ABSTRACT
Early forms of organisation persisted. Stourbridge Fair at Cambridge was still a national event, and the traders who assembled there once a year dealt in goods of all kinds. Most of the other fairs, however, had come to specialise in the staple products of the region in which they were held. Such, for example, was so of those held at Norwich for cattle, Northampton for horses, Weyhill and Burford (in Dorset) for sheep, Worcester for hops, Yarmouth for fish, Colchester for oysters, and Ipswich for butter and cheese. But, as population thickened and means of communication improved, weekly markets, at several hundred towns in England and Wales, took over much of the trade that had previously been done at the fairs. These markets tended to specialise increasingly in agricultural or semimanufactured products. There were markets for grain at Maidstone, Ipswich, Lynn, York, Ormskirk, Gloucester, and Devizes, and for wool at Cirencester, Leicester, and Lincoln. Yarn and cloth were disposed of at markets in many towns of East Anglia, Yorkshire, and the south-west-often on stalls in the streets, but later in the solid, and sometimes gracious, cloth halls that were ~uilt at places like
64 An Colchester, Ipswich, Witney, Wakefield, Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield.
