ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses one morphological element, the medieval marketplace, and examines its form and function comparatively in a sample of towns. Consequently, smaller market towns and later medieval new towns are severely under-represented in the corpus thus far published, hence the decision to include some smaller towns. The atlas maps are multi-period documents and it is consequently not always easy to discern medieval from early modern features of the townscape. The tiny marketplace at Caernarfon, laid out after the English castle town was developed in the 1280s, is square. The evidence from these English towns regarding churches and marketplaces cannot therefore be regarded as quite so clear-cut as A. Simms has argued for central Europe. An model for the development of urban economies sees the marketplace as initially subservient to the lord's castle with traders providing for the needs of the garrison.