Market town
In
medieval law, a
market town is a
town that has the right to hold
markets. Market towns are opposed to
villages, which are typically smaller and do not have this right, and to
cities, which are typically larger and often have additional rights.
In
Britain, even up to the
19th century, the majority of people lived off the land, and relatively few in towns. Market towns were an important feature of rural life, as some place names remind us:
Market Drayton,
Market Harborough,
Chipping Norton and
Chipping Sodbury —
chipping being derived from a
Saxon word, meaning
to buy.
Market towns often grew up close to fortified places, such as castles, in order to enjoy their protection. They tended to be located where transport was easiest: for example, at a crossroads or close to a river ford.
The most obvious feature of the traditional market town is a very wide main street or market place, with room for stalls and booths to be set up on market days. A
market cross often stood in the centre of the town, as a way of obtaining God's blessing on the trade. The best remaining examples of market crosses in
England are at
Chichester and
Malmesbury. There would often be a market hall, with administrative quarters at first floor level, above the covered market.
Colchester claims to be
Britain's oldest recorded market town.
The right to hold markets is similarly recollected in the names of many towns in
Germany and
Austria which have the prefix
Markt, for example
Markt Berolzheim and
Marktl am Inn. Other terms used for market towns were
Flecken or
Marktflecken.
The status of market towns (
Marktgemeinde) still has some legal significance in
Bavaria,
Austria, and
South Tyrol.
In
Norway the medieval market town (
Norwegian kjøpstad from the
old Norse kaupstaðr) is a Norwegian town which had been granted commerce privileges by the king or other authorities. The citizens in the town had a
monopoly over the purchase and sale of wares and operation of other businesses, both in the town and in the surrounding district.
Market towns were first created in Norway in the 12th century to encourage businesses to be concentrated around specific towns.
Import and
export was to be conducted only through market towns to allow oversight on commerce and to simplify imposition of
excise taxes and
customs duties. It served to encourage growth in areas which had strategic significance, providing a local economic base for construction of
fortifications and population for defense of the area. It also served to restrict
Hanseatic League merchants from trading in areas other than those designated.
Norway included a subordinate category to the market town, the "lading place" (
Norwegian lossested or
ladested), which was a port or harbor with a monopoly to import and export goods and materials in both the port and for a surrounding outlying district. Typically these were locations for exporting timber and importing grain and goods. Local farm goods and timber sales were all required to pass through merchants at either a lading place or a market town prior to export. This incentivized local merchants to assure trading went through them, which was so effective in limiting unsupervised sales (
smuggling) that customs revenues increased from <30% of the total tax revenues in 1600 to >50% of the total taxes by 1700.
Norwegian "market towns" died out and were replaced by free markets in the 1800s. After
1952 both the "lading place" and the "market town" have simple town status.
* in
Swedish:
köping* in
Finnish:
kauppala* in
Romanian:
târg* in
Croatian:
trgovišćeA Revolution from Above; The Power State of 16th and 17th Century Scandinavia; Editor: Leon Jesperson; Odense University Press; Denmark; 2000
