The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life (Routledge History Handbooks) by Miriam Müllerller

Author:Miriam Müllerller [Müllerller, Miriam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-10-26T22:00:00+00:00

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.

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