MARKETS AND CUSTOM

 

1. Market as Pphysical Place or as Metaphor

 

2. Market as Physical Space

• How were goods bought and sold?
• Fairs, pedlars, retail shops

 

3. Fairs & Pedlars

• c. 3,200 fairs in England Wales in 1756
• the major international fairs were great international events of the early modern and eighteenth-century world
• major national fairs brought tog. wide range of traders
• most districts had a general purpose annual fair - also acted as labour market
• also network of weekly markets with royal charters - 1693 - 680 active markets in Eng. & Wales - 728 in 1792
• pedlars and hawkers - were innovative, aggressive and pushing salesmen and women - sold the full range of fashion goods

 

4. Shops

• evolution of shops
• numbers & types of shops in the eighteenth century
• numbers of shops
• excise records 1759
• ratio of population to shops for England and Wales – 43.3 – survey in 1785 showed an average of 54.8 persons per shop
• there were 32,234 with licences to sell tea

 

5. The market and custom

• manorial custom
• manorial custom defined common rights and copyhold privileges for landholders
• custom and common rights
• enforcement of custom in local manorial courts
• custom over gleaning, game taking, tenant rights of widows etc.
• the custom of the trades
• Tudor and Stuart wage legislation - had been set up to contain claims for high wages in period of inflation
• nforce of notion of customary minimum wage in times of decaying trade
• the custom of markets
• Any market, now or in the past, exists within the framework of an institutional structure of laws, practices and administration.
• in the early modern period there was a legislation and administration for overseeing of markets
• fears of profiteering middlemen raising prices

 

6. Markets and Middlemen

 

7. Grain markets and food

• forestallers, regrators and engrossers
• laws against forestalling (buying and selling again for a profit in the same market or nearby)
• engrossing - buying large quantitites for resale - punishable by fine and imprison.
• Book of Orders 1630 empowered magistrates to survey the corn stocks in barns and granaries, to order quantities to be sent to market; to enforce with severity every part of the marketing, licensing and forestalling legislation
• no corn to be sold except in open market - did not explicitly empower justices to set the price, but ordered them to attend the market and ensure that the poor were `provided of necessary Corne' - fell into disuse during Civil War - but powerful popular memory of it & invoked in 18thC.

 

8. Food riots

• grain riots of 1766 - concentrated in rural cloth districts of Gloucestershire & Wiltshire, central Midlands and East Anglia
• central govt. felt that condemnation of middleman was counter-prod.- stressed free movement of grain

 

9. Wages and custom

• wage-fixing by magistrates fell into disuse by mid-century - re-estab. in woollen trade in 1756 then repealed - repeal of Statute of Artificers in 1815
• role of informal custom over materials which bec. an accepted part of wages - bec. changed into embezzlement in course of the 18thC.
• look at prosecutions for theft of a whole range of things - coal, beaver fur, timber, silk, sugar, pins and needles, pewter, tobacco, calico, coffee, indigo cochineal, lead type, beer, tea, planes and saws, silver and gold - defences offered were that these were perquisites -accepted as part of customary wage