James Masschaele

The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England

Recent years have seen a spate of publications devoted to the role of markets in the medieval English economy. We now know considerably more than we did a generation ago about such matters as when and where markets were founded, the social backgrounds and spatial horizons of those who engaged in trade, the types of goods in circulation, and a host of similar issues. Indeed, research on markets has effectively transformed the field of medieval economic history, directing scholarly attention away from demography and toward commercialization as the primary explanatory model for change in the period. In spite of the evident interest in the medieval marketplace as an economic phenomenon, though, scholars have been surprisingly reluctant to explore the social implications inherent in the routine use of markets, from at least the twelfth century on, by a growing segment of the English population. This reluctance has undoubtedly been dictated by a reliance on sources-formulaic charters, prosaic accounting statements, cursory entries in court rolls-that were created primarily to record the administrative and financial interests of those who held market rights. In spite of the very real constraints of the source material, though, there is no reason to assume that the people who gathered at a market site would have been intent on conducting their business as expeditiously as possible in order to hasten their return to the grind of daily life. Such an assumption would warrant the view that medieval English markets were unlike the markets observed in all other parts of the preand nonindustrialized world, where the retailing of news and gossip and the reiteration of cultural traditions and social roles are as much a part of what happens in the market as the exchange of commodities. In traditional China, for example, William Skinner and others have argued that the influence of the marketplace was second only to that of the family in the formation and dissemination of social and cultural beliefs and behaviors.1 Historians may never be able to re-create as vividly as ethnographers the human drama inherent in market gatherings, but they need not take this as a counsel of despair. At least some of the constellation of noneconomic activities occurring in medieval marketplaces can be recovered in reasonable detail, enough to suggest that, by the thirteenth century, markets had

Book Review: The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon Coast, 1086–1550

means of production were used; what kinds of people were engaged in fishing and related activities; and to which areas did the trade in salted Baltic herring extend? Using these five central questions as the foundation for his research, the author succeeds in writing a clear synthesis of the production and trade in salted Baltic herring during the Middle Ages. We need more such books, including especially a comparable study of the pan-European wood trade in the pre-industrial period.