I. The Legal Status of Markets

Extract

In his study of Les Droits des Marchés et des Foires, M. Huvelin discusses the question whether markets owed their origin to grants made by the king, direct or through authority delegated to a lord, or to grants made by a lord and confirmed by the king. His decision that they were entirely of royal origin would have met with the approval of Edward I, whose attorneys during the Quo Waranto inquest constantly asserted that, “to no one in the realm is it permitted to have a market without the licence and goodwill of the lord king or his predecessors.” In the delegated regality of the Palatinate of Durham it had been definitely stated in 1228 that, “no one has toll save the Bishop, because no one has market or fair in the Haliwarifolc save he alone.” Yet it is legitimate to wonder how this particular apple got into the royal dumpling. The majority of the regalia are obviously such by nature; but there are some about which we feel that, while we hear much of baronial usurpations from the king, we might well hear something of royal encroachments upon domanial rights. If a market is regarded simply as a regularly recurrent assembly for the sale of local products, it is surely a matter that concerns the local community or its lord rather than the king. A phrase in the so-called “Laws of William the Conqueror”—“There shall not be any market or fair save in cities of our realm and in boroughs enclosed by a wall and in castles and very safe places, where the customs of our realm and our common right and the royalties of our crown … may not be defrauded”—sounds more like an attempt to bring an existing, independent market system under the control of the Crown than the assertion of an acknowledged regality; and it may be noted that a previous attempt, made by Athelstan in 925, to confine markets to towns had had to be abandoned.