Download PDF | Medieval Market Morality Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500, Cambridge University Press 2012.
533 Pages
This important new study examines the market trade of medieval England from a new perspective, by providing a wide-ranging critique of the moral and legal imperatives that underpinned retail trade. James Davis shows how market-goers were influenced not only by practical and economic considerations of price, quality, supply and demand, but also by the moral and cultural environment within which such deals were conducted. This book draws on a broad range of cross-disciplinary evidence, from the literary works of William Langland and the sermons of medieval preachers, to state, civic and guild laws. Davis scrutinises everyday market behaviour through case studies of small and large towns, using the evidence of manor and borough courts. From these varied sources, Davis teases out the complex relationship between morality, law and practice and demonstrates that even the influence of contemporary Christian ideology was not necessarily incompatible with efficient and profitable everyday commerce.
james davis is Lecturer in Medieval History in the School of History and Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast.
Introduction
The fifteenth-century poem London Lickpenny provides a vivid portrait of a town’s streets, brimming with the vibrant noises and sights of market life. Within the marketplaces of medieval London swarmed a multitude of hawkers, pedlars, cooks and stallholders, all crying their wares and pestering potential customers: Then went I forth by London stone, Throughout all Canwyle streete; Candlewick Street Drapers mutch cloth me offred anone. Then comes me one, cryed, ‘Hot shepes feete!’ One cryde, ‘Makerell!’; ‘Ryshes grene!’ another gan greete Rushes One bad me by a hood to cover my head – But for want of mony I myght not be sped.1 The poem portrays a young man from the country who is bewildered by the cacophony of sounds, but is perhaps also seduced by the contrasting sights and smells of a commercial world in which money is the prime motivational force.
The writer emphasises the variety of goods on sale, as well as the belligerent persistence of the vendors. However, a distasteful undercurrent is implied. A hood lost by the young man is later spotted by him on a stall, being sold amidst other stolen goods. A similar touting for wares is seen in the Prologue of William Langland’s Piers Plowman (c.1360–87) in the ‘Fair Field Full of Folke’, in which cries of ‘hote pyes, hote!, Good goos and grys’2 ring out. Bakers, brewers, butchers, cooks, taverners, weavers, tailors and other craftsmen are all represented in this ‘Fair Field’.3 Yet, Langland’s commercial world, though brimming with opportunities and variety, belied another more insidious, deceitful and harmful environment, where people and traders competed with each other for material goods, driven by their own venality, avarice and gluttony. An early fourteenth-century preacher’s handbook, Fasciculus Morum, described this dualism: ‘A marketplace or a fair is now filled with people, stocked with all sorts of goods, joyful and magnificent, and in a little while everyone goes back to his home, one with profit, another with loss, and the place at once becomes deserted, ugly, dirty, and contemptible’.4 A thirteenth-century French Dominican, Humbert de Romans, similarly lamented the quarrels, drinking, fraud, perfidy and injustice that pervaded medieval marketplaces. He related the tale of a man who entered an abbey and found many demons in the cloister, but in the marketplace there was only one, alone on a high pillar.
He was told that the abbey and cloister were arranged to help souls find God, so that many devils were needed to lead the monks astray. But in the marketplace, since each man was a devil to himself, just one other demon sufficed.5 In these examples, the dilemmas of medieval market morality are starkly evident. The opportunities of commerce and the vital needs it served were counterbalanced by the realisation that money and profit dominated trade, which in turn was driven by avarice and self-interest. It was this paradox that lay at the core of representations of market traders in the literary and religious works of medieval England. Moralists found it difficult to fit retail traders and middlemen into concepts of social harmony. Traders were considered to be the epitome of selfishness, greed and dishonesty, yet their activities were also recognised as essential to the sustenance of society.
The marketplace was the setting where these paradoxes and attitudes were played out on a day-to-day basis. How did medieval people view the market and traders with whom they interacted; was it the problematic economic and social space that consternated medieval moralists? This book is an attempt to examine and evaluate the moral undercurrents and discourses that influenced everyday medieval market practices, but also to determine the extent to which the cultural and religious environment both informed and was shaped by wide-reaching commercial developments. Retail traders, small-scale artisans and middlemen dominated the transactions of internal trade in late medieval England (1200–1500). The following study explores how they were represented in literary and cultural artefacts, how they were regulated in their commercial affairs, and how they practised their occupations in the marketplace.
Market trade and traders Exchange, commerce and credit have long permeated society, in a daily and often informal manner, wherever one person has something that another needs or desires. It is likely that medieval people regularly bought and sold items and services from each other in an informal manner, agreeing prices for a pound of apples, the hire of a plough, the rent of a room, or a day’s wages.6 However, when production and demand reached a significant level, many marketing practices became more formal and sophisticated. This does not mean that informal trade declined, merely that formal institutions developed to assist transactions and commercial growth. This included not just physical sites for the facilitation of marketing, but also processes for the movement, sale and purchase of goods. Regular market places and times, enforcement of contracts and debts, quality-controls, supervision of prices, and protection against stolen goods were just some of the devices that helped lower transaction costs and expedite trade.
These marketing developments not only encouraged new patterns of consumption and expenditure, but may have also shifted contemporary attitudes towards trade and traders. In late medieval England, the periodic rural or small-town market, usually held once a week, was predominant because of the localised structure of society and the pervasive agricultural economy. Periodicity allowed an efficient use of time for vendors, who would be ensured a maximum number of consumers gathered for a minimum time, while consumers could concentrate their efforts to a single day. In addition, periodicity facilitated itinerant traders who could not find enough custom in a single, permanent location and could thus travel around several markets. Annual fairs were also held when the surplus agricultural produce of an area was ready to market in bulk, or to cater for luxury imports or specialist goods.
More frequent marketing, as seen in larger towns, required heavier and broader consumer demand. The marketplace was the accepted physical location where regular economic, social, cultural and political interchanges took place and attitudes were readily formed. It facilitated a dynamic congregation of professional traders, marginal retailers, part-time hucksters, peasant producers and sundry consumers, who created a hive of haggling, shouting and gossip. The core of any medieval town was the marketplace, often symbolised by a market cross. These structures, varying from simple cruciform wooden pillars to more elaborate stone shelters, were symbolic reminders to market users of a multiplicity of influences over their activities: the royal market charter, regulatory oversight by local officials, and the moral imperatives of divine authority.7 The market cross was the economic, social and cultural heart of any market town or village. Markets were thus places where the forces of supply and demand converged, but also where such economic factors were circumscribed by contemporary regulations, morals, attitudes and prejudices.
There has been much academic interest in medieval market trade, particularly in the wake of growing research on commercialisation, internal marketing networks and small towns. Richard Britnell, Christopher Dyer, James Masschaele and others have reinforced the historical importance of smaller markets and towns to the commercial environment of medieval England. They recognised that small-scale trade was a vital lifeline for many in an increasingly market-oriented society, and that petty commodity production and exchange lay at the heart of numerous economic changes.8 There has been less work on market traders specifically, but Judith Bennett and Heather Swanson have produced substantial research on brewers and artisans respectively, including the role of women who often supplemented household income by engaging in part-time retailing.9 Many women would bake and brew, make butter and cheese, and raise poultry for meat and eggs, within the context of the household economy.
They were common sights, sitting under the cross on market day, selling their victuals to raise extra income for the family, though their profits were often marginal.10 Rodney Hilton also highlighted the pervasiveness of hucksters and retailers in late medieval England, in both urban and rural settings, fulltime and part-time, male and female.11 In his investigations of Halesowen and Thornbury, he presented a medieval world dominated by petty production and petty retail trade. In particular, he drew attention to the prevalence of victuallers in court rolls and argued that this demonstrated both the volume of trade in foodstuffs and the earnestness of authorities to control such transactions. Hilton suggested that market traders and retailers were regarded with suspicion and closely controlled, though our historical perception of such people may have become distorted by the level of prosecutions evident in late medieval court rolls, as well as the literary representations of cheating and corruption. David Farmer, in contrast, assumed that retailers and victuallers suffered daily harassment and opprobrium on the scale suggested by moralists such as John Gower and William Langland.12
The relationship between the literary and legal representations of traders is still not clearly understood. Indeed, despite a number of studies on alewives, the role and behaviour of medieval market traders more generally has not been fully examined. Medieval market traders encompassed a wide range of people, engaged in commerce for a variety of reasons and levels of gain. The following study concentrates on those that can be broadly defined as engaged in retail trade, petty wholesale transactions and small-scale commodity production, but such individuals ranged from lesser merchants and middlemen to urban shopkeepers and stallholders, and from itinerant hawkers and pedlars to marginal and part-time hucksters. Market traders did not form a contained, self-aware and homogeneous group, but were a broad and varied constituency. This book is concerned primarily with those retail traders who sold goods in the marketplaces on a regular or semiregular basis, but it is recognised that any who were involved in vending were expected to abide by legal and moral injunctions. Indeed, retailers merely constituted the base of a commercial pyramid, at the apex of which resided the wholesaling, international merchants.
The label ‘merchant’ normally conjures up images of a wealthy Stapleman, exporting wool or cloth in exchange for various luxury goods, which he then distributed throughout the realm. Typically, he aspired to gentry life and perhaps retirement to a country estate, where he could enjoy the benefits of his commercial gains and a higher social status.13 Rosemary Horrox argued that merchants wanted the best of both worlds, town and country.14 The activities of such merchants have been widely investigated by historians, attracted by the abundance of customs records detailing the trade in international commodities.15 There are also several studies of individual merchants and their families, as well as research into the merchant class as a whole.16 However, merchants were a rank apart from the mass of small-scale traders and artisans in late medieval England. Swanson suggested that the fourteenth century saw the polarisation of wholesalers, retailers and artisans into more definitive sub-categories, whereas previously ‘merchant’ had been a more generic term.17 By the later Middle Ages, the designation of ‘merchant’ was confined to those engaged in wholesale trade, though this covered a range of people, from international dealers to lowly intra-regional traders.18
Thirteenth-century London, for instance, was well served by cornmongers, with places like Henleyon-Thames operating as entrepots for the collection of London grain ˆ supplies.19 At the higher end of the marketing scale, usually in the bigger boroughs, there were the merchants and specialised traders who dealt in imports like dyes, spices and wine, or higher-quality manufactures like cloth and metalware.20 All these required distribution networks and would have differentiated the regulatory and political structures in larger towns from those in small towns and markets. The merchant elite thus dominated international and regional trade and often governed larger towns, but they were partially detached from the day-to-day retail trade in basic, low-value commodities. It was the petty retailers and craftsmen who represented everyday marketing and who were the main, accessible link between the peasantry and market dealings. Retailers were generally poorer and less influential than wholesaling merchants, and often processed their own goods, sold them from shop fronts, stalls or moveable carts, or hawked them in the streets.
On market day, simple timber stalls were erected in the marketplace, though over time some became more permanent in style and structure, encroaching upon the public space. Those without a stall would carry goods in baskets, either wandering around the marketplace or standing in designated areas. More substantial retailers might have had permanent shops under arcades or within a ground-floor room. A typical urban shop was contained within the front of a house and opened onto the street by the lifting or removal of window boards. Professional craftsmen-retailers also had workshops in the yard behind, as well as living quarters above.21 Very often, resident traders with shops might seek to enlarge their commercial space by renting a stall on market day. There is also evidence that some traders travelled to other markets to sell goods.22 In particular, there were itinerant pedlars or chapmen who sold minor manufactured goods: cheap clothes, pottery, metalware, buckles, purses, combs and other knick-knacks. These were often low-quality, small-scale and second-hand items, and may have been distributed around regular circuits of periodic markets.23
Minor middlemen similarly wandered the countryside in search of raw materials to sell at local markets, particularly staple products such as grain, wool and fish. There were certainly professional traders, such as brewers, bakers, cooks, butchers and various artisans, who operated from fixed shops or stalls as specialised retailers or petty commodity producers. They might sell goods acquired from local producers or wholesalers, or process raw materials themselves to retail. Indeed, the craftsmen-retailer or producerretailer was common in all market towns.24 However, the level of specialisation should not be overemphasised.25 Many retailers were general dealers rather than specialists, seeking profit where they could find it: taverners were often vintners; chandlers often sellers of wax or tallow products; innkeepers were brewers and grain dealers. Other traders were irregular, part-time and ad hoc in their marketing patterns, often as an adjunct to another primary occupation or domestic activity. For instance, brewing was a domestic industry which many women undertook on a supplementary basis in order to earn extra household income.26 Victuallers constituted the most common trading group in late medieval markets, supplying sustenance to an increasing non-agricultural, landless or smallholding population. Indeed, with fluctuating harvests, poor transport and a lack of storage facilities (especially for perishables), the supply of food was a prime consideration for officials. Consequently, the activities of bakers, brewers, fishmongers, butchers, poulterers and other producers or sellers of foodstuffs were closely monitored and intensely regulated.
In larger market centres, victuallers were seen throughout the streets, and probably throughout the week, alongside cooks who sold the ‘fast-food’ of the Middle Ages – pies, pastries and breads.27 In a similar manner, inns, alehouses and taverns became an increasingly dominant part of the everyday marketing landscape, providing food and drink to a variety of customers. Many regular victuallers also sold a percentage of their products to hucksters or regraters, who were purely retailers, buying goods directly from producers in order to sell them onto consumers. The term ‘huckster’ was frequently applied to those who dealt in small batches of victuals on a casual basis. They were often women (hence the feminine form ‘-ster’), dealing in a selection of low-priced vegetables, poultry and dairy products. These derived from either their own holdings or from local producers, and were then carried into the marketplace in baskets on their heads or in their arms. Some resided in the market settlement, while others travelled from the surrounding countryside. They paid the appropriate market tolls, and then sold their goods from under the market cross, in the streets, or occasionally from hired stalls, depending on the arrangements and costs of the particular marketplace. Many purchased and resold ale, bread and fish, or diversified into petty manufactures like coarse cloth, yarn and candles. Hucksters were usually at the bottom of the marketing hierarchy in both status and wealth, making only meagre gains through trade.28
It appears that hucksters, hawkers and regraters were closely watched, and authorities were anxious that they should not usurp the privileges of more permanent retailers, sell substandard foodstuffs, or engage in unacceptable regrating, forestalling or other price-raising activities.29 At its most basic extent, trade involved manorial officials or peasants, selling surplus agricultural produce or by-products, such as ale and cheese, and entering the market on a transient basis. Several studies have emphasised the extent to which the medieval peasantry were producing goods to sell in nearby markets.30 They sold either to producer-retailers or directly to consumers. In turn, they would purchase a diversity of manufactures and commodities, such as pottery, metalwork or cloth, which they could not find in their own communities. For smallholders and labourers, there was a great dependence on the market simply for obtaining basic foodstuffs.
But most peasants, whether they held large or small holdings, also needed to raise cash to pay fines and rents to their lords. Market trade thus supplied the small-scale needs of numerous consumers, whether resident or visitors, in foodstuffs and cheap manufactured goods. Traders were a mix of the regular and irregular, the well-off and the poor, all seeking to make a profit. Periodic markets would throng to the sound of traders hawking their wares, while a more steady retail business for victuals and manufactures undoubtedly continued throughout the week. These petty traders constituted the backbone of a growing commercial system from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, facilitating the exchange of goods and shaping local market ethics.
The commercialisation of English society The history of retail trade is an important indicator of the sophistication of the English economy. Some historians argue that the expansion of market trade and production was a small, but important, steppingstone towards a new form of economic organisation.31 Consequently, the function and importance of market traders should be examined within a context of the wider economic and social environment of medieval England. Changing economic trends in the later Middle Ages ensured that petty traders did not remain peripheral or irregular figures. Indeed, it is important to recognise that there was a proliferation of market traders from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries and a general immersion of the English population in commercial endeavours. Medieval economic history has turned full circle as scholars have revitalised the study of commercial institutions and practitioners. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economic historians stressed the importance of markets and other commercial institutions to the economic growth of late medieval England.
Ephraim Lipson and Norman Gras, for example, viewed the rise of monetarisation, merchant oligarchies and markets as part of an evolutionary progression towards a modern economy.32 However, by the 1960s, the dominance of commercialism in economic histories was questioned by Munia Postan, who advocated a greater emphasis on agricultural and demographic factors, in the economic tradition of Ricardo and Malthus.33 Postan moved the historical debate away from markets and monetarisation towards a more pessimistic model based upon the relationship between resources, population and income. He argued that the striking population growth of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries caused demand to outstrip available resources, leading to a decline in living standards. Postan saw agriculture as stagnant, reliant on poor marginal lands and lacking in technological innovation. As the population expanded, resources became scarce for the peasantry, particularly smallholders and the landless. Land was subdivided to such an extent that more units of production were unable to support a family group. Consequently, a growing number of peasants were struggling to subsist on their own landholdings and had to find byemployment and labouring wages in order to buy their food from local markets. Postan’s thesis has been criticised, especially in its application to less populated parts of the realm.34 The model also downplays important agricultural and technological innovations, efficient and appropriate use of marginal lands, and questions about the relationship between demographic trends and economic indicators.35
The complexities of change, especially considering the stagnant population after the Black Death, are not convincingly accommodated. Others, employing a Marxist perspective, argued that more account was needed regarding the lack of seigneurial investment and the lordly exploitation of dependent peasants. Hilton and Robert Brenner both suggested that excessive burdens precipitated a crisis in both peasant welfare and lord–tenant relations, though John Hatcher argued that such a model neglected the customary and economic restraints upon lordly action.36 Issues of internal trade thus became sidelined until work in the 1980s looked anew at the commercial sector, markets, money supply and agrarian innovation. Scholars proposed a model of commercialisation in which the English medieval economy was driven by an increasing demand for grain from an expanding population.37 Richard Britnell redeveloped concepts of ‘commercialisation’ in his book The Commercialisation of English Society 1000–1500, in which he studied changes in the medieval economy and emphasised the formal institutional frameworks for those changes.38 In particular, he noted that the facilities of commercial exchange grew in size and number in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
This was part of a wider commercial transformation, which included: a denser, organised market structure; an increase in the value and volume of coinage in circulation; growing credit markets; urban expansion and new towns; a proliferation of non-agricultural occupations; and a more market-oriented peasant society. For instance, the urban population may have, on aggregate, doubled over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sustained by immigration from the burgeoning ranks of the rural population.39 Some towns grew in their physical size and density of settlement, while others were new foundations established by lordly enterprise.40 It is difficult to be exact about the proportion of the medieval population that lived in towns, especially given the problematic nature of defining an urban settlement, but most historians assert that some 15–20 per cent lived in towns by 1300 and that this remained buoyant despite the post-Black Death demographic decline.41
By the late fourteenth century, London was still by far the largest city, with a population of over 50,000; this was followed by the provincial centres of York, Coventry, Bristol and Norwich (8,000–15,000); some 30–40 towns between 2,000 and 8,000 inhabitants; and over 500 small towns, where half of the aggregate urban population lived.42 Britnell estimated that by 1300 there was a substantial non-agrarian sector (perhaps 20 per cent of the population) dependent upon producing goods and services for sale. In addition, some 20 per cent of agricultural produce, as well as most wool, was sold through markets.43 In this analysis, monetarisation, urbanisation and market facilities increased in proportion to demographic expansion. Indeed, in addition to the needs of the rural peasantry, urban expansion itself both fed and generated demand. Commercialisation thus enabled a growing population to subsist at the existing levels of welfare.44 Ambitious landlords were drawn into producing for the market in order to profit from increasing levels of consumption, and their success was aided by buoyant prices, high rents and cheap labour.
The peak of demesne agriculture consequently occurred during the thirteenth century.45 The peasant tenants of medium to large holdings also put their surpluses into circulation. Kathleen Biddick showed that many higher-status peasants were using thirteenth-century Bedfordshire markets in a proactive manner for commercial gain.46 William Lene of Walsham-le-Willows (Suffolk) was one such early fourteenth-century wealthy peasant, whose possessions unusually were listed in the court roll. He had surplus corn, dairy produce, wool and meat, all of which he could have sold in nearby markets, as well as russet cloth, linen sheets and brass pots that he had probably bought there.
A minority of the peasantry may have benefited from the market opportunities of the thirteenth century, but the majority were smallholders or landless who faced a period of acute poverty and heavy seigneurial burdens and needed the market for subsistence.48 It has been argued that the increasing impoverishment of a significant sector of the peasantry meant that they were compelled to sell their produce in the market. Lords and the state demanded that certain rents, dues and taxes were met in cash.49 Not all market involvement was thus liberating in the classical economic mode; it was a dependence on the market driven by necessity rather than opportunity.50 Nevertheless, the market was instrumental in sustaining population and urban expansion, and demand came from all sectors of medieval society. Market exchange also facilitated agricultural and industrial specialisation and thus increased economic efficiency, though admittedly this was an uneven process.51
There were limitations to commercial improvements, including an unequal distribution of gains both socially and regionally, and perhaps a glut of commercial expansion by the early fourteenth century. The wider benefits of commercialisation were probably not felt until after the Black Death when, paradoxically, historians have noted a declining number of markets and fairs, a monetary slump, agrarian recession and a crisis in towns. Population decline was perhaps already evident in the early fourteenth century, but the Black Death of 1348–9 was a significant exogenous episode, with up to 40–50 per cent of the population lost, followed by more than a century of demographic non-recovery.52 Postan did not regard the fifteenth century as conducive to market-oriented production, because the compulsion to grow cereals for cash weakened.53 Instead, he viewed it as an ‘age of recession, arrested economic development and declining national income’.54 Postan also noted a depression in urban areas as well as a decline in corporate towns and marketing, demonstrated by changing overseas trade, monetary shortage and urban revenue crises.55 In addition, Hatcher highlighted a general recession in the mid-fifteenth century, exacerbated by a shortage of coinage.
Anthony Bridbury, in contrast, saw the fifteenth century as a period of widespread prosperity, ‘resurgent vitality and enterprise’, based mainly upon the growth of new industries and the resilience of the urban sector in comparison to rural England.57 He used subsidy returns to argue that there was an increasing urban share of national wealth, as well as prosperity in areas of cloth production and rural industry. Indeed, although the corporate base of prosperity diminished, the individuals of many towns often benefited and some towns suffered only short-term fluctuations in their fortunes. Subsequent debates of the 1970s and 1980s on fifteenth- or sixteenth-century urban decline became embroiled in arguments over evidentiary reliability and inadequacy. Urban documentation was ambiguous and all too often historians seemed to forget that contraction was not necessarily commensurate with decline. Decline could be relative in comparison with other towns or absolute compared to previous levels. Indeed, a town could be smaller and less wealthy in aggregate, with decayed buildings, lower populations and falling rents, but its output, trade and income per person might be buoyant. In some respects the academic controversy floundered on the difficulty of quantifying ‘decay’ or ‘growth’ and on the wide regional and chronological variations which defied generalisation.
Some towns, notably York, Boston, Yarmouth and Lincoln, suffered in the later Middle Ages, while others did well, particularly London, Southampton, Norwich, Ipswich and Exeter. Many places, like Colchester, experienced inconsistent fortunes during the post-Black Death period. The causes of decline were complex, since towns differed in their manufacturing specialities, regional networks, local circumstances and overseas markets.58 Many English towns certainly suffered decline due to the fall in total population and aggregate demand after the Black Death, but a few centres developed vibrant specialisms and prospered, particularly those towns which promoted the cloth industry. In the country as a whole, there was a movement of wealth towards the south-west and south-east, where textile industries predominated. However, one result of the growing rural cloth industry was that many erstwhile urban cloth centres struggled. For places like York and Coventry, the realignment, caused by cheaper rural manufacturing costs and the development of fulling mills, created a period of decline. By contrast, Colchester and Ipswich benefited from acting as distributors for their surrounding hinterlands of cloth manufacture, though Colchester also experienced short-term fluctuations in its fifteenth-century economy.59
In general, the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can best be characterised as incorporating factors of both decline and prosperity. There was a contraction in population, settlement and cultivation, as well as evident decline in production, wool exports, grain prices and rents.60 However, Postan recognised that an aggregate decline in national wealth was compatible with increasing freedoms and standards of living for some groups. After the mid-1370s, as harvests became relatively plentiful for the existing population, grain and land prices fell and, consequently, demesne farming was less profitable than in times of demographic expansion. Lordly profits were hit hard by the general shortage of labour, land abundance, falling grain prices and rising real wages. Increasing amounts of demesne land were leased in response to these economic pressures and landlord–peasant struggles also became more commonplace.61 The manorial system of serfdom subsequently declined and some peasants prospered by accumulating acres at lower rents and using their new-found bargaining power to obtain freer copyhold tenure in place of customary burdens.62 By the mid-fifteenth century there were numerous substantial tenant farms producing for the market, while larger demesne production had declined.63 The demographic plunge presented the peasant elite with new opportunities, creating a divergence between prosperous yeomen and labourers, but the market conditions still had to be judged very carefully in order to make a profit. The economic upheavals had significant implications for the marketing networks of late medieval England.
The demands for exchange facilities in the thirteenth century had fed a proliferation and formalisation of markets. But the Black Death and subsequent demographic stagnation meant that the total demand for grain fell significantly, lordly income decreased and many rural markets declined or disappeared. In general, retail trade also fell, but there was a rise per capita in demand for certain goods and changes in consumption patterns. The labouring classes benefited from the population decline through higher wages and a choice of work, despite attempts by lords to limit their movements and payments. For an average basket of cereals and peas the spending power of the average wage-earner increased by 137 per cent from the 1330s to the 1470s, and for meat and fish twofold.64 Ultimately, living standards increased, and although the aggregate demand for basic cereals remained slack, there was a heightened domestic, per capita demand for basic consumer and manufactured goods, such as meat, cheese, butter, ale, leather, cloth and pottery.65 Surviving wills for wealthier peasants in Worcestershire show valuable landholdings and items such as pewterware, furred gowns and silver spoons.66 Also, the diet of harvest workers developed to include more fresh meat and stronger ale, while cheaper legumes and grains were used for fodder rather than human consumption.67 With improved standards of living, consumerism spread slowly down the social ladder and had profound effects on the goods and services available and the variety or specialisation of occupations practised. Maryanne Kowaleski states: ‘The appearance of such occupations as beer-brewer, butcher-grazier, pewterer and pinner, and increasing specialisation in the leather, cloth and clothing trades, reflect the impact of growing consumer demand’.68 Demand for produce from occasional retailers and craftsmen decreased as consumers sought better-quality wares from professionals who operated in larger units of production.
A wider range of products were offered and bought in the average market, including imported goods of cloth, glass, pewter and linen. There were also decreasing transaction costs and increasing specialisation and production by market traders. Agricultural producers responded to market conditions by switching to more commercial outputs like barley, wool and livestock.69 Judith Bennett has argued that the brewing industry was similarly transformed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from large numbers of casual, small-scale and domestic operations to fewer professionalised, regular and large-scale enterprises. This was partly driven by socio-economic changes and technical improvements, including the greater use of hops for beer-brewing, and also by the increased demand for ale and beer in alehouses. The introduction of beer from the Low Countries and its increasing popularity during the fifteenth century was surely aided by heightened consumer spending. In towns, in particular, and in the south and east of England, the brewing industry became more capital-intensive and male-dominated. Women lacked both the capital and legal autonomy to compete in this growing industry and Bennett argues that the reputation of the corrupt alewife also contributed to their exclusion. Many women were forced out of the brewing process, while others had to rely solely on retailing in the streets as tapsters and hucksters.70 Although there are still some examples of women setting up more permanent alehouses and brewing regularly, in both towns and villages, they were usually supported heavily by their husbands who were bakers, butchers, fishmongers or artisans.
By the sixteenth century, women brewers were seemingly fewer in number and brewing for sale became a more full-time, male occupation. Economic and social changes also precipitated an important realignment in the hierarchy of local marketing centres. Village markets frequently floundered in the new competitive environment, while many larger boroughs also struggled. It was often small towns that survived and prospered in this leaner marketing system, especially with the increased spending ability of the middling peasantry.71 Many historians have turned their attention away from large provincial towns towards the smaller market towns that peppered the country. The importance of these places in the marketing networks of medieval England has generated a spurt of modern historical research.72 Hilton highlighted the importance of England’s numerous small towns, containing less than 2,000 inhabitants, to the medieval commercial environment.73
He cited Thornbury as a typical example of a small town, with a population of about 500 and some thirty-five separate occupations.74 He recognised that a significant number of petty transactions took place in this local market town and that the development of Thornbury and other such small towns was a good indication of the progress of commercialisation and urbanisation. The distinction between a small town and a large village is sometimes uncertain, especially given that many inhabitants of the former were still engaged in agrarian-based activities. However, the definition of a small town depends mainly upon evidence of urban characteristics: a formal market, diverse occupational structure and a non-agricultural bias. Such urban characteristics have tended to displace the definitions of early urban historians, such as James Tait, who concentrated upon the constitutional definition of towns, highlighting their legal privileges and borough status.75 A borough charter was granted by the Crown or lord (‘mesne boroughs’), and gave burgesses certain privileges, such as burgage tenure, freedom from servile dues, structures of self-government and exemption from tolls.76 Burgage tenure was granted for small plots of non-agricultural land, often of a standard long and narrow shape, facing onto a market or road. Such tenure freed burgesses from customary dues, allowed freedom of transfer and a fixed money rent.77 Burgage tenements, and their associated privileges, were grasped eagerly by traders and artisans. Generally, larger boroughs gained a high degree of corporate autonomy, while smaller boroughs had less sophisticated structures of government and fewer rights. Significantly, however, many other settlements managed to acquire urban characteristics without being granted borough status, while some boroughs never developed recognised urban functions.78 Historians now define urban settlements primarily in terms of their function, particularly focusing on the idea that a majority of the concentrated population was engaged in a multiplicity of non-agricultural occupations.79 While a small-town community contained non-trade professionals, such as lawyers and clerks, as well as vagrants, labourers and servants, the bulk of the residents were petty retail traders and artisans involved in small-commodity production that served local interests and small purses.80
Additionally, the topography of a small town and its marketplace, including modest tenement rows and a dense concentration of buildings, were visible guides to urban status. Archaeological evidence supports the assertion that most small towns were directed towards processing low-cost agricultural surplus rather than large industrial production.81 Ultimately, there was an intimate interaction between a market town and its rural surroundings, and a movement of goods, people and skills that encouraged the commercialisation and monetisation of society. Late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England thus witnessed a realignment of marketing and consumer patterns. This included a greater consumption of manufactured and imported goods, which were distributed through regional mercantile networks. Numerous pedlars and chapmen supplied the country with goods and this brought them into direct competition with sedentary merchants. Itinerant traders had lower overheads, mobility and freedom from town restrictions, and took advantage of the contraction of urban trade and the rise of rural industry. Pamela Nightingale regarded them as entrepreneurial figures, working outside traditional and official commercial forums in order to bypass provincial wholesalers and deal with London dealers directly. This advanced the distributive position of London at the expense of many provincial centres. It also led to the greater use of inns as staging and meeting posts and the need for fewer commercial centres.82 It is possible that individuals were increasingly prepared to trade beyond the confines of official institutions during the fifteenth century, where they could evade tolls and tight controls.83 In addition, there is evidence that alehouses, shops and inns in small towns and villages were becoming more prevalent. Wage-earners appear to have indulged in more leisure time, particularly in the alehouse and tavern, and these institutions grew in number and prominence.84 Tottenham, for example, saw its first mention of common hucksters, inns and embryonic shops in the fifteenth-century court rolls.85
However, informal trade activities had been going on for centuries, including in permanent shops, suburbs, inns and alehouses, and it is difficult to document any changing balance between formal and informal trade.86 Britnell has argued that informal or ‘hidden’ trade may not have been superseded by formal practices during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and possibly even grew in parallel with commercial developments at that time.87 Indeed, landlords are known to have long sold their produce in bulk direct from their demesnes to woolmongers or cornmongers, avoiding formal marketing institutions.88 There were, nevertheless, some significant commercial developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Even though aggregate demand had fallen and the number of retailers had declined, it appears that more of the remaining market traders were becoming full-time, permanent and professional. They specialised more in their occupation, though often diversifying in the products they processed and offered.89
The decline in village markets was a natural consequence of population decrease, but this local institution failed to recover because increasing demand and incomes after the late fourteenth century meant that fixed traders in larger settlements could be more profitable.90 By the fifteenth century, more commercial products, such as ale, meat, dairy produce, leather and cloth, were consumed per capita, even if the overall market had understandably lessened since the early fourteenth century.91 A more substantial and sustained consumer boom came in the seventeenth century, but its roots were laid in the new prosperity for many of the post-plague peasantry. This was a commercial demand that had to be matched by the marketing strategies of traders.
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