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Market towns and the countryside in late medieval England
Canadian Journal of History, Apr 1996 by Dyer, Christopher
Figure 4 seems to represent the urban system as a network rather than a hierarchy, although the towns are clearly exercising unequal degrees of influence over the countryside. Lines go out from the market towns to two much larger cities, Coventry and Worcester, and they in turn depended on ports such as Boston and Bristol, and above all on London. Worcester's links with London had become so routine by the 1520s that the Prior of Worcester was able to buy luxuries from London through a carrier who went on a regular carting journey, probably loaded with cloth on the outward run, and returning with such commodities as spices.(22) The merchants of Coventry and Worcester supplied imported and specialized goods to the small-scale traders of the market towns. For example, in 1421 a dyer, John Essex, one of the Coventry elite, was renting a market stall at Shipston, his most likely purpose being to sell dyestuffs for use in local cloth manufacture.(23) Litigation at Alcester in 1468 reveals the activity of another Coventry dyer, Thomas Pulter. He did not occupy such a prominent position in Coventry society as John Essex, though he must still have seemed important to the traders and artisans of a small town.(24) William Dee of Alcester claimed that he had entrusted Pulter with a silk belt worth six shillings, perhaps so that it could be dyed, or as a pledge, and this rather superior garment (by Alcester standards) had not been returned. In fact Pulter won his case, but the picture of an Alcester man dependent on a Coventry trader either for a loan or specialist services would surely have seemed a plausible one to the court.(25) The superiority of Coventry in the trade of the region is readily apparent in the records of debts under Statute Merchant, which covered much larger sums than an ordinary borough court. A dyer of Bengeworth (a suburb of Evesham) was in debt to a Coventry man for L16 in 1394, and two years later a spicer from Kineton, a small market town to the east of Stratford, owed L40 to another Coventry supplier.(26)
Just as we can detect the economic subordination of the small towns to large provincial centres, so we can glimpse dependence among the market towns. The debts in the borough court of Alcester, for example, which resulted from the sale of goods to an outside customer tended to be revealed by pleas initiated by Alcester traders. If we find, however, that the action was begun by an outsider this would often indicate that goods or services had been bought by the Alcester resident. Litigation of the second type came from the larger market towns of Chipping Campden, Tewkesbury, and Winchcomb, suggesting that Alcester stood below them in the pecking order. The same relationship lies behind the activities at Shipston of ironmongers and drapers from Chipping Norton and Chipping Campden, who, like John Essex the Coventry dyer mentioned earlier, rented market stalls to supply the shoppers of Shipston with a better range of goods than the local smith or weaver could provide. They may even have been selling "wholesale" to local retailers.(27)
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