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Formal and informal markets

The formal marketing structure in English local trade was well defined - perhaps, misleadingly well-defined - by the legal requirement that new markets should be licensed by the king, a principle that was firmly established throughout the kingdom by 1250. The king's rights were sanctioned both by private prosecutions - since neighbouring landlords had legal redress against unchartered markets - and by royal inquiries. A market, as understood by lawyers, was a franchise to be held by manorial lords, ecclesiastical foundations or by borough communities, by virtue of which they could exact tolls on transactions at a particular place and on a particular day each week. Between 1278 and 1294 Edward I's enquiries into abuses of local power known as the quo warranto proceedings sought to establish that all such markets brought to their attention had either been formally licensed by the king or, alternatively, that they could claim lawful status on the grounds of great antiquity.⁵³ Markets that could not meet either of these criteria of legitimacy were judged illegal. Such weekly markets were particularly relevant to the grain trade because, as a staple source of nutrition, grain had to be sold continuously through the year. The other major source of agrarian cash income, wool, was quite different in this respect. Trade in wool was more seasonal, and insofar as wool passed through formal trading institutions - and much of it did not - annual fairs were more appropriate than weekly markets.

The markets of the older royal boroughs mostly originated in a period before there is any adequate documentation. They were subdivided into different areas, with one or more particularly set aside for grain. London, inevitably, had some of the earliest attested markets, and the structure of grain marketing there was exceptionally complex. Here there were four principal markets for grain coming into the city, two for inland traders and two for grain coming in by boat. The two former were inside Newgate, near St. Paul's Cathedral, which was at the eastern end of the medieval city, and at Gracechurch in the western part. Both of these markets were in public streets, and both were accordingly described as "the pavement" (pavimentum). This name probably also relates to the fact that, being bulky, grain was sold without the need for stalls. The two riverside markets were Queenhithe above London Bridge, which especially attracted grain coming down the River Thames, and Billingsgate, which attracted the trade of ships coming in from the Thames estuary and the sea. Probably well over half of London's grain supply came into the city by water to either Queenhithe or Billingsgate.⁵⁴

In the larger royal boroughs of the provinces, which by this time had a considerable measure of administrative autonomy under elected officers, markets usually operated every day of the week except Sunday. The marketing areas of these boroughs, usually in the central streets, were subdivided into specialised trading areas of which the corn market, sometimes called Cornhill, was inevitably one. Boroughs which had riverside markets characteristically also had central grain markets for retail sales by burgesses who had produced it on their own land, or by those who had brought in grain by overland routes. All these markets were subject to policing by officers of the borough community they served, subject to the overriding responsibility of the bailiffs or mayors, who answered to the king for the proper policing of local trade. They were obliged to maintain measures which, in law, were standardised across the whole of the kingdom. In the liberties that King John granted to his rebellious subjects in 1215, the famous Magna Carta, clause 35 had included the requirement that the "quarter of London" (equivalent to almost three hectolitres) should be used throughout the kingdom.⁵⁵ The rules relating to urban markets often discriminated in favour of burgess householders by attempting to hold down retail prices, in ways that will be discussed shortly.

Markets in smaller centres of trade were characteristically held on one day of the week, usually between Monday and Saturday, since Sunday trading in this period was effectively discouraged by the ecclesiastical authorities.⁵⁶ Some of these smaller markets, like those the larger towns, were policed by elected officers, but more often they were subject to direct seigneurial control. Landlords were obliged by law to supply certain facilities, such as standard legal weights and measures. In addition they usually invested in stalls or other constructions marking out the trading area, from which they derived rents. An account of receipts and expenses from the market at Framlingham (Suffolk) in 1274-5 records a modest income of £0.16 from the rent of stalls. It also records payments out of the lord's income for the purchase of two standard "gallons" and one "bushel" (both measures of capacity), a standard "ell" (a measure of length) and a seal for sealing the measures.⁵⁷

An example of such a seigneurial market was the new development at Chelmsford, founded on the main road between London and Chelmsford by William of Saint-Mère-Église, bishop of London. An earlier bishop had built bridges at this point to replace the ford that gave the settlement its name, and this improvement to the road had diverted traffic from an older market centre at Writtle. On 7 September 1199 King John granted Bishop William the right to hold a market at his manor of Chelmsford every Friday, and the site was immediately developed as a new town. This is shown by a charter of 1200 whereby the king confirmed freehold tenure to all those who accepted building plots in Chelmsford from the bishop. In 1201 the king further granted the bishop the right to hold an annual fair in Chelmsford. Chelmsford market place became the focus for a community of free tenants who within a few decades were known as burgesses. This small borough was both geographically and legally distinct from the older community of serfs attached to the bishop's manor. The market was policed by means of the bishop's manor court, at which he regulated the quality of ale and the size of loaves of bread in accordance with the king's law. Later evidence demonstrates well the extent to which the burgesses stimulated trading activity. Sources of the early fourteenth century show that the inhabitants included butchers, bakers, cooks, smiths, tailors, tanners, a vintner, a wool merchant, an arrowsmith and even a schoolmaster. These families constituted a focus of demand for grain and other foodstuffs, both to feed the for their own consumption and to enable them to supply travellers through the town. Chelmsford developed as a source of demand for foodstuffs for other reasons. Because of the convenience of its location it rapidly became the chief centre for the administration of royal administration and justice in the county of Essex. By 1277, too, it had attracted a house of Dominican friars. It is not surprising, therefore, that local grain sellers took their produce for sale in Chelmsford market. Because it was not on a navigable waterway, grain came overland, probably over distances up to 15 kilometres in normal years. Around 1258 Chelmsford was one of the markets to which a serf had to carry grain from the Templar manor of Cressing, 15 kilometres away to the north-east. The availability of grain supplies in Chelmsford is indicated by the fact that in 1274 it was one of the Essex markets from which royal officers took wheat for the king's use.⁵⁸

In some circumstances the fact that markets were public gave added security for sellers as well as buyers, and some landlords may have insisted on their officers using them for this reason. The author of the treatise called Seneschaucy, who wrote probably in the period c. 1260-76, recommended that "manorial produce which is to be sold should not be taken away by anybody, but all is to be shown and bargained for in public at fairs and markets".⁵⁹ A more important adavantage of formal markets, however, was that many of them, like Chelmsford, were situated at the heart of towns or substantial villages, and constituted significant centres of demand for that reason alone. Countrymen knew that they could sell foodstuffs there to resident householders and buy from them the products of local crafts and trades. A complaint by countrymen of Henbury Hundred (Gloucestershire) in 1274 shows that they took their grain to the public markets of Bristol and Sodbury to sell to the inhabitants there.⁶⁰ As these comments imply, one of the chief characteristics of the trade of formal markets is that they primarily served the needs of local household purchasers, rather than those of traders in bulk. The rules which were applied to them were devised chiefly to protect consumers and to inhibit their exploitation by large operators.

Local markets were numerous in the period 1250-1350. It is not difficult to make lists of market charters granted by the kings of England after 1199 since most of them, numbering many hundreds, are recorded in the Charter Rolls and other records of the king's central administration. Table 3 indicates the statistical evidence from 27 English counties, comprising in all 72 per cent of the area of the kingdom. There were many important markets already in existence before 1200, which are imperfectly represented, for the 27 counties listed in Table 3, by the 409 markets ennumerated in the first column; the markets recorded "sometime before 1349" are those known to have been founded before 1200 together with those later held to be of such antiquity that they did not require a charter to authorise them. The second column lists a further 256 markets licensed in these counties during the first half of the thirteenth century. Some of these projects may never have been put into effect, and others failed after a brief period of trial. Some were legally suppressed as a result of complaints by neighbouring landlords. Even so, there were fewer abortive projects in the period between 1199 and 1250 than there were later on, and many new chartered markets of this period were of lasting importance. These figures imply that at least 921 markets had been founded in the kingdom as a whole by 1250, and of these the majority were actually operating.

The markets in existence by 1250 remained the primary infrastructure of formal marketing for the following hundred years. The final two columns of Table 3 show that markets were authorised at 588 new sites between 1250 and 1350, implying about 817 in the whole kingdom. The continuing establishment of such institutions implies that they were perceived to have some local usefulness, and it may be surmised that in this respect, at least, transaction costs were continuing to fall through the period 1250-1350. Few of the new foundations of this period attracted much investment, however, and most of them disappeared in the course of the later Middle Ages, even in the "eastern" and "near northern" counties where the founding of markets was exceptionally vigorous in the second half of the thirteenth century. This suggests that the majority of new markets founded in the period under discussion attracted little trade and were of little or no significance, probably because by the 1250s the countryside was becoming saturated with marketing institutions.

Though the development of the formal marketing system testifies to commercial expansion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, recent research has called into question its importance in the total structure of inland trade. As already observed, the essential purpose of formal markets was to meet the needs of the villages and towns in which they were situated. They were not always the most convenient means of acquiring produce for those who lived in village communities away from market centres, and they often did not provide the most satisfactory access to supplies for those who wanted to buy in bulk. There was no requirement in law that transactions in grain had to be made in formal market places, and historians are now aware of a great amount of "hidden trade" that occurred elsewhere, sometimes in accordance with well-established routines.⁶¹

The importance of trade in ordinary village communities can be illustrated from the Palatinate of Durham, in northern England, where the bishop had certain very unusual and distinctive rights. He, rather than the king, had the right to license markets within the Palatinate.⁶² In practice he tightly restricted the number of new markets in order to protect his own seigneurial boroughs, and as a result there were many fewer formal markets in the Palatinate of Durham than in any other region of comparable size in England. This did not mean, however, that the rural inhabitants of the Durham countryside had no outlets for their produce. The free men of the countryside are recorded as buying grain by the acre, oxen, cows and foodstuffs of other kinds "in all the country villages as well as in market towns". In 1303 the bishop made an agreement with the commonalty of Durham which records that the bailiffs on his estate had been taking illegal tolls on such transactions.⁶³

The trade that took place away from formal markets was very heterogeneous. On the one hand, it included a great deal of purchasing for individual households. Many of the sales of grains "in the countryside" from manorial granaries were of this kind, though it is not often possible to identify them from manorial records, which rarely give details of individual sales. Some of these were small sales to tenants. In 1328-9, for example, the manors of Longbridge Deverill and Monkton Deverill (Wiltshire) sold 86 hectolitres of wheat "to the lords serfs", and such sales within the village from the lord's barns seem to have been an annual event.⁶⁴ Some manorial accounts refer to sales by small lots or "by the bushel", implying sales of 35 litres or less.⁶⁵ The manorial account of 1324-5 from Langenhoe includes several sales of a single bushel of wheat.⁶⁶

At the same time, however, many sales from rural granaries were the results of contracts between producers and dealers of various sorts; these transactions can be identified by their large size, and by the fact that the number of units purchased was a multiple of 10 or 12. In 1338-9, for example, William of Dunkerton bought from Longbridge Deverill 24 quarters (67 hectolitres) of barley and 12 quarters of oats.⁶⁷ The cost of transport was met by the purchaser in such instances. Sometimes grain may have been sold by sample; dealers would meet agents of the producer in an inn, or some other suitable location, negotiated a purchase on the evidence of a sample, and then collected the grain from the granary where it was stored. This probably explains the purchases made by some Londoners at Henley-on-Thames in 1295, in which transactions in the market are contrasted with transactions in bulk (in grosso). Large purchases in grain were often dependent on the development of credit relations between buyers and producers, though it is not clear that the direction of credit was all one way. Purchasers of grain sometimes bought produce in advance of the harvest, and so acted in this respect like those merchants who bought up wool in large quantities before the sheep had been sheared.⁶⁸

Large purchases might in some cases be required for the sustenance of large households, or for the replacement of seedcorn on a large demesne; they are not invariably evidence of trading by middlemen. However, though the grain trade was not nearly so dependent upon merchant activity as the wool trade - which was principally handled by exporters - it can be shown that there was a considerable involvement of buyers whose intention was to resell grain in some form, processed or unprocessed. Sometimes the grain crops of particular manors were bought up.⁶⁹ It was not uncommon for townsmen to purchase grain and grain products (bread and ale) from intermediaries, and in London it was not uncommon for more than one intermediary to be involved. Londoners often bought bread from a baker who had bought grain from a cornmonger, who had in turn bought his supplies from the producer or even from some remote supplier. The organisation of the grain trade needs examination in order to assess the scope for such middleman trade.

Commercial enterprise: middlemen

Much of the enterprise that developed in the grain trade must be ascribed to the sort of manorial officer, often called the reeve (prepositus), who was responsible for the management of demesne lands and for the sale of surplus produce. On large estates, at least, the system of accounting gave them a status as a trusted agents and sometimes allowed them to benefit from their good administration.⁷⁰ Marketing was a responsible activity, and could take up quite a bit of their time. In the summer of 1307 the reeve of Combe went 17 times to market at Andover or Newbury for this purpose, and he went 20 times in 1307-8.⁷¹ The reeve of Cuxham often made as many as 20 journeys to market in the course of the year, and sometimes more.⁷²

In small country markets many sales must have been directly to householders, sold in very small quantities. Such marketing policies, involving repeated journeys to market, and some waiting around there, were clearly costly in terms of both time and money, and it is not surprising that landlords often preferred to sell grain in bulk.⁷³ On some occasions lords even sold grain in the stack, immediately after the harvest.⁷⁴ Usually, however, it was sold threshed, and by measure. Manorial reeves themselves sometimes acted as middlemen in this way. In 1327-8 the surplus grain from Monkton Deverill was all sold to the reeve of the manor, Robert Bronekyng.⁷⁵ At Langenhoe, James the Herd, who was reeve of the manor in 1337-8, occurs the following year as the contractual purchaser of 31 hectolitres of wheat from the manor. A few years earlier, in 1334, he had sued a baker in Colchester for debt, so there is reason to suppose that he had been a dealer in grain for several years.⁷⁶ Although no quantitative study of such mercantile careers is possible, it seems likely that manorial office was a frequent route to a career in local trade.

Bulk buyers of all kinds were often able to benefit from special terms in accordance with a sales technique well attested in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; this took the form of an extra five per cent allowed to the buyer as a(d)vantagium or a(d)vantagium mercatoris in addition to what he had paid for. Often this allowance, which represents a contractual agreement between sellers and particular buyers, was of a form known as known as a(d)vantagium quasi xxj pro xx. In 1282-3, for example, 168 hectolitres (60 quarters) of barley were sold in bulk lots from the manor of Dovercourt in Essex and five per cent of this (3 quarters) was given in avantagio.⁷⁷ Similarly on the manor of Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, 56 hectolitres (20 quarters) of barley were sold to Simon à la Porte of the town of Northampton, and he was given a supplementary five per cent (one quarter) pro avantagio suo.⁷⁸ It was sometimes given on quite small transactions, but normally only if the sale was made on terms convenient to the producer, so that he was saved having to pay the associated transaction costs. A similar custom was employed in bulk sales of wool and some other agricultural commodities.⁷⁹

Some of those benefiting from this device were undoubtedly middlemen. The most distinguished group of these was that of the London cornmongers, often called bladers whose numbers, wealth and political influence reached a peak about the beginning of the fourteenth century.⁸⁰ Many of them specialised in grain. Of the 146 London cornmongers surveyed in a recent study, 54 were to all appearances solely or principally interested in the grain trade. Some of them had a related interest in the baking and brewing trades of the capital. Roger le Palmer, for example, aquired bakehouses near Bread Street in 1302. By the early fourteenth century these merchants had a definite group identity, which was formalised by the establishment of a cornmongers' guild.⁸¹ Some very large purchases were made by individual Londoner dealers from rural landlords. In 1291 a London merchant is recorded to have owed £118.88 for grain to a single landowner, which at current prices represents a purchase of 952 hectolitres of wheat.⁸²

London cornmongers also bought in large quantities from specialised markets that arose in the London area to channel the flow of supplies towards the capital. In such markets traders could buy up large quantities from the many producers, great and small, who attended them. Henley-upon-Thames was an important inland source of wheat and oats, and Faversham, on the north coast of Kent, was another major source of wheat.⁸³ These were both very unusual grain markets because, though weekly, they did not cater primarily for local households. They functioned rather as satellites of the London markets; Henley was sufficiently important for local landlords to hire granaries there in anticipation of large sales to Londoners.⁸⁴ Farmer has vividly described the grain trade through Henley in its great days:

One may imagine Robert Oldman, the reeve of Cuxham, measuring the grain into sacks to be carried by the horses or carts of the customary

tenants; the carts climbing the Chilterns by what the accounts call Broadhill, and dropping to the valley below as they moved to the Henley market place, where the reeve made his bargains with the bladers' agents. Then the wheat would be carried into the merchants' granaries (for the manor needed to take back for re-use sacks which had cost five or six pence each); when enough for a shipment had been assembled, it would be measured under supervision, put into the bladers' own sacks, and carried by porters to the barges for shipment down-river. At London, the sacks would be unloaded, carried to the bladers' granaries or storehouses, and kept for release when the price was right. Some of the grain was probably sold directly to consumers, particularly those buying in bulk; most of the remainder went to retailers in the markets of Billingsgate, Queenhithe, Newgate and Gracechurch.⁸⁵

On occasion Londoners also imported grain from suppliers abroad.⁸⁶ As a result of the activities of these men, London became a centre where grain was stockpiled in large quantities, though the granaries were all private ones. London merchants were able on occasion able to supply the king with large supplies from their accumulated reserves, as in 1323 when Edward II required supplies for troops engaged on a campaign against the Scots.⁸⁷

Outside London and the London region specialist traders in grain were uncommon, and the grain trade did not provide a foundation for commercial wealth comparable to the wool trade. However, general merchants often handled grain part of the time. One non-specialised group which took particular advantage of opportunities in the grain trade during the period 1275 and 1290 was the Jews. In November1275 King Edward I, by the Statute of Jewry, put an end to their activities as usurers. Instead "the king granted them that they may gain their living by lawful trade and by their labour, and that they may have dealings with Christians in order to carry on trade by selling and buying". From this time onwards, Jews in England were more inclined than in the past to advance money to rural borrowers in return for repayment in agricultural produce, to be delivered to their houses by the debtor. In effect they were driven to becoming general commodity dealers using advance sale credit.⁸⁸ An agreement of 1276, for example, records how Anselm de Guise, a knight of Bedfordshire, undertook to deliver 210 hectolitres of good, dry and clean wheat to Aaron son of Vives of London in exchange for £15 "paid into my hand". Of the 76 known bonds recording debts to the Jews of Hereford between 1283 and 1290, 34 recorded payments in grain.⁸⁹ At the time when the Jews were expelled from England in 1290, Bonefey of Cricklade was owed 1,106 hectolitres of wheat, worth £131.25, on 12 separate bonds.⁹⁰ It must be supposed that, as a result of the change in the character of their lending activites Jewish businessmen became more active as sellers of grain in urban markets, though there are no observations, as yet, of this side of their activities in the grain trade.

Although it is likely that a considerable share of the demand for grain was from independent households, to an appreciable extent this was not the case. A good deal of grain in medieval towns was consumed in the form of bread and ale purchased ready made from bakers and brewers. Urban market regulations made provision for such dealers buying up grain, usually after ordinary householders had had a chance to buy what they needed first.⁹¹ But a lot of urban victuallers were more enterprising, and sought their supplies in the surrounding countryside. Amongst those who bought oats in the village of Langenhoe in 1344-5 were a number of victuallers from Colchester, four miles away, including Richard the baker (who bought 29.4 litres of wheat), two female brewers of ale, Emma de Brome and Katherine Fordham (who each bought 29.4 hectolitres of oats), and at least three men from Colchester whose wives brewed.⁹²

The development of middleman activity as an important feature of the grain trade is well illustrated in the growing concern, at all levels of government, to prevent the emergence of monopolies in vital food trades. In the period 1250-1350 these concerns focused chiefly on the trade in grain and fish, both of which may be thought of as staple foodstuffs. Those who policed markets were likely to be particularly severe with traders who intercepted supplies on the way to market in order to resell them, an offence that within the period 1250-1350 became technically known as forestalling. The rules designed to control this practice may be traced to two separate sources, one the local practices of different boroughs, and the other the king's court.⁹³

As early as the twelfth century London had had a regulation designed to prohibit the interception of goods on their way to market, though the rule was not restricted to those who bought to resell.⁹⁴ Other towns are known to have adopted or reasserted such rules in the course of the thirteenth century, and often had them embodied in the texts of royal charters of liberties. For example, Oxford in 1255 adopted the rule that no middleman was to buy victuals in the town or coming to the town, and a similar rule was adopted by Cambridge in 1268.⁹⁵ Enforcement of such rules can be found documented in some of the earliest urban court records. At Exeter, for example, Stephen Speare was condemned to the pillory in 1266 "because he took wheat on the River Exe". A closely related offence was the buying up of grain before the market was legally open. Another early example from Exeter illustrates this rule in operation: in 1265 Stur the baker owed a money fine "because he bought wheat for resale before prime".⁹⁶

The parallel concern of the king's court, like its interest in weights and measures, arose from problems in provisioning the royal household, and the dangers of merchants exploiting its presence to push up prices and earn exceptional profits. One undated royal text known as the Judicium Pillorie, probably of the later thirteenth century, condemns

forestallers who buy anything before the proper time as decreed in the town... or who leave the town to intercept such things as come to market and buy them outside the town to sell to middlemen more dearly than those who brought them would have done had they reached the market.

A second, more important text, known as the Composicio, can be dated to 1274-5. It condemns the activities of forestallers in language that recalls the terms in which usurers had been condemned by the Lyons Council of 1274. Copies of this document were sent out in various form from the king's court to sheriffs and urban officials, as a guide to their duties towards the crown, and in time the clause relating to forestallers acquired the status of a royal statute.⁹⁷ It was responsible for the general adoption of the verb to forestall (forstallare) as a legal term to describe the offence by which middlemen intercepted of goods on their way to market in order to enhance the price. According to this influential text:

It is especially commanded, on behalf of the lord king, that no forestaller should be allowed to stay in any town, who is manifestly an oppressor of the poor and a public enemy of the whole commonalty and country. Thirsting for evil profit he hurries out before other men, sometimes by land and sometimes by water, to meet grain, fish, herring or other kinds of goods coming for sale by land or water (oppressing poorer people and deceiving those better off) and he contrives to carry off these goods unjustly and to sell them much more dearly. He circumvents outsiders coming with goods for sale, offering himself as an agent for the sale of their goods and suggesting to them that they could sell their goods more dearly than they proposed.⁹⁸

Under this rule, which became firmly identified with the protection of ordinary urban consumers, and to some extent displaced more local formulations of anti-monopoly policy, dealers in grain and other foodstuffs could be punished for a variety of offences, some of which bore little relation to the exact wording of the law. Five centuries after its introduction this law was still technically in force, and it attracted the irony of Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations. "The popular fear of engossing and forestalling," he wrote, "may be compared to the popular terrors and suspicions of witchcraft".⁹⁹ This legislation was more commonly used as a matter of form to discipline petty traders than to counter serious threats to the provisioning of towns.¹⁰⁰

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