The English Market Town

By: Kevin Wilson

Born in England. Resides in Nottingham, England. Staff tutor in history, the Open University, East Midlands Region. Ph.D., London University. Author.

Between 1500 and 1700, the population of England roughly doubled, growing from about 2.5 million to 5 million. The proportion of people living in towns grew much faster than the rate of population, and in this sense we can legitimately regart the period as one of increaseing urbanization. At the same time, we must not exaggerate this tendency. Even by the early eighteenth century when the English industrial pulse began to quicken, more than three-quarters of the population lived in the countryside and earned its living directly from the land.

Much of the increase of the urban population in this period is due to the staggerin growth of London from an estimated population of 50,000 in 1500 to around a half-million two centuries later. Yet although the metropolis towered over the urban hierarchy, there were various types of towns in England in this period. Let me give you some examples. There were the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, cathedral towns like Salisbury or Wells, county towns like Nottingham or Leicester, and sea ports like Hull or Boston. But the most numerous urban type was the market town.

In 1500 it has been estimated that there were about 750 or so market towns scattered throughout England.1By the eighteenth century, there had been considerable fluctuation in the urban heirarchy, and new towns like the dockyard towns of Chatham and Portsmouth, the industrial towns like Sheffield and Halifax, and the spa towns of Bath and Wells had made their appearance on the urban scene. THe market town, however, continued to be the most numerouse type, even though there were less of them than in 1500. So when we reflect upon the urban experience of preindustrial England, the market town remains an important consideration.2

But what did market towns look like? How did they develop? What role and function did they perform? What was their pattern of distribution? What were different types of market towns? What records have they left behind? How can these records be exploited by the family historian? These are the questions I would like to explore with you in this session.

Almost all the market towns in England in the sixteenth century had their origins in the distant past. Some, the so-called primary centers, predated the Norman conquest of 1066 and could trace their settlement back at least to the Anglo-Saxon period.3 But the majority were either organic towns, that is to say market towns which had grown from villages in the two or three centuries after the Norman Conquest, or planted towns, that is to say market towns which, in the same period, had been founded especially for trading purposes. Irrespective of their origin, these towns had a number of features in common.

In the first instance, they were survivals from a more expansive age. The period from the eleventh century to the fourteenth century had seeneconomic expansion, a rising population, and a corresponding growth in the number of market centers. By the early fourteenth century, there were mor than 1500 market centers in England.4 But the following the Black Death when England lost at least one third of its population (1348-50), this number rapidly declined. So the market towns of Tudor England had weathered some difficult times.

The other features they had in common were legal and topographical. These included (1) the right, usually granted by a charter from the King or lord of the manor, to hold a weekly market and one or more fairs during the year, (2) the existence of a marketin space where buying and selling could take place, and (3) the existence of burgage plots or tenements for which their holders, the burgesses, paid an annual money rent to their lord. Burgage tenure is a good indicator of merchandizing and marketing. The burgage plots themselved fronted onto the marketing area, and their holders enjoyed a prime trading position as well as privileges in the local market. In fact, it was the line of burgage plots which marked out the original trading area of a market town, though by the sixteenth century, marketing in most towns had spilled into adjoining streets.

More than anything else, the market space gave the core of the market town its distincive character. no two towns looked exactly alike but several predominant market shapes can be identified. The long wide main street is a fairly common shape. We find it well illustrated in two Oxfordshire towns of Burford (see figure 1) and Thame (see figure 2), where later building development, or, if you like, infilling, has encroached upon the original market space. A triangular shape is also common and tended to occur when the market grew up at the junction of three roads as at Bampton, also in Oxfordshire (see figure 3). Eynsham, another Oxfordshire town, illustrates the rectangular market square which was also fairly common (see figure 4). And then there is the cross shape, wher the market develped at the intersection of two main roads, a feature which can be seen at Royston in Hertfordshire.