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EH.NET BOOK REVIEW 
 
Published by EH.NET (April 1998) 
 
James Masschaele, _Peasants, Merchants, and Markets: Inland Trade 
in Medieval England, 1150-1350_.  New York: St Martin's Press, 1997. 
xii + 275 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-312-16035-6. 
 
Reviewed for EH.Net by Gregory Clark, Department of Economics, University 
of California, Davis.  <[log in to unmask]> 
 
          Medieval Commerce: Too Much of a Good Thing 
 
     You have got to feel sorry for our colleagues in medieval economic 
history.  This bright and energetic group - Richard Britnell, Bruce 
Campbell, Christopher Dyer, Derek Keene, Maryanne Kowaleski, John Langdon, 
Mavis Mate, Larry Poos, Ambrose Raftis, to name just a few - are model 
scholars.  To practice their craft they master Latin and paleography, they 
learn the subtleties of the documents, they spend the time in the archives. 
And the archives themselves are glorious: a mine of economic information 
so much richer than even what we find for eighteenth century England.  But 
what reward do they get for all this effort and all this erudition?  The 
more we learn about medieval England, the more careful and reflective the 
scholarship gets, the more prosaic does medieval economic life seem.  The 
story of the medieval economy in some ways seems to be that there is no 
story. 
 
     Back in the bad old days, when the scholarship was less careful, the 
medieval economy was mysterious and exciting.  Marxists, neo-Malthusians, 
Chayanovians, and other exotics debated vigorously their pet theories of a 
pre-capitalist economic world in a wild speculative romp.  But little by 
little, as the archives have been systematically explored, and the 
hypotheses subject to more rigorous examination, medieval economic 
historians have been retreating from their exotic Eden back to a mundane 
world alarmingly like our own. 
 
     This book, by James Masschaele, a historian at Rutgers University, is 
a nice piece of scholarship which constitutes a few more steps in this long 
retreat from paradise.  His book is really a collection of essays exploring 
various aspects of the English medieval market before the Black Death.  In 
successive chapters, through skilled and convincing use of tax records and 
other sources Masschaele shows that the medieval economy was thoroughly 
permeated by markets and market activities. 
 
     Thus the occupants of medieval towns engaged in a wide variety of 
specialized commodity production, of which the main were victualling, 
leather making, textiles, clothing, vending, metal working, and building. 
Those in towns were all engaged in the market.  Some peasants were able to 
produce a substantial surplus of grain and animal products which must 
normally have been sold on the market.  Many peasants were thus also in the 
market.  Much, and perhaps even most, of the great cash crop of medieval 
England, wool, was produced on peasant holdings and not on the lay and 
clerical estates. 
 
     Those with the right to hold markets defended that right vigorously 
and tried to limit competition.  But the English courts generally 
interpreted this right as excluding only other markets held on the same 
day within 6.7 miles.  Thus in the East Midland counties of Northampton 
and Bedford we see even before 1250 many markets within 6.7 miles 
of their neighbors.  Indeed it seems from the map given in the book that 
the average location in these counties would about 5 miles from a market 
by 1250.  By 1690 I know from other sources that the average distance 
to market in these counties had shrunk to 3.3 miles.  But this seems a 
very modest gain in the prevalence of markets over these years.  If the 
monopoly right to hold a market exercised much restriction on the medieval 
economy, then markets should have generated significant incomes for 
their owners through market tolls. In fact toll rates were generally seldom 
more than 1% of the value of goods traded, and there were many who 
were by one custom or another exempted from toll.  Thus goods 
bought for household consumption typically did not pay toll.  Similarly 
small goods such as apples, or butter in earthen pots, produced by 
peasant households were also apparently often exempt. 
 
     Towns similarly seem to display an expected urban hierarchy, with a 
few major trade and manufacturing centers and a large array of smaller 
places with very little evidence of commercial or manufacturing activity. 
Using records of disputes over toll payments and toll exemptions 
Masschaele shows that there were significant trade relations between towns 
that could be quite distant from each other.  Thus, for example,  in 1315 
the town of Sandwich seized the almonds, figs and raisins of a 
merchant refusing to pay toll, where the merchant was from London, 
63 miles away. 
 
     Using again records of toll disputes Masschaele is also able to get 
some information about the marketing activities of rural producers.  By the 
early thirteenth century English kings, as pious acts, had granted 
exemption  from toll in all markets to most major ecclesiastical 
corporations.  This exemption was held to apply to their manorial tenants 
also.  The  exemption was meant to apply to rural produce sold by the 
tenants to meet  their rent payments to the houses.  Tenants on the royal 
demesne had by custom a similar privilege.  Tenants of both types, 
however, seem to have availed themselves of the exemption to further 
general trade activities.  Thus even in the fourteenth century many court 
cases appear where rural tenants of religious orders or of the king are 
alleged to be buying goods  with intent to resell, or selling goods 
they had bought. 
 
     In one of the later chapter Masschaele documents carrying costs by 
land and water per ton-mile in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire between 
1305 and 1346.  These costs suggest, for example, that if wheat was 
transported by water is would cost about 1.4% of its final value per 
additional ten miles carried.  These costs seem relatively modest. 
 
     The concluding chapter begins with the statement, "By the end of the 
thirteenth century, England had developed a sophisticated commercial 
economy that embraced all levels of society" (p. 227).  There is no doubt 
that this statement is well supported by the evidence of the book.  But if 
medieval England was just a low-tech version of Kansas, why would anyone be 
interested in its economy?  The early economy had, I believe, some very 
interesting features.  But focused as this tradition is on the existence 
and extent of the market, I fear that further excellent scholarship such as 
this can only provide more compelling evidence of the utter dullness of the 
medieval economy.  For this erudition to be more interestingly employed, at 
least as far as economic historians are concerned, it needs to be directed 
at a richer set of issues than just the existence of the market. 
 
Gregory Clark 
Department of Economics 
University of California- Davis 
 
 
Among Gregory Clark's recent publications are "The Political Foundations of 
Modern Economic Growth: England, 1540-1800," _Journal of Interdisciplinary 
History_, 26 (Spring, 1996), "Commons Sense: Common Property Rights, 
Efficiency, and Institutional Change," _Journal of Economic History_, 58 
(March, 1998) and "Land Hunger: Land as a Commodity and as a Status Good in 
England, 1500-1914," _Explorations in Economic History_, 35 (1), (Jan., 
1998). 
 
 
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