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.(2) 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.(3)
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.(4) 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.(5) 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.
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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.(6) 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.(7) 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 …
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