If an area specialised in a particular product, as Southampton did in fish, those who produced it didn’t necessarily want to travel long distances to sell their goods. It didn’t just exist to allow local people to buy and sell in small quantities. There might be a cloth market or a fish market or a grain market where traders could buy in bulk, for this was another purpose of a market. In larger market towns, and large didn’t have to be very large in medieval England, there could be separate markets for different types of goods. There was, however, always the need for somewhere to store wool in a port from which it was exported. I suspect that there was little point storing fish in a town where fishing was a major concern. Relocated in the seventeenth century, it used to stand in the middle of the fish market, outside St. Although you can’t see them now, there were arcades all around the bottom for stalls in the fish market. Westgate Hall, pictured at the top of the post, was built towards the end of the fourteenth century or the beginning of the fifteenth. This applied particularly to wool and it made it much easier to tax the traders. Usually there was a requirement that certain goods coming into a town be stored in one place, regardless of who they belonged to. Many were housed in arcades of a building that had an enclosed top floor used to store items sold by the traders in the arcades below. I mentioned last week that many market stalls were semi-permanent and some were even permanent. It was the bells of the church that told everyone when the market was opening and closing. Markets were held in large open spaces, often in front of a church, and the roads around it were made as wide as possible to allow carts to pass one another coming and going. In larger towns there could be a market on every day of the week, except Sunday. Markets in towns close to one another were held on different days, partly to reduce competition amongst them, but also to allow traders to travel around them. If buyers went elsewhere there would be no more tolls, rents or fines, so the market was overseen by a catchpole whose job was to look out for merchants who were breaking the rules of the market, mainly by cheating their customers. Smaller market towns existed solely to enable trade. The authorities of a market town were keen to see that buyers weren’t cheated, since there was usually another market town not too far away. There were undoubtedly many unlicensed markets as well. By the mid-thirteenth century markets had to be licensed by the king and a century later about 1,200 had been licensed. Tolls were paid to enter the town and rents were paid for the stalls. They received the tolls, rents and fines from the market. Most market towns were small and they were controlled by the lords of the manor who founded them. Cloths and threads from silk to linen, furs and leatherware could also be purchased. Foreign foods weren’t the only luxuries, though. You could also buy, depending on which merchants were there, luxury goods such as sugar, almonds, dates, aniseed, liquorice, sweetmeats, nutmeg, cinnamon, coriander, currants, raisins, figs, cloves, ginger, salt and rice, most of which had travelled a long way. Markets weren’t just about local produce, however. Peasants also grew flax and hemp and dyestuffs all of which would be sold. These were normally the responsibility of the women and it was their job to take them to market, usually on foot. Although grain was the chief crop and had to be sold and transported in bulk, they also produced poultry, eggs, fruit, vegetables, honey and wax. It wasn’t just merchants who had goods for sale by the fourteenth century peasants were growing crops to sell and they sold them in the nearby market towns. Often people were both buyers and sellers if they came in from outside the market town. On average, most people in England in the fourteenth century lived just over four miles from their nearest market, which meant that both buyers and sellers could get there and back in a day. Last week we looked at medieval shops and I thought it would be interesting to take a look at medieval markets today.
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