Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade in Medieval England, 1150-1350 (review)

Historians’ understanding of the role of towns and trade in medieval society has changed dramatically in the last few years. The medieval town was once regarded as, in Bloch’s phrase, “a foreign body in feudal society.” ¹ Inhabited by merchants catering to the consumption needs of the ruling groups in church and state and prospering from long-distance trade in luxury goods, towns were surrounded by a countryside inhabited by a commercially inert peasantry. Subsistence farmers, peasants participated in market-mediated exchange in only a minor way. Recent scholarship has revised this picture. Masschaele’s excellent work exemplifies a new way of looking at towns and trade in medieval society from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century.

Masschaele makes three major contributions. The first is a careful description of the way in which English towns and their markets were tightly integrated with their agrarian hinterlands. Through the analysis of lists of urban occupations and tax returns, Masschaele demonstrates that the economy of the typical English town was dominated by the processing of raw materials obtained from the countryside. The primary sectors of the urban economy involved the provision and processing of food stuffs for the urban population, the production of textiles, and the processing of leather and hides. In Masschaele’s opinion, these activities accounted for one-half to two-thirds of urban economic activity. As he puts it, “the growth and prosperity of most towns went hand in hand with the development of commercial links with the countryside” (17).

Masschaele’s second contribution is to underline the deep involvement of English peasants in commodity production. For Masschaele, the true agrarian entrepreneurs of medieval England were the upper levels of the peasantry. Although the gentry sold agricultural goods into urban markets, Masschaele estimates that the total amount of market-bound goods produced by peasants vastly outnumbered that produced by the gentry. In Masschaele’s account, the English countryside was not populated with a largely subsistence peasantry, living in a “moral economy,” and only marginally engaged in the market, but with large numbers of bustling peasant entrepreneurs carefully judging market conditions, loading up their packhorses and wagons, and setting off down the roads and over the bridges of an elaborate inland communications network to town in search of profit.

The book’s third major contribution is an interesting case study of the market network of Huntingdonshire. Drawing on central-place theory, Masschaele discusses how rural markets and peasant villages were linked together into a regional marketing network focused on the larger towns. The efficiency with which such a market network could function is elegantly outlined in Masschaele’s description of how the sheriffs of Huntingdonshire, when called on to provide huge amounts of provisions for the king’s armies in the early fourteenth century, were able to do so in a remarkably speedy manner, using existing market structures to amass and store large amounts of produce, and ultimately moving it out of the county along an elaborate transportation infrastructure of roads, bridges, and rivers.

In addition to the fruits of his own research, Masschaele pulls together much existing scholarship to produce a picture of a pre-plague England that was far more economically active and market-oriented than many historians have believed.