2012).
7. Practical considerations prevent inclusion of Spain and Italy, countries with good and growing literatures on these topics.
8. E.g. R.H. Britnell, ‘The proliferation of markets revisited’, in M. Davies and J. Galloway (eds.), Medieval London and Beyond: Essays in Honour of Derek Keene (London, 2012), 49–66; J. Pétrowiste, ‘Aux origines de la gestion publique du réseau des marchés locaux dans le royaume capétien: le cas du Midi toulousain (vers 1270-vers 1340)’, in Bourin et al. (eds.), Dynamiques, 253–83.
9. D. Angers, ‘Le bourgage de Tilly-sur-Seulles, ses foires et son marché (1381)’, in M. Arnoux and A.-M. Flambard Héricher (eds.), La Normandie dans l’économie européenne (XIIe-XVIIe siècle) (Caen, 2010), 51–64.
10. E. Baratier, ‘Le notaire Jean Barral marchand de Riez au début du Xve siècle’, Provence Historique, 7 (1957), 256.
11. Such records are used extensively, for example, in M. Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge, 1995); J. Petrowiste, ‘Définir et sanctionner le commerce informel dans une petite ville de la fin du Moyen Âge: Saint-Jean-d’Angély aux XIVe-Xve siècles’, in N. Giampero (ed.), Il commercio al minuto. Domanda e offerta tra economia formale e informale. Secc. XIII-XVIII / Retail Trade. Supply and demand in the formal and informal economy from the 13th to the 18th century (Prato, 2015), 131–51.
12. E.g. Kowaleski, Exeter, 60–8; Petrowiste, ‘Définir et sanctionner le commerce’, 138–40; W.H. Stevenson, ed., Records of the Borough of Nottingham, Volume I, King Henry II to King Richard II (London, 1882), contains many references to the ‘daily market’.
13. Dyer, ‘Market towns’; J.A. Galloway, ‘Urban hinterlands in later medieval England’, in K. Giles and C. Dyer (eds.), Town and Country in the Middle Ages. Contrasts, Contacts and Interconnections 1100-1500 (Leeds, 2005), 111–30.
14. Kowaleski, Exeter, 281–7.
15. J. Petrowiste, À la foire d’empoigne. Foires et marchés en Aunis et Saintonge au Moyen Âge (vers 1000 – vers 1550) (Toulouse, 2004), 254, 333.
16. Davis, Medieval Market Morality, 254–5; Petrowiste, Foires et marchés, 316–7.
17. Stevenson, ed., Nottingham Borough Records, vol. I, 279.
18. C. Dyer, ‘Did peasants need markets and towns? The experience of late medieval England’, in M. Davies and J. Galloway (eds.), Medieval London and Beyond, 41.
19. E.g. Galloway, ‘Urban hinterlands’, 120–1; on journeys by cart, see Masschaele, Peasants, merchants and markets, 203–4.
20. For Exeter, see Kowaleski, Exeter, 286–93.
21. Cambridge University Library, Vanneck MSS Box 1.
22. Kowaleski, Exeter, 289.
23. Baratier, ‘Le notaire Jean Barral’; O. Masson Bessière, ‘Le commerce et la société à Brignoles au milieu du XIVe siècle (1336-1348)’, Provence Historique, 14 (1964), 143–81.
24. N. Coulet, ‘Commerce et marchands dans un village provençal du XVe siècle. La leyde de Puyloubier’, Études rurales, 22–4 (1966), 114.
25. Dyer, ‘Did peasants need markets and towns?’.
26. I. Theiller, ‘Les marchés hebdomadaires à la fin du Moyen Âge: le cas normand’, in Arnoux and Flambard Héricher (eds.), La Normandie, 45–6.
27. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants and Markets, 69–70.
28. J. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets. The Organization of Commodity Markets in Holland, c.1200-c.1450 (Leiden, 2011), 90–1.
29. J. Laughton and C. Dyer, ‘Seasonal patterns of trade in the later Middle Ages: buying and selling at Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire, 1400-1520’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 46 (2002), 170, 175.
30. Kowaleski, Exeter, 200–1.
31. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets, 92; Petrowiste, Foires et marchés,318, 322–3; for similar rules in England, and doubts as to how far they could be enforced, see Davis, Medieval Market Morality, 159–62.
32. R.H. Britnell, ‘Price setting in English borough markets, 1349-1500’, Canadian Journal of History, 31 (1996), 1–16.
33. J. Masschaele, ‘Economic takeoff and the rise of markets’, in C. Lansing and E. English (eds.), A Companion to the Medieval World (Chichester, 2009), 89–110.
34. Theiller, ‘Les marchés hebdomadaires’; Petrowiste, ‘Aux origines de la gestion publique’.
35. Petrowiste, ‘Aux origines de la gestion publique’, 254–9; the date of 154 markets was either in an earlier period, or unknown.
36. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets.
37. R. Smith, ‘A periodic market and its impact upon a manorial community: Botesdale, Suffolk, and the manor of Redgrave, 1280-1300’, in Z. Razi and R. Smith (eds.), Medieval Society and the Manor Court (Oxford, 1996), 450–81.
38. C. Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce: market regulation at Balsham, Cambridgeshire, in the early fourteenth century’, in M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon and P.R. Schofield (eds.), Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy. Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell (Turnhout, 2015), 247–72.
39. London, Westminster Abbey Muniments, 14544–52.
40. S. Letters et al., Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516, at http://www.history.ac.uk/cmh/gaz/gazweb2.html.
41. Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce’.
42. Smith, ‘Periodic market’, 478.
43. R.H. Britnell, ‘Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses in medieval English trade’, in B. Blondé et al. (eds.), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2006), 109–24; J. Davis, ‘A reassessment of village markets in late medieval England’, in Kowaleski et al. (eds.), Peasants and Lords, 273–96.
44. Davis, ‘Reassessment’, 281.
45. Coulet, ‘Commerce et marchands’; see also J. Drendel, ‘La bourgade provençale comme nœud de commerce local et régional (1300-1450)’, in Bourin et al. (eds.), Dynamiques, 246.
46. A simplified picture; see Masschaele, Peasants Merchants and Markets, and Davis, ‘Reassessment’.
47. Masschaele, Peasants, Merchants and Markets, 137.
48. R.H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), 89; cited in Dyer, ‘Market towns’, 31.
49. K. Reyerson, G. Larguier and M. Bourin, ‘Les dynamiques commerciales dans les petites villes languedociennes aux environs de 1300’, in Bourin et al. (eds.), Dynamiques, 182.
50. Coulet, ‘Commerce et marchands’, 113. Trets is some ten kilometres from Puyloubier.
51. Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce’.
52. Masschaele, ‘Economic takeoff’, 97.
53. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets.
54. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets; B. van Bavel, Manors and Markets. Economy and Society in the Low Countries 500-1600 (Oxford, 2010), 224–5, 228; Galloway, ‘Urban hinterlands’, 112.
55. Dyer, ‘Market towns’, 29; Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce’; Davis, ‘Reassessment’, 275.
56. See Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce’.
57. Coulet, ‘Commerce et marchands’, 102.
58. G. Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (London, 1968), 413–4.
59. Angers, ‘Le bourgage’, 57, 62–4.
60. London, The National Archives, JUST 1/96, m. 32.
61. A charter for a market at Fowlmere was granted in 1207: Letters et al., Gazetteer.
62. Theiller, ‘Les marchés hebdomadaires’.
63. Laughton and Dyer, ‘Seasonal patterns’, 163–4; J.S. Lee, Cambridge and Its Economic Region 1450-1560 (Hatfield, 2005), 117.
64. Lee, Cambridge and Its Economic Region.
65. Britnell, ‘Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses’, Table 6.1, based largely on royal charter evidence.
66. Petrowiste, Foires et marchés, 109–13; Angers, ‘Le bourgage’, 55; Reyerson et al., ‘Les dynamiques commerciales’, 189–91.
67. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets, 24, 50.
68. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets, 55–6.
69. J.S. Lee, ‘The role of fairs in late medieval England’, in M. Bailey and S. Rigby (eds.), Town and Countryside in the Age of the Black Death. Essays in Honour of John Hatcher (Turnhout, 2012), 407–37.
70. Lee, ‘Role of fairs’.
71. London, The National Archives, DL 30/62/764-5.
72. …dixit quod fuit lana de marisco & quod non fuit ad opus suum.
73. Petrowiste, Foires et marchés, 304–5 (Mirambeau).
74. Laughton and Dyer, ‘Seasonal patterns’; Lee, ‘Role of fairs’, esp. 418–9.
75. Dyer, ‘Hidden trade’; see also Britnell, Commercialisation, 161–2.
76. Britnell, ‘Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses’, 121.
77. Petrowiste, ‘Définir et sanctionner le commerce’.
78. Britnell, ‘Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses’, 114; Laughton and Dyer, ‘Seasonal patterns’, 176.
79. Duby, Rural Economy,414.
80. Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, Le Strange DA1.
81. Davis, ‘Reassessment’.
82. London, London Metropolitan Archives, HO1/ST/E/079/005.
83. See Britnell, ‘Markets, shops, inns, taverns and private houses’ for trade in Colchester (Essex) houses.
84. For further examples, P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Women in England c.1275-1525: Documentary Sources (Manchester, 1995), 186–94.
85. Baratier, ‘Le notaire Jean Barral’, 256.
86. M. Bailey, ‘Peasant welfare in England, 1290-1348’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998), 223–51.
87. P. Slavin, ‘Market Failure during the Great Famine in England and Wales (1315-1317)’, Past & Present, 222 (2014), 9–49.
88. C. Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford, 2009); P.R. Schofield, ‘The social economy of the medieval village in the early fourteenth century’, Economic History Review, 61 (2008), 38–63.
89. Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce’.
90. K. Biddick, ‘Medieval English peasants and market involvement’, Journal of Economic History, 45 (1985), 823–31.
91. Dijkman, Shaping Medieval Markets; Petrowiste, Foires et marchés,304–6.