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.

But whatever their shape, market towns shared several basic functions. First and foremost was the sale of suplus agricultural produce from the surrounding countryside. Second was the supply of goods like dystuffs, metal wares, or spices not readily available in neighbouring villages and the provision of services by people like lawyers, doctors, or school teachers. In addition to their basic marketing roll, certain market towns developed an interest in particular commodities like corn, wool, leather or in livestock such as orses, pigs, or cattle. In such cases, specialized fairs attracted people to a town from much farther afield than its immediate hinterland.

Economic specilazation, then, was one of the factors which had a bearing on the distribution of market towns in preindustrail England. Another was the spread of population. There was a greater concentration of market towns in the more populous midland and southern corn-growing counties than in pastoral northern counties. Nor must it be forgotten that in an age before mechanizedtransport, the distance that people could travel in the course of a day would be a further crucial factor in the distribution of market towns. Villagers would have to journey to the market with their goods and return home on the same day. It is no coincidence that livestock markets were further apart than grain markets because moving cattle on the hoof was a much easier proposition thant carting bulky farm produce.

So far we have touched briefly on the origins, funcion, and distribution of market towns in preindustrial England. Before we dicuss the characteristic institutions of the market town, I would like to give you some idea of what a market town was like. I would like to do this by showing you some film of the Cotswold town of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. This film sequence is taken from a television program made for the Open University course on English Urban History 1500-1780.

We're looking down on the Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. The buildings are strung ouot along both sides of a long road that follows the floor of the valley. We can just get a hint of the course of the road by tracing the roof line of the buildings.

This rural setting gives some indication that the lives of the merchants, tradesmen, and shopkeepers of Chipping Campden were orchestrated by the cultural rhythms of the surrounding countryside. Depending on the season, wool, grain, livestock, and dairy produce were marketed in the town, and if the market gave the town a distictive urban character, there must have been a strong rural flavour in the marketing function. Anyway, by 1500 when our period opens, there had been a market here for the best part of three hundred years. And the settlement goes back even further.

Chipping Campden was one of several north Cotswold towns which acted as a link between the economy of the lowlands. It is situated in a dip in the wolds, and it is on the line of an ancient road called the White Way, which came from Cirencester northwards through Chipping Campden and down the Cotswold scarp leading to the Avon and Stour valleys. It was also linked by the road across the Cotswold scarp to the Severn plain, and it may well be that Chipping Campden's lovation on several traffic routes was a factor in the settlement's development along urban lines. The town itself consists simply of a church on a spur of land overlooking a curving high street which broadens to accomodate a market area.

As early as 1273, a survey shows that Chipping Campden has seventy-five burgage plots, fifteen other houses, and seven shops. A century later, the poll tax returns of 1381 give an idea of the occupational structure of the town. Only a handful of people earned their livelihood directly on the land, although many traders and craftsmen probably had dual occupations, working part of the year in the fields. The population at the end of the fourteenth century was somewhere in the region was undoubtedly William Greville, a wool merchant listed in the poll tax returns as having no less than six servants. The inscription round his memorial brass in the church reads "Here lies William Greville of Campden, formerly a citizen of London, and the flower of the wool merchants of all England, who died on the first day of October in the year of the Lord 1401."

This is where Greville lived and worked. It has been restored over the years, but there are still one or two ourteenth century details. Greville's career bears witness to the fact that Chipping Campden, besides acting as a center for the exchange of local agricultural produce, had a wider marketing role. Through the commercial activities of merchants like Greville, Chipping Campden was connected not just with the neighbouring towns and villages, but also, via the woolstaple at Calais, with European markets. Greville House gives us the rare opportunity of looking at a late medieval business firm, with living quarters and offices at the front and warehouses and storage at the rear. The wool probably changed hands in the wool staplers hall, originally a private house which later became a meeting place for merchants and their agents. The parish church of St. James was substantially rebuilt during the fifthteenth century from the profits of the wool trade. Although there were several weavers and fullers in Chipping Campden in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the town never developed a specialist interest in cloth manufacture. It remained substantially a small market town and a wool distribution center.