Richard Britnell

Introduction

The grain market in England during the later thirteenth and earlier fourteenth centuries can be analysed exceptionally well, by the standards of this period, because of the considerable amount of documentation that bears upon it. The property of landlords was organised into manors, and manors were normally divided between demesne lands, which were under the control of their lords, and tenant lands that were subject to the hereditary rights of customary tenants. The demesne was the portion of his land that a lord could exploit to its full commercial potential, if he chose to do so. This pattern of organisation was to be found through much of medieval Europe. English historians of this period are fortunate, however, in having large numbers of manorial accounts in which the management of demesne lands is minutely described. Since most demesnes had an arable component, and since most sold at least some grain, it is possible to establish a considerable amount of information about the composition of grain sales from demesne lands, the proportion of different crops that was sold, and the price at which transactions were made. The best series of grain prices of the period are taken from manorial records of this type, and notably from the exceptionally fine series of accounts from the manors of the bishops of Winchester. Occasionally, too, such records report the time of year at which transactions were made, the markets in which grain was sold and the institutional structure of marketing. Other details of grain marketing are obtainable from urban records, since the grain trade was a particular focus of concern by urban authorities. Urban registers sometimes contain ordinances relating to the trade, and legal records contain information concerning the prosecution of dealers who offended against such regulations. In the administrative records of medieval England no other agricultural product yields quite so many references .

By comparison with the sale of grain from demesne lands, that from tenant holdings is very imperfectly represented in the documentation at our disposal since peasant farmers did not keep accounts. Some grain from peasant holdings reached the market through the hands of the clergy, since in principle a tenth of the produce of village lands was given to parish churches in tithes. There are a number of surviving accounts recording the receipt and disposal of such tithes - usually from churches that had been appropriated by monastic houses. For example, in 1254 and 1297-8 almost all the grain sold by the Augustinian canons of Leicester Abbey derived from tithes, and in the years 1305-19, Bolton Priory in Yorkshire,¹ another Augustinian house, derived 65 per cent of its grain sales from sales of tithe corn.² Durham Priory used to lease its tithes to local merchants in the early fourteenth century.³ In addition to this institutionalised route in to market, peasants sold grain to raise cash in order to pay money rents, judicial fines and royal taxes as well as to buy necessary manufactured goods (such as iron, salt and tar) that they could not themselves produce. Such sales are rarely recorded; their volume and relative importance has to be estimated from what is known about the productivity of peasant holdings on the one hand, and the general level of financial burdens on the peasantry on the other.

In comparison with northern Italy the range of commercially produced crops in England was narrow. The most expensive, and the most commercialised, was wheat, which was used principally for making bread. Contemporaries did not clearly recognise distinct species of wheat, though they distinguished between better and poorer qualities. Wheat was grown in most parts of the kingdom, and was often a primary source of cash from demesne lands. In the London region it was the most widely cultivated crop, and the most likely to be sold from the granaries of manorial lords. It accounted for about a 25 per cent of their sales of agricultural produce (including livestock and animal produce), and over 40 per cent of their income from sales of crops. Barley and barley mixed with oats were sold by fewer estates, and in most parts of England occupied a smaller part of the sown area than wheat. But these crops were used to make malt for brewing ale, commanded a relatively high price and were commercially important. Barley was the principal crop in much of Norfolk.⁴ In the London region barley, and barley mixed with oats, brought in about 10 per cent of all sales of agricultural produce and about 17 per cent of crop sales. Oats were widely cultivated as fodder for farm animals rather than for sale, though some oats were sold for brewing and for horse fodder. In the London region oats contributed 5 per cent of all sales and less than 10 per cent of grain sales. The remaining crops - rye, rye and wheat mixed together, peas, and beans - were cultivated on many estates, but featured less in trade than wheat, barley and oats. Rye was an inferior bread grain, consumed chiefly by the poor, and leguminous crops (peas and beans) were considered chiefly as cattle food, though they too were eaten by families who could afford nothing better.⁵

No other agrarian product can be studied in quite so much detail as crops, even from the records of manorial demesnes. Wool was almost as frequently a product of demesne farming as grain, but it was usually sent to some central place to be marketed and the details of its sale are for that reason less often recorded in manorial accounts. A lot of English wool was exported in this period, and as it was often sold to merchants directly from the producer's store, without passing through any formal market, there is correspondingly less mention of this trade in English borough records.⁶ Fuel, hides, tallow, and other agricultural products, though all approachable through agrarian and urban records, were of such subsidiary importance as marketable commodities that no very adequate knowledge of their marketing is possible.⁷ It is for this reason that the present study will concentrate on grain, though the distinctive characteristics of the trade will be constantly borne in mind, and from time to time it will be necessary to mention contrasts with other trades. As far as possible the available sources will be used to give a quantitative picture of the trade, but attention will also be given to its institutional characteristics insofar as these can be determined.

Demand

The urban population of England was a smaller than that of Italy both absolutely and as a percentage of the total. Only London, whose population around the year 1300 is variously estimated within the range 60,000-100,000, approached the larger cities of northern Italy in size. It has been estimated that if the city's population had reached the upper of these limits, the implied demand for grain is likely to have reached about 500,000 hectolitres⁸ of assorted grain each year. Most of this was needed for baking and brewing for human consumption, on the assumption that on average each person required an intake of between 2,000 and 2,500 kcal. each day and that between 60 and 75 per cent of this was supplied by grain and grain products. The estimate also includes 11,000 hectolitres of oats needed for the carthorses that supplied the city.⁹ Although some Londoners farmed land, and some institutional landlords, like Westminster Abbey, continued to derive grain from their estates, most of the city's grain would have had to be supplied through commerce.¹⁰

The next town after London, ranked by size, was perhaps Norwich, with about 17,000 inhabitants in 1311. After that, estimates of urban size become very uncertain, but even the most generous estimates identify no more than 15 English boroughs as having more than 10,000 inhabitants, and these are unlikely to have held more than five per cent of the total population of the kingdom. There were, however, many smaller marketing centres scattered across the whole country, though more numerous in the south, and many of their inhabitants were tradesmen and artisans. By 1300 there were at least 480 English boroughs,¹¹ and many other villages had markets and minimal urban features, even if their inhabitants were numbered in hundreds rather than thousands. When all these minor centres of trade are accounted for, perhaps up to a fifth of the English population was in some sense urban. Inevitably, because many of them had no land, these townsmen frequently needed to buy grain, either directly from rural producers or indirectly through the hands of cooks and bakers. They also required oats or hay for their horses.

Amongst country people, as well, there was a significant market demand for grain. The evidence of estate surveys suggests that two-fifths of the rural population had too little land for self-sufficiency.¹² Many cottagers and smallholders worked as farm-labourers, and received much of the food they needed for themselves and their families in return for their labour.¹³ In 1296-7, for example, a ploughman normally received somewhere between 12 and 19 hectolitres of mixed grain, predominantly barley, in the course of 52 weeks of employment, as well as a small amount of cash.¹⁴ Such workers were independent of the marketing structure for much of their subsistence requirements. Only a minority of rural workers enjoyed such security, however, and most depended upon casual earnings, or upon the practise of rural crafts, that brought in an income predominantly in money. On some estates large amounts of cash were transmitted into the rural economy by such wage payments. Total payments to occasional labourers from a single demesne were usually below £8,¹⁵ but on occasion much larger figures are recorded. For example, on Peterborough Abbey's property known as Biggin Grange (Northamptonshire), £20.17 was paid to occasional workers for reaping, haymaking, threshing and other seasonal tasks in 1310.¹⁶ The more market-dependent workers depended upon being able to purchase foodstuffs from their neighbours. Such, for example, was Richard "the herd" or "the cowman", who bought wheat from the lord of the manor of Langenhoe (Essex) in 1324-5.¹⁷

Though the landless and near-landless population did not constitute such a large source of effective demand for grain as the urban populations of Italy, it was large enough to make a significant impact upon how both landed estates and peasant holdings were managed. In fact the demand function for grain was moving outward for much of the later thirteenth century as a result of non-agricultural development and the growth of aggregate expenditure. England does not have urban records comparable to the estimi that document the course of demographic change in parts of northern Italy, and for this reason few numerical statements concerning population increases, even at a local level, can be made with any confidence. There can be little doubt, however, that London's size reached its medieval peak in the reign of King Edward I (1272-1307), after two centuries of considerable development, and it is likely that the population of many provincial towns showed a similar pattern of development.¹⁸ Since rural population was also particularly large in the late thirteenth century, it is likely that the numbers of country people dependent on grain purchases was also at its medieval peak around 1300.¹⁹ The history of market demand thereafter is a matter for debate, but it is unlikely that either urban or rural populations were increasing in the earlier fourteenth century as they had done a century before. It may be that the severe famines of 1315-17 had a long-term effect on total demand for grain. By the 1340s some village populations had fallen sufficiently below their peak level to suggest that the demand for basic foodstuffs had declined.²⁰ There is also evidence of demographic or commercial contraction in quite a number of urban centres, including London.²¹

This peak of non-agricultural population coincides with the highest volume of coinage in circulation for the whole medieval period; the first part of the period under discussion saw an increase from about £400,000 in 1247 to about £1,100,000 in 1311. A mild price rise in this period accords with this upward shift of demand. The monetary and price evidence is much stronger than demographic evidence in suggesting that demand contracted after the first two decades of the fourteenth century. There was less money in circulation in the period 1320-50 than there had been earlier, and by the late 1330s prices had fallen to a degree unprecedented in living memory. There was probably only about £500,000 in circulation in 1350.²² This contraction of the money stock and fall in prices corresponds to a significant fall in the market demand for cereals. Not all this contraction of demand can be attributed to declining population, whose extent is very uncertain. A good case can be made for supposing that demand was depressed largely as a result of high taxation and heavy expenditure overseas by the government.²³

Through all this period grain constituted too large a part of the economy's total output for demand conditions to be considered independently of circumstances affecting its supply. The incomes of grain buyers were minimally affected by receipts from overseas. For the most part they depended on the home market, and that meant that they depended on receipts from households that produced grain. As in all predominantly agrarian economies, fluctuations in agrarian output from year to year resulting from fluctuations in the weather had implications first for rural incomes, but then for incomes throughout the economy. Since the livelihood of townsmen and landless families was unstable from year to year, so were the demand schedules for grain. The incomes of many landless families became highly precarious in years of scarcity; in effect they became isolated from the market economy and were driven by consequence into scavenging, begging and crime. Some implications of this aspect of the medieval market economy will be considered later, once the normal operations of the grain trade have been analysed.

The role of the crown in the grain market needs particular mention, however, as a wholly exogenous source of instability on the demand side. The king's right to take grain by compulsory purchase for supplying his household was extended, in periods of war, to acquire provisions for his armies. Grain was purchased, for these purposes, at the points most suitable for easy transport to the theatre of war. In the years 1296-1307 the eastern counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Essex and Huntingdonshire were the most frequently called on to supply troops in Scotland or Gascony. The quantities of grain in question could be very large in years of heavy fighting. In the spring of 1296, when troops were engaged in Gascony, the king's officers were instructed to purchase 37,800 hectolitres of wheat and 36,400 hectolitres of oats in 12 southern counties of England, and later that year there were further royal purchases of 94,640 hectolitres of wheat, 57,120 hectolitres of oats, 16,240 hectolitres of barley and 8,960 hectolitres of peas and beans.²⁴ To take such large quantities of grain out of local markets could have serious implications for the welfare of the poor in years of shortage. In the famine year of 1316 the king's men took over 33,600 hectolitres of grain and malt to supply the king's armies in Scotland, with the effect that Cambridgeshire, normally a region of low prices, suffered an exceptional degree of scarcity. Prices there were above the national average.²⁵

Supply

It may be confidently be assumed that differences in the commercial orientation of producers were to some extent the consequence of random individual variations of personality and personal circumstances. In the administration of a monastic estate like that of Canterbury Cathedral Priory, some administrators stand out as better entrepreneurs than others.²⁶ The records of less institutionalised estates are less satisfactory, but amongst laymen too there were probably marked differences. Moreover, even an individual landlord was likely to be motivated differently in different years, depending on changes in his projects and responsibilities. The sources are rarely good enough to permit the evaluation of individual performance with any confidence, since this would require access to a wider range of contextual evidence than accounts alone can supply.

Structural differences between different types of producers are much more accessible to research. Whatever the private ambitions of the landlord, the possibilities of commercial development on any estate were constrained by the relationship between its size and geographical distribution on the one hand, and the commitments it had to satisfy on the other. Most estates, from the greatest to the least, had to supply the needs of a household of some kind, and it is of the greatest importance to evaluate what these were before interpreting the commercial policy of any particular estate. At the one extreme, some estates had so few charges on their produce that they could be primarily geared to the market. At the other extreme were properties so heavily committed to the needs of a particular household that any sale of produce was an unwelcome diversion from their primary purpose.

In the first category, of estates that could be committed to production for the market, episcopal estates were outstanding. A thorough analysis of manorial accounts from the London region in the period 1288-1315 has shown that on 19 episcopal manors, after payment of tithe, on average 56 per cent of grain (by value) was sold. The situation was almost identical on 39 manors in the region which had come into the hands of the king and queen for various reasons and were being exploited for cash. Some of the great and scattered lay estates were managed with the same eye to commercial opportunity, at least on those portions of their lands that lay at a distance from the family's principle residences. In the period 1288-1315 nine manors of the earldom of Lincoln sold as much as 65 per cent of their disposable grain.²⁷ Even for an estate unburdened by the need to provide for a household of any sort, this degree of commitment to commercial grain-production represents about the upper limit of what was possible, given that a proportion of each crop had to be reserved for seed corn and that demesne husbandry depended on hired workers who required to be paid chiefly in grain.

Smaller lay estates, belonging to those below the rank of baron, also depended upon sales of produce to raise the cash that their lords needed to maintain their status. Because of the almost invariable need to feed the lord's household - often from rather a meagre inheritance of farmland - such smaller estates could rarely equal the degree of commitment to production for the market that was possible for the bishop of Winchester.²⁸ However, smaller estates rarely had any considerable income from money rent, and their lords undoubtedly needed cash for a wide variety of purposes. Kosminsky, who convincingly demonstrated the characteristics of such estates from the evidence of the Hundred Rolls of 1279, cites as an example the estate of a minor landlord called James Grim. He had 140 hectares of arable land in demesne scattered between two villages in Huntingdonshire, and in return he owed money rents of £17.17 to superior lords, though he himself meanwhile received only £3.69 in rents from his own tenants. He therefore depended upon selling produce to pay his own rents before he ever started to think about his own consumption needs.²⁹ Small estates also depended more upon money payments than big estates for their labour costs (because they lacked labour services) and for investment costs (because they could not make up losses of seedcorn or livestock by transferring produce between different manors). Some small landlords kept accounts similar to those that are more common from large estates, and these accounts indeed confirm that their manors had the sort of characteristics that Kosminsky identified.³⁰

Monastic estates characteristically operated at a low level of commercial orientation because of the substantial number of mouths to be fed. It is true that outlying manors were often managed for the cash that they would bring in, and that on some occasions it was cheaper for monasteries to sell the grain from their estates and use the money to buy grain nearer the point of consumption, thereby eliminating transport costs.³¹ Nevertheless, the high proportion of produce that monks and nuns retained on manors near their monasteries for their own use and for that of their servants depressed the level of commercialisation of which they were capable. On the 107 manors from the London region belonging to abbeys, priories and university colleges, only 20 per cent of all grain was sold.³² The manors of Peterborough Abbey sold very little of their grain, and so represent about the lowest limit of commercialisation of arable husbandry.³³

Taken all together, demesne lands - which in England in this period were usually managed as single units, rather than split up and leased to smaller tenants - perhaps accounted for about a third of the total area of southern England; this was the proportion in the shires of Huntingdon, Cambridge, Bedford, Buckingham, Oxford and Warwick that were surveyed by Edward I's commissioners in 1279. If it is assumed that, as in the London region, the proportion of grain sold from manorial demesnes was on average 36 per cent of total net receipts by value (that is, total harvested grain less parochial tithes) it would follow that sales from the demesne sector accounted for some 12 per cent of all crops harvested, at least in southern England and the Midlands. This assumes that cropping patterns and yields per acre were much the same on tenant lands as on demesne lands.

Meanwhile, of course, the greatest part of the land was divided up into much smaller units, most of which were in the hands of peasant farmers. In this period, because of the low productivity of the land, a peasant family in southern England with two adults and three children needed at least 6 hectares of land to live, and the evidence of the Hundred Rolls would imply that only a quarter of manorial tenants had more land than this bare sufficiency. Only a tiny rural elite amongst the peasantry had more than 12 hectares. This meant that the possibility of a commercial spirit amongst the peasantry was structurally confined to perhaps about 250,000 households in the country as a whole, most of whom could dispose of only very small grain surplusses.³⁴ After a normal harvest even a tenant with 12 hectares, cultivated under a three-course rotation of wheat, spring-sown crops (barley, peas, oats) and fallow, could expect to sell only 36 per cent of his net output of grain by value after allowing for retained seedcorn and the sustinence of his wife and children.³⁵ If this was the highest proportion to be expected from the peasant elite, then the average proportion of sales fom the whole peasant sector must have been below this in years of average harvest, and lower still in years of scarcity. Although peasant holdings accounted for about 68 per cent of the total arable acreage in the regions documented in the Hundred Rolls, the value of crops marketed by peasant farmers may not have been very different from that marketed by demesne officials.

At a rough guess, in a normal year in the period 1250-1350 about 30-40 per cent of all the grain grown in southern England (by value) was made available for sale. This estimate is based on the assumption that some 6-8 percent of the kingdom's total harvest was sold by parish rectors out of parochial tithes, that 12 per cent was sold by demesne officials from demesne lands and that 12-20 per cent was sold by peasant households from their family holdings.

So far the propensity to market grain has been related solely to internal contraints within estates of different sizes, namely the need to reserve seedcorn and the need to supply households. This topic would not be complete, however, without some discussion of external constraints in the form of monetary obligations levied on households in cash - that is, taxes, rents and money fines. Of course, in the absence of peasant accounts there is no particular evidence that such levies were met out of sales of grain rather than out of other earnings. Families must have differed markedly in the extent to which they were constrained to sell grain. However, since the ownership of sheep was a characteristic of larger tenants rather than smaller ones, and since almost all tenants other than cottagers had some arable land, and since regular work was difficult to secure, it is likely that a large proportion of rents, taxes and other enforced monetary dues were met by sales of grain. A poem of the late thirteenth century recording the plight of a peasant subject to Edward I's wartime taxation, laments that "to obtain silver for the king I sold my seedcorn".³⁶

In view of the low crop yields and the low standards of nutrition that were widespread in the English countryside around the year 1300 it is by no means certain that peasant farmers would have sold so much grain as they did had they not been required to meet these monetary obligation. On a peasant holding of 30 acres, cultivated according to a three-course rotation, seigneurial dues could easily account for the equivalent of a fifth of the total value of grain produced (net of tithes), and was likely to be more. In his estimate of the budget of Robert le Kyng of Bishop's Cleeve in 1299-1300, Dyer estimates the total net value of the annual crop at £6.39 and the normal annual payment of rent and "aid" at a minimum of £1.40.³⁷ Taxes and exceptional charges, such as legal fines, could easily push that proportion up higher. In discussing the extent of commercialisation in the English economy between 1250 and 1350 it is therefore important to reckon with the large share of the total sales - tithes and rents together - which were motivated by compulsion rather than by any spirit of commercial enterprise on the part of producers; it is likely to have been over half of all grain that entered into trade.

The main source of instability in the supply of grain whether from demesnes or peasant holdings was the weather. A detailed study of crop yields and prices on the manors of the bishop of Winchester has established that fluctuations in supply were both dramatic from year to year in this period and that these fluctuations were overwhelmingly caused by climatic variation. A survey of yields and prices on the estates of the bishopric of Winchester between 1209 and 1350, which demonstrates a high correlation between crop yields and grain prices, stresses the impact of weather conditions on the quality of harvests. Exceptionally good harvests tended to follow cold winters and dry summers, while exceptionally poor harvests were usually the result of prolonged wet weather, especially during the early growing season.³⁸ Table 1 illustrates some of the implications of these fluctuations from ten of the most unstable years of the whole period, from 1311 to 1320. These years include the disastrous famine years 1315-17, when the price of grain reached unprecedentedly high levels because of three successive bad harvests. By implication the availability of grain varied dramatically from year to year, especially when it is considered that the need to provide for the following year's harvest and the need to feed the producers household were commitments that producers had to hold as firmly fixed as possible. The amount of grain available for sale, in other words, fluctuated more from year to year than the amount of grain harvested.

Transport costs and marketing

The marketing of a bulky commodity was constrained, not surprisingly, by the current level of transport costs. Table 2 shows some transport costs from the London region about the year 1300, and indicates the marked difference (as might be expected) between the cost of carting grain overland and the cost of carriage by river or sea. The cost is recorded first in terms of the units of capacity and distance (quarters and miles) employed in the royal documents from which this evidence is extracted. This figure is then converted into in hectolitres per kilometre. The marked differences between land and water transport meant that the marketing regions of English towns were likely to to be shaped by the availability of water transport. Coastal towns, or towns with easy access by river, were likely to derive grain over appreciably greater distances than those which were landlocked.

English port towns had multiplied during the 150 years before 1250, and constituted an important focus for local trade on the east coast, in particular, because grain was traded both along the coast and across the Channel to the Low Countries. It is impossible to gauge the quantitative significance of trade through the ports - which is likely to have fluctuated very markedly from year to year. The high level of intensity of farming in eastern Kent has been interpreted as a response to foreign markets.³⁹ Grain constituted a major item in the export trade of the ports of Kent and the south coast; there was a regular trade with Picardy and Ponthieu.⁴⁰ Grain exports from other east-coast ports were also high in years of peace and plenty. Grain, mostly wheat, made up 53 per cent of the value of goods exported by foreign merchants through Hull between July 1304 and August 1309, and in this same period ale and grain together constituted over 47 per cent of the exports by aliens through King's Lynn.⁴¹ However, much of the trade in grain by sea was not across the Channel but along the coast. England had nothing to compare with the remarkable grain trade between the Kingdom of Naples and the northern Italian cities in this period, but there was nevertheless a significant volume of traffic in both cereals and livestock between the farming regions and towns of the eastern and southern coasts. Kent and parts of eastern Sussex were firmly within the range of the London market in the early fourteenth century.⁴² Some provincial towns also benefited from the ability to draw grain cheaply along the coast. The main coastal ports - Southampton, Great Yarmouth, King's Lynn, Newcastle-upon-Tyne - all had quays where grain was unloaded from moored vessels.⁴³

The extent to which urban populations were served by river transport has recently become a matter of debate.⁴⁴ London clearly benefited from barge traffic along the River Thames, and this meant that much of the Thames basin was supplying the city in normal years. Henley-on-Thames was one of the principal inland provincial markets supplying the city with grain. It therefore constituted an important market for estate-owners in Oxfordshire. It was the principal market for corn from the well-documented manor of Cuxham, whose reeve made 20 journeys there in 1300-1.⁴⁵ Similarly, some of England's larger provincial cities had quite good communications by inland navigation. York had quays on the River Ouse and Norwich on the River Wensum.⁴⁶ The River Severn was a major artery of trade for the supply of several west-country towns, including Gloucester and Bristol.⁴⁷ By 1300 Cambridge, on the banks of the River Cam, had a series of hythes that included a grain hythe.⁴⁸

Northern Italy supplies examples of very large towns with no water communications of any significance, most notably Milan, so it is hardly surprising that many English towns of much smaller dimensions were able to develop by means of overland communications only. For the most part English towns were sufficiently small in relation to the surrounding arable resources to be able to draw their supplies overland from within a radius of about 16 kilometres, though stretching to perhaps twice that distance in years of scarcity and high prices. Colchester, whose population was about 3,000-4,000 in 1300, normally took its grain supplies from within a radius of about 13 kilometres, even though much of the land in the immediate vicinity of the town was of very poor quality.⁴⁹ The same sort of distances were characteristic of the normal pattern of manorial marketing. For example, in the early 1270s wheat and barley from Kennet in Cambridgeshire was sold 16 kilometres away in the monastic borough Bury St. Edmunds. Grain from Longbridge Deverill and Monkton Deverill in Wiltshire was mostly marketed within this distance.⁵⁰

Because they were subject to royal authority, and had no power to legislate for the countryside, even the larger English towns were powerless to control trade flows by operating a grain policy such as that characteristic of Italian cities. It is true that some early English urban charters had contained clauses granting some measure of control over river trade. A charter granted to Cambridge by King Henry I in the 1120s had given the burgesses liberties enabling then to control trade on the River Cam:

I forbid that any boat shall unload at any hithe (litus) in Cambridgeshire except at the hithe of my borough of Cambridge, nor shall barges be laden except in the borough of Cambridge, nor shall any one take toll elsewhere, but only there.⁵¹

However, this sentence was not repeated in later Cambridge charters. It was a very unusual privilege even in the twelfth century, and is unlikely to have been of any practical significance by the later thirteenth. In general burgesses could control trade only within the immediate proximity of their market place. They could sometimes also prevent the creation of new markets in nearby villages if it could be proved that their trade would be damaged. Even this success, however, depended upon the authority of the king's justice and not upon their own powers.⁵² For the most part, therefore, the English grain trade should be envisaged not as a structure of large regions articulated by the market demand or political domination of large cities, but as a complex pattern of small, intersecting regions in which sellers were free to choose between several different neighbouring markets in which to sell. Only the largest towns, and especially those with good water communications, were able to break free of dependence upon a local network of suppliers.

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