Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 111

In this work, Samantha Letters and her team of co-researchers at the Centre for Metropolitan History have created an extremely valuable reference tool. During the past two decades, medieval social and economic historians have developed a keen interest in issues related to commercialization. Documenting the location, chronology, and uses of markets and fairs has been a major concern in this endeavour, and a number of excellent county and regional studies have appeared over the years. These have served well as building blocks for broader syntheses, but the field as a whole has long been hampered by the absence of a standard, authoritative source with coverage of all parts of the country and all medieval centuries. Letters and her team have at last solved this problem with resounding success.

The Gazetteer is structured on a simple and straightforward basis, providing entries organized by individual commercial location, arranged alphabetically within each county. A separate section is devoted to Wales, treated as a single unit. Within each entry, information is given about the earliest datable reference to the conduct of commercial activity at that particular place, the days on which the market or fair met, and the person or institution vested with authority to hold the gathering. To assist analysis of the material, most entries also provide information about the amount of tax paid in the 1334 lay subsidy, and about the survival of the venue into the sixteenth century, as determined by comparison with Alan Everitt’s list of early modern markets and William Harrison’s 1587 list of fairs. Ancillary material related to the commercial fortunes of the site is also provided in many cases, including among other things evidence from law suits over franchisal rights, manorial descents, and miscellaneous references to trade taking place at the site.

To this reviewer’s eyes, the information provided is comprehensive and reliable. Undoubtedly evidence for other markets and fairs will surface from time to time, but it is unlikely that much more will be found. In addition to its thoroughness, three features of the gazetteer deserve special comment. The first is the care taken in translating place-names from their medieval forms into their current modern forms. Anyone who has attempted this feat even on a limited scale understands how daunting such an undertaking can be. The inclusion of Ordnance Survey grid references for each entry enhances this accomplishment. The second notable feature is the provision of multiple indexes to the work, allowing it tobe searched efficiently for information about the individuals and institutions holding rights over markets and fairs, as well as about where the markets and fairs were held. The third notable feature is the level of detail provided for markets operating before the standard documentary sources are available (essentially before 1200). These early markets are notoriously difficult to date, and the compilers of the work are to be commended for their effort in dealing with this problem.

Letters and her team limited their searches to source material already in print. A work on this scale assembled with such great care would have been difficult to complete in any other way. It is, nonetheless, unfortunate that the team working on this project did not make use of the manuscript sources emanating from the royal office of the Clerk of the Market, a relatively comprehensive source of information about medieval markets and one that is reasonably accessible for research in the Public Record Office. Inclusion of such material would have greatly enriched the ancillary references furnished for many listings, and would have been particularly useful in narrowing the chronological parameters within which individual markets operated. The compilers of the work state that one of the key aims of their research was to define the active working life of each venue listed, but their decision to use the sixteenth century as their reference point fails to do justice to this important topic.

Perhaps the biggest problem confronting this volume is the limited accessibility of the series in which it appears. The List and Index Society has a venerable pedigree as a publisher of research tools for scholars, but its volumes can be difficult to obtain, particularly outside the United Kingdom. According to WorldCat, only about three dozen libraries in North America subscribe to the Society’s Special Series, and a random check of individual library catalogues reveals that even some ofthe biggest libraries do not subscribe to it. This 112 the agricultural probably reflects recent austerities in library budgets, and one can only hope for improvement in this situation, so that work of such high quality as Samantha Letters and her team have produced will find the wide audience it deserves.