In a quiet country town like Stratford the weekly market was an occasion of some interest to the boys as to their elders. There is still such a market on Fridays at Stratford, when wares of many sorts are exposed for sale in the streets, and people from the neighboring villages come to buy. In old times there would have been a greater throng of buyers and sellers. "The housewife from her little farm would ride in gallantly between her paniers laden with butter, eggs, chickens, and capons. The farmer would stand by his pitched corn, and, as Harrison complains, if the poor man handled the sample with the intent to purchase his humble bushel, the man of many sacks would declare that it was sold. There, before shops were many and their stocks extensive, would come the dealers from Birmingham and Coventry, with wares for use and wares for show,—horse-gear and women-gear, Sheffield whittles, and rings with posies."
We find a number of allusions to these markets in Shakespeare's plays. In Love's Labour's Lost (v. 2. 318) Biron, ridiculing Boyet, says of him:—
"He is art's pedler, and retails his wares
At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs."
In the same play (iii. 1. 111) there is an allusion to the old proverb, "Three women and a goose make a market," where Costard, referring to Moth's nonsense about "the fox, the ape, and the humble-bee," followed by the goose that made up four, says, "And he [the goose] ended the market."
In As You Like It (iii. 2. 104) Touchstone, making fun of Orlando's verses which Rosalind has just read, says: "I'll rhyme you so eight years together, dinners and suppers and sleeping-hours excepted: it is the right butter-women's rank to market"; that is, the metre is just like the jog-trot of countrywomen riding to market one after another, with their butter and eggs.
In Richard III. (i. 1. 160) Gloster, after saying that he means to "marry Warwick's youngest daughter," adds:—
"But yet I run before my horse to market:
Clarence still breathes, Edward still lives and reigns;
When they are gone, then must I count my gains."