ABSTRACT

Trade had played a vital part in the economy for centuries, and any depiction of Tudor England as a land of subsistence farming without a cash economy is a wild caricature. Scarcely any farmers can have lived entirely off their own produce, even if some of their dealings were conducted in barter, tokens or mutual credit rather than coin. Agricultural produce had to be exchanged between countryfolk as well as to feed townsmen. Urban and rural industries and crafts needed markets by definition; townsmen and craftsmen could not mutually absorb all their own products, just as they could not feed themselves. Naturally the degree to which men and women participated in a market or cash economy varied with their wealth and their access to markets. A poor hill-farmer living away from main roads and navigable rivers might be nearly self-sufficient; a rich townsman or gentleman in the Home Counties or near the coast was likely to enjoy a wide range of native and overseas luxuries. Yet the surviving

inventory of James Backhouse, a shopkeeper of Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland (1578), is a warning against glib generalisations. His stock - which included Spanish silk and French garters, Norwich lace and Oxford gloves, Turkey purses, groceries and stationery - 'would not have disgraced a York or Exeter or perhaps even a London shopkeeper'.2