Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, Volume 2

CHAPTER II
THE TOWN MARKET

Close under the sheltering walls of the parish church we may look for the market of a mediæval town, with stalls leaning against the building where possibly the first beginnings of trade had found shelter, where before any market was held the people of the neighbourhood assembled on feast days and sold meat and bread at the church without fear of being called on for any payment for toll and stallage;^[46] and in which, after the community had been endowed with market rights, the rulers and governors of the market met, the guardians of its weights and measures, the makers of its laws, the assessors of its tolls, the supervisors of its wares. There, while the national government was drifting in perplexity at the mercy of court factions, agitated by problems of the King’s civil list, pensions to nobles, and the conquest of France, the towns were rapidly sketching out their commercial system and tentatively laying down the main lines into which the national policy was ultimately to be driven.

The market had long been kept out of view by its more showy predecessor the fair – the offspring of an immemorial antiquity, whose very name^[47] betrays its origin in the ancient gatherings at feasts heathen or Christian, and reveals it as an institution derived from old tribal and national usages. Gradually expanding in later times with the growth of the royal prerogative and necessities of commerce, and drawing to its miscellaneous gatherings strange merchants fetched from far and near, the fair had a brilliant history of its own; it had given birth to universal commerce and watched over its growth; it became the foster-mother of the Merchant Law; even now it still appears with the lavish airs of an antique benefactor casting on the green its faded gifts of holyday and merry-go-round and quack delights. But as long ago as the fifteenth century the superannuated fair was already falling into a slow decrepitude, and giving place to its successor, the product of a later order of things.^[48] For the market had another origin and might trace back its descent to the traditions of the Roman municipia, and claim the Roman Pandects for its sponsors, and show itself fortified by customs and modes of administration handed down to England with many another legacy from the laws of the Frankish kings.^[49] With all its air of being the very work and possession of the people, the market was by descent no popular or tribal right; it was the king’s prerogative; its tolls and customs were regulated by the authority of the Justices of the King’s Bench, and its prices were proclaimed by the king’s Clerk of the Market.^[50]

What kings could not themselves profitably enjoy, however, was generally to be bought at some reasonable price. The privilege of holding a market could be transferred as a franchise to a subject, and the whole market system in England grew up by means of royal grants of monopolies to individuals or to corporations. Between the years 1200 and 1482, almost 5000 local centres of organized trade were established by grants of markets and fairs,^[51] and the towns were naturally well to the fore in securing whatever bargains were being distributed. But the origin of the privilege was always independent in theory of the ordinary municipal franchises;^[52] and in many important boroughs freedom from the Steward and Marshal of the Household and the royal Clerk of the Market was one of the last rights given to the people.^[53]

Closely connected with the right to hold a market was the right to keep a Beam or Steelyard with its weights, a yard measure, and a bushel.^[54] On the day that each new mayor entered on his office, he received from his predecessor the common chest, the town treasure, and the standard measures; and was required forthwith to send out his councillors to the house of every shopkeeper, baker, brewer, or innkeeper, that they might carry all bushels, gallons, quarts, yards, or weights back to the Mayor’s house to be compared with the standard models and duly sealed.^[55] Thenceforth it was his business to make war on spicers and grocers who sold by horn or aim of hand or by subtlety deceived the poor commons, on brewers who used cups and dishes instead of lawful measures,^[56] on drapers who measured after their own devices, on weavers who used stones and not sealed weights to buy their wool; even merchants of the Staple and country squires and foreign dealers brought their wool to the “Trove” or Balance, with a fee for the “Fermour of the Beme,”^[57] as soon as general trade proved the inconvenience of a variety of local weights, or of the primitive method of using stones which still survived in the fifteenth century, when a Yorkshire steward writes to his master, “I have a counterpoise weight of the weight stone that the wool was weighed with, and that ye see that the stone be kept that the shipman brings.”^[58]

Thus the market with its Beam and measures became the source and centre of an activity absolutely new – an activity which crowded the roads not only with merchants and chapmen, but with the new race of carriers that was created at the end of the fourteenth century to transport the dealer’s wares throughout the length and breadth of the country.^[59] Dealers and manufacturers gathered in groups round the central Cheap and its Balance with authentic sealed weights, and gave the names of their several trades to the alleys in which butchers or milksellers clustered together, or where spurriers and goldsmiths had their shops, and grocers, mercers, wool-dealers, and cloth merchants were ranged in ordered ranks round the Guildhall for the greater convenience of the municipal officers. What the new movement meant we can see in the change that passed over the face of English boroughs. The first sight of a mediæval town must have carried little promise to the visitor. We have a lively picture of the state of Hythe given by the presentments of its reforming jury in the beginning of the fifteenth century, from which it is not easy to understand how the inhabitants ever made their way about the town at all. Streets were choked with the refuse of the stable, made impassable by the “skaldynge de hogges,” flooded by the overflow of a house, drowned by the turning of a watercourse out of its way or the putting up of a dam by some private citizen heedless of all consequences to the public road. Timber dealers cast trunks of trees right across the street, dyers poured their waste waters over it till it became a mere swamp, builders blocked it up utterly with the framework of their new houses, and traders made their wharves upon it. Not only the most thriving and respectable merchants, such as the Honywodes, but the butcher and swine-keeper as well, threw the waste of house and shambles and swine-cote into the open street till there was scarcely any passage left for the wayfarer; or established a “hoggestok,” “which smells very badly and is abominable to all men coming to market, as well as to all dwelling in the town,” say the jury. There was hardly a street or lane which was not described as “almost stinking and a nuisance.” The “Cherche Weye” was occupied by the pits of a skinner. “There was no carrying through Brokhellislane.” The street by which the procession went on Holy Thursday, the day of perambulation of the town, could scarcely be traversed. Everywhere gates and bridges were falling to decay, ditches unrepaired, and hedges overgrown; and one offender who had obstructed a road by neglecting to repair the ditches found an easy way of escape from his obligations by a courtesy to the Bailiff – “the dyeing of two cloths that the said ditches may not have to be repaired.” Worse still the Holy Well was choked with refuse, and so was the well in West Hythe, and “the water in the cart of Geoffrey Waterleader by which the whole community is refreshed” was equally obstructed and spoiled by the refuse of the butchers’ shambles. It is no wonder that pestilence devastated Hythe in 1412, as throughout the century it swept over one town after another. But it has been calculated that even without the aid of pestilence the ordinary mortality of a borough in the Middle Ages was almost equal to that of a town during a visitation of cholera to-day. Even the first well-meant efforts of Corporations to shut pigs out of their streets and banish wandering dogs, by levying fines from any inhabitant who had an “irrational animal going about” in the churchyard^[60] or the market, doubtless added to the dangers of pestilence by removing the only scavengers known to the early borough.

Nor was this the condition of the smaller towns only. In Nottingham, a thriving and prosperous borough, we read in the same way of streets blocked with piles of cinders cast out smoking hot from the bell-foundry or the iron workshops, or with heaps of corn which the householders winnowed, or as they said “windowed,” by the simple method of throwing it from an upper window or door into the street that the wind might carry away the chaff.^[61] In the yet wealthier manufacturing city of Norwich the market place was not yet paved in 1507, but a judicious order was issued that no one should dig holes in it to get sand without the mayor’s licence.^[62] The very attempt to get access to a town was often not wholly free from peril. In 1499 a glover from Leighton Buzzard travelled with his wares to Aylesbury for the market before Christmas Day. It happened that an Aylesbury miller, Richard Boose, finding that his mill needed repairs, sent a couple of servants to dig clay “called Ramming clay” for him on the highway, and was in no way dismayed because the digging of this clay made a great pit in the middle of the road ten feet wide, eight feet broad, and eight feet deep, which was quickly filled with water by the winter rains. But the unhappy glover, making his way from the town in the dusk, with his horse laden with paniers full of gloves, straightway fell into the pit, and man and horse were drowned. The miller was charged with his death, but was acquitted by the court on the ground that he had had no malicious intent, and had only dug the pit to repair his mill, and because he really did not know of any other place to get the kind of clay he wanted save the highroad.^[63]

All this heritage of squalor and rough disorder however was no longer accepted without protest. Old abuses were brought to light and denounced.^[64] Towns were swept and garnished, stately market crosses set up, and new Guild-halls everywhere built with shops and stalls and storage rooms for the traders. A new interest was awakened in the state of streets^[65] and lanes and central squares when waggons and pack horses began to struggle through the mire with their loads on market day. And as travellers multiplied – busy men intent on bargains, traders flocking to buy and sell, mayors and clerks of distant boroughs come to negociate a commercial treaty, men of law having the conduct of a new charter, common earners – all travellers who no longer cared (and some of them for very obvious reasons) to depend on the hospitality of monasteries, the towns with one accord began to provide inns where, to the greater profit of the community, such men might turn for shelter; and the more luxurious among them might discover good cheer which demanded a grateful entry – “paid for our bed there, and it was well worth it, witness, a feather bed 1d.”^[66] Everywhere a new order reigned under the busy rule of the municipal officers, as they leased out the market stalls and sheds,^[67] appointed the corresponding pews in the church, allotted storage rooms in the Guildhall, issued licenses to alien traders, and controlled the wayward will of the sellers by regulating their prices and their profits. Goods landed at the wharves of a seaport were delivered up to the public porters and measurers of the Strand^[68] employed by the town to unload vessels with pulleys and ropes supplied at the common expense, and to carry them to the appointed place for toll or for inspection; and the town brokers – public officers sworn to make no private profit while they held their posts – conducted bargains in the name of the whole community,^[69] freighted vessels, and measured cargoes of corn or canvas or cloth. Before the mayor the endless officials of the market were sworn – the clerk of the market who had to search and survey all victuals, the sergeant who carried the toll-box on market days after the bailiffs,^[70] the “leave-lookers,” the “decennaries,” the “prud’hommes,”^[71] the butchers chosen to oversee the meat market, the men appointed to control the sale of fish and poultry, the common weigher, and so on through the long and various list of officials.

A vast system of ingenious and elaborate regulations^[72] marked the long effort of the townspeople to carry out in their new markets the apparently simple end which lay at the heart of the democracy, that food and necessaries of life both good and cheap should be within the reach of every man. According to the theory which still held its ground in the sixteenth century that “victual being a necessary sustenance for the body should not be esteemed at the seller’s liberty,”^[73] a fixed price was set on all provisions. Hence the Assize of Bread^[74] (apparently quite neglected by the feudal lords^[75]) and the Assizes of Beer and of Wine were secured by the towns, whether as a part of their market rights or as an independent privilege.^[76] Victuallers were closely watched lest in selling meat, eggs, butter, or oatmeal they should take “excess lucre upon them, selling that is to say more than 1d. in the shilling;”^[77] innholders were allowed a penny of gain on every bushel of corn and a half-penny on every seven pounds of hay, so that if a man could buy a bushel of corn^[78] for 2s. 8d. he was not allowed to sell it for 3s.; tavern-keepers might have twopence profit on a gallon of white or red wine, and on sweet wines brought by Italian merchants, fourpence;^[79] cooks must make their meat “well seasoned and wholesome, and sell it for reasonable winning, and that they reboil nor rebake no meat in hurt of the King’s people;” while fishmongers – a class most important in the mediæval world, and among whom it was impossible to prevent the growth of the middleman, were subjected to endless regulations.^[80] In the unceasing effort to save themselves from dearth or from fraud the poor commons had their authorized protector in the Mayor – a protector who on entering office took oath before the community not only to obey the King but also to serve the people, and to “keep truly correction on all bakers and brewers and taverners and cooks and such like people.” No sooner was the Mayor of Bristol installed than he was bound to call all the bakers of the town to the Guild Hall, to understand from them what stuff they had of wheat, to counsel them in their buying and bargaining with the “Bagers” who brought corn to the town, and to decide on the size of the loaves. Then all the Bristol brewers were summoned before him, that he might commune with them about the cost of malt, and decree a fixed price which no brewer might evade or alter. In like manner he proceeded to set a price on wood “by his wise discretion,” and to order the hours of its sale; and he had to examine the colliers’ sacks, and to assure himself that standard measures for coal were set in the proper places of the town. Further, throughout the year it was his duty constantly to watch that his ordinances were duly observed. Occasionally his walk was extended along the river side, that he might keep an eye on the timber trade and observe whether the great wood called Berkeley wood was discharged at one quay, and the smaller faggots at another landing-place; and that he might from spring to spring watch prices, and see that there was small wood enough to supply the poor people with bundles at 1/2d. or 1d. kept at the “Back,” a waterside street where the merchants’ stores were piled. At divers times he went to oversee the quality of the bread and try its weight (for which perhaps, as at Sandwich, he engaged a goldsmith who was liberally paid for his experience at the scales); while at Christmas, or whenever there was holiday or a pilgrimage in the town, it was his business to make sure that there was bread enough in the shops to supply all needs. And in order to know certainly that the brewers not only made good ale for the rich but also a cheap small drink for the poor, on Wednesdays and Saturdays he was “used to walk in the mornings to the brewers’ houses, to oversee them in serving of their ale to the poor commons of the town, and that they have their true measures; and his ale-konner with him to taste and understand that the ale be good”^[81]– a very necessary task if we accept the picture given us in Piers Ploughman of the typical beer-seller of his day —

 
“Yea, bawe,” quoth a brewer, “I will not be ruled,
By Jesus, for all your jangling after spiritus justicie;
Nor after conscience, by Christ, for I could sell
Both dregs and draff, and draw at one hole
Thick ale and thin ale, and that is my kind,
And not to hack after holiness; hold thy tongue, Conscience!
Of spiritus justicie thou speakest much and idle.”^[82]
 

The Nottingham jury a century or two later would have drawn the same picture. “Master Mayor,” they cry, “we beseech you to be good master to us, and see a remedy for our brewers, for we find us grieved with them all.”^[83]

Nor did legislation stop here. The moment a trader came within reach of a town he became the object of universal suspicion lest he should be a dealer travelling with an alert intention to outwit the public and force an artificial value in the market by some contrivance of forestalling or regrating or engrossing – that is of intercepting goods on the way to market in order to buy them more cheaply; of thus buying at advantage to sell at increased prices; or of keeping back goods bought at wholesale prices in order to sell them later at a better value. A jealous watch was kept on him. He was not allowed to do any business secretly or outside the proper limits, but “openly in the market thereto assigned,” and even there he was ordered to stand aside till the townsmen had come back from early mass and had first been served with such stores of corn and malt, of butter and poultry and meat as their households needed, and the bell struck the hour when he might take his turn for what was left.^[84] And as he bought so must he sell only in the established and customary place; and food once displayed on his shelf or stall could not be taken out of the town unsold without leave of the bailiffs.^[85] Any citizen who helped a “foreign” merchant by buying or selling goods for him under his own name lost his freedom.^[86] Men who lived “upland”^[87] were rejected from the society of privileged traders of the towns, and sharp distinctions such as we find at Worcester between the “citizens denizen” and the “citizens foreign”^[88] separated the folk within and without the walls.^[89] In one borough strangers’ stalls in the market were separated from those of the burghers^[90] so that they might not hinder the townsfolk in their business; in another they were forbidden to carry their wares from house to house;^[91] here they might not sell their goods with their own hands, there they must dispose of them wholesale, or forfeit their entire stock to the town if they attempted to sell by retail; elsewhere they had to wait for a given number of weeks after their arrival before they could offer their merchandise to the buyer; if for public convenience aliens were allowed to bring into the market victuals^[92] and a few other articles, the monopoly of all valuable trade was kept in the hands of the burgesses or of their Merchant Guild.^[93]

It is however needless to multiply instances of monopoly. The system was universal, and a curious attempt which was once made to establish free trade at Liverpool died almost as soon as it was born. The charter of Henry the Third contained the usual provision that members of the Guild alone might trade in the borough, unless by consent of the burgesses, but in a new charter of Richard the Second for which he was paid £5 this clause was left out and free trade practically established. No sooner however did Henry the Fourth appear in 1399 than the burgesses bought from him for £4 a fresh grant of privileges with the former clause restored, and the old monopoly was consequently reasserted, till oddly enough an outburst of religious bigotry abolished trade restrictions; for seeing that the Liverpool Protestants were shutting out Roman Catholics from their market, Queen Mary in 1555 proclaimed anew the charter of Richard the Second and the right of free commerce.^[94] Sometimes a lively smuggling trade betrays the weak side of the monopolists’ position; as when Bristol claimed entire control of all ports and creeks as high as Worcester, and the only lawful trade left to Gloucester was the shipping of supplies, mostly of corn, to Bristol. The shippers of Gloucester saw their chance of a rich lawless traffic; small boats quickly and easily laden and drawing little water, shot out of the channel by shallow passages where the bigger Bristol ships could not follow them, and Irish vessels made their way direct to Gloucester and escaped the heavy dues at the Bristol port; and while Gloucester traders grew rich fast, the Bristol folk made complaint that they were threatened with ruin.^[95]

This elaborate system of trade regulation was no doubt mainly due to the effort which men were forced to make, as centres of thicker population grew up in a country where the carriage of goods^[96] was a slow and difficult matter, to protect themselves from violent changes in the price of food;^[97] while it is also possible that a society which dictated wages and profits was naturally drawn on to undertake the corresponding duty of fixing the value in food and clothing of these wages and profits. It would seem that for some centuries the cost of mere subsistence remained almost stationary; and even in exceptional cases, like the Jubilee of 1420 which brought a hundred thousand pilgrims to Canterbury, the corporation which had charge of the preparations was able to ensure that there should be no increase in the ordinary price of provisions.

It has been commonly held, however, that the old trade laws were not only invented to protect the people’s food, but to protect wages and profits as well; and they have been denounced as the outcome of an ignorant selfishness; and as proving the belief of the mediæval burghers that the industrial prosperity of the whole community could only be assured by their securing so complete a monopoly of the entire trade of the borough that they might themselves reap all the fruit of their enterprise and gather wealth undisturbed – a belief to which modern democracies (with one great exception) still cling, though they throw a grander air over their creed now-a-days by discussing protection in continents instead of protection in a little market town. But it seems likely that protection in the modern sense had scarcely anything to say to the great mass of mediæval legislation about trade. No doubt it was the natural ideal of every craft to have the State for its nursing-mother; but the voice of the crafts was lost in the monotonous reiteration by the general public of their dominant principle, that manufactures and commerce only existed for the benefit of the whole community – the “poor commons of the realm,” to use the phrase of that day. It was for their protection that no unlicensed or unregulated trade should be allowed to exist, that there should be no fraudulent manufactures, no secret breaking down of barriers set up by Parliament for the orderly division and control of crafts, no buying and selling by forestallers, public enemies to the community and to the country, hastening by land and by water to oppress the poor;^[98] and rules devised to check a public mischief or secure a public good are no more to be classed as protective than regulations for the sale of drugs or the licensing of public houses in our own day. Such rules indeed were often as unsolicited by the trader as they were agreeable to the public, and all his cunning was exerted to elude them. Some little margin of profit was to be won beyond the city boundaries where there was freedom from the city law and from the city tolls. Therefore the London corporation complained that the butchers of London “who have bought their freedom and are sworn of the franchise, do rent their houses at Stratford and round Stratford, and never come at any summons nor bear their part in the franchise of the city; but shut out the citizens (resident butchers) in divers markets where they ought to buy their wares, so that through them no wares they can get to the great undoing of the citizens.”^[99] Bakers withdrew themselves “into the foreign” to avoid punishment for frauds.^[100] Candlemakers established themselves in the suburbs, and butchers were presented “for selling of his tallow into the country and will not sell it to a man within the town,”^[101] or for carrying tallow in sacks at night out of the city for the making up of candles; and being punished were ordered to leave candle-making to the chandlers, who on their part were commanded to keep within the boundaries. In Canterbury, where owing to the great number of ecclesiastical tenants the main burden of taxation was thrown on a part only of the population, and where doubtless taxes were correspondingly high, there came a time at last when traders of every kind, cloth-makers and brewers and bakers, carried their business outside the “liberties,” so that according to the story of the mayor and council “formerly there were divers and many habitations in which of time past were kept good and notable households, by the which many men and women were relieved and had their living and increase, being now uninhabited and greatly decayed, and some of them fall to ruin and utter destitution … and it is well understood and known that the principal cause thereof” was this wicked device of the independent dealers, by which the tradesmen in the city who had to pay “tax, tallage, and other impositions,” could not compete with those outside and “have not the sale and utterance of their bread and ale, as they in times past have had, to their great impoverishing, and manifold hurt and prejudice to the commonweal of the said city.” The suburban bakers sold their goods to “divers and many simple and evil disposed persons of the city as well to Scots, Irish, and other, which in no wise will apply themselves to any labour or other lawful occupations, but only they live upon sale and huckstry of the said bread, beer, and ale, and for that they have resorting unto them many vagabonds … whereby many well disposed persons be greatly annoyed and grieved.”^[102] To restore trade to its primitive simplicity a law was passed with clauses against the mercenary Scotch and Irish, the troublers of the city’s peace, and dealers were forbidden to sell their provisions “to no inhabitant within the said city, but only to such persons as shall be thought by the mayor and aldermen of good disposition and conversation.”^[103]

The prejudice against unregulated trade was no doubt reinforced by the hostility of the town dealer to competitors who throve at his expense on illegal profits; but it was probably the governing body of the town which maintained the most serious opposition to all traffic that depended on the cheating of the common treasury of the borough.^[104] For no trifling part of the town revenue came, as we see from the Nottingham records, from fines paid yearly by non-freemen for the privilege of holding a stall in street or market. In Canterbury “Tollerati” paid for the right of buying and selling during a limited period, and at the end of the time renewed the right by a fresh payment of what was called “Tolleration money”;^[105] alien traders living without the liberties, there known as “intrantes,” took in Romney the name of “extravagantes.” Some towns shewed a jealousy of strangers, dictated no doubt by special circumstances; as in Preston, where the “Foreign Burgesses,” as distinguished from the “Inn Burgesses,” were drawn from the country gentry and squires and some inhabitants of the town,^[106] and were merely freed from toll^[107] for any goods bought for the use of their families, but were allowed no other profits of trade, and even though they were inhabitants had no right of common on marsh or moor, nor could they join in the election of any town officer nor be themselves elected;^[108] while even with these restrictions no trader who lived outside the walls was admitted among them,^[109] and it was only in course of time that alien dealers were gradually allowed on payment of a fine to set up stalls in the market-place and carry on their business under the name of “stallingers.” In general, however, an open purse was all that was needed to commend a stranger; and if the charge on it was sometimes excessive it seems to have been enforced mainly as a means of persuasion to enter the Merchant Guild.

But for whatever reason the regulation of trade was thought desirable, whether to protect the consumer’s pocket or to fill the town treasury, it certainly was not intended to keep buyers and sellers at home, to hamper their enterprise, or to abolish competition. If protection and monopoly were allowed to look big, they were never allowed to get seriously in the way of business. In theory and sometimes in fact iron chains might be flung across the King’s highway, bars thrown athwart the river, and custom house officers set at the gate to levy toll and stallage.^[110] But gates and bars and chains swung open everywhere before the trader “if he have the penny ready to take to;” the guilds enlarged their rolls for foreigners,^[111] the towns granted them their privileges liberally. Since a man could hold citizenship in more than one borough a speculator or merchant doing business in a large way might always circumvent the rules against foreign dealers by being made citizen in some convenient trading centre as well as in his own town,^[112] and so obtain power to carry on the business proper to an alien speculator with all the privileges of a resident burgher. Every pedantic hindrance, indeed, was removed out of the way of his enterprise, for a very slight study of town records disposes of the idea that mediæval trade was ultimately governed by the formal laws of statute books. Monopoly was broken through whenever it was advisable or convenient for special occasions. Bakers and victuallers who rose to municipal offices turned the assize of bread and the inspection of cooking houses and fish stalls into an idle tale. In the hands of merchants the laws of buying and selling were manipulated so as to interfere neither with the free circulation of goods nor with the instinct of the dealer to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest; and it was still left possible to carry food where it was most needed, whether to supply a manufacturing centre such as Norwich or a city which was rapidly doubling its population like London.^[113] If the law ordained that the forestaller was to be heavily fined for the first offence; for the second to lose his merchandise and be put in the pillory; and for the third to be deprived of the freedom of the city, the law was simply ignored, or some trifling fine was inflicted – a paltry sum which a prosperous trader might easily disregard.^[114] In fact it would almost seem that the actual result of the trade laws was mainly to give the rich wholesale merchant an additional advantage over the poor trader. Forestalling and regrating became the fashionable privilege of town councillors and magnates who through their position and their wealth found it doubly easy to evade local ordinances, of London merchants who were buying all over the country to supply the needs of the growing city, and of dealers on a large scale interested in the export trade; while the terrors of the law served as an effective deterrent to struggling hawkers and chapmen against meddling with the profits won by more exalted speculators from a customary if illegal traffic.