In markets, sellers set up booths for their wares. They sold grain for making oatmeal or for sowing one's own ground. Wine, butter, cheese, fish, chicken, and candles could also be bought. Butchers bought killed sheep, lambs, calves, and pigs to cut up for selling. Tanned leather was sold to girdle-makers and shoemakers. Goods bought in markets were presumed not to be stolen, so that a purchaser could not be dispossessed of goods bought unless he had knowledge that they were stolen.
The ruling group of the towns came to be composed mostly of merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, and physicians. Some townswomen were independent traders. The governed class contained small master craftsmen and journeyman artisans, small traders, and dependent servants. The major streets of London were paved with stone, with a channel in the middle. More water conduits from hills, heaths, and springs were built to provide the citizens of London with more water.
The idea of competition appeared. Each man sought to be richer than his neighbors.
The cloth, mining, iron, and woodcraft industries employed full-time workers on wages.
Land held in common was partitioned. There were leases of mansion houses, smaller dwelling houses, houses with a wharf having a crane, houses with a timber yard, houses with a garden, houses with a shed, shops, warehouses, cellars, and stables. Land with a dye-house or a brew-house were devised by will along with their dying or brewing implements. There were dairies making butter and cheese.
The knights had 70% of the land, the nobles 10%, the church 10%, and the King 5%.
Citizens paid taxes to the King amounting to one tenth of their annual income from land or wages. The national government was much centralized and had full- time workers on wages. A national commission of sewers continually surveyed walls, ditches, banks, gutters, sewers, ponds, bridges, rivers, streams, mills, locks, trenches, fish-breeding ponds, and flood-gates. When low places were threatened with flooding, it hired laborers, bought timber, and hired carts with horses or oxen for necessary work. Mayors of cities repaired water conduits and pipes under the ground in their cities.
The organ and harp, precursor to the piano, were played.
All people generally had enough food because of the commercialization of agriculture. Also, roads were good enough for the transport of foodstuffs thereon. Four-wheeled waggons were in general use as well as two-wheeled carts. They were used for carrying people as well as goods. Goods were also transported by the pulling of barges on the rivers from paths along the river. A plough with wheels was used as well as those without.
The matchlock musket came into use, but did not replace the bow because rainy weather made it unusable.