If any man engage in Sunday marketing, let him forfeit the chattel, and twelve ores among the Danes, and thirty shillings among the English.
Thorpe, Ancient Laws and Institutes, 73.
Circa 1020. Charter of Canute.
We admonish that men keep Sunday's festival with all their might, and observe it from Saturday's noon to Monday's dawning; and no man be so bold that he either go to market or seek any court on that holy day.
Stubbs, Select Charters, 76.
N.B.—These latter enactments were chiefly distinguished by their breach, for throughout the middle ages English markets were frequently held on Sunday. They were probably abortive attempts on the part of pious legislators to end a custom which seemed to them ungodly.
EFFECT OF THE CONQUEST.
In Domesday Book there is evidence of a considerable number of markets which had existed in England under Edward the Confessor, and which usually yielded to their holders an annual profit of from 20s. to 40s., in those days large sums of money. New markets were in some cases established by the Norman lords who acquired English lands, and they tended to disorganise the market economy.
1087. The ruin of the bishop's market at St. Germans.
The bishop has a lordship called St. Germans. In that lordship, on the day on which King Edward lived and died, there was a market held on Sunday. And now it is made nothing by the market set up close at hand by the count of Mortain in his castle, on the same day.