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]