ABSTRACT
Retailing was an important industry in its own right; in many towns it must have provided a major source of employment, and in the markets and shops tied up a considerable amount of fixed capital. Commercial directories require the disentangling of multiple entries, and of retailers from wholesalers, but much more serious in those compiled before the 1840s is the limited coverage given to small shopkeepers and market traders. A range of sources have been used to throw some light on the existence of retailers, including the evidence of trade tokens, lists of freemen, guild records, probate inventories; but all are inevitably fragmentary and selective, failing to match up to even the poorest of the directories. Market retailers without regular tenancies and the various sorts of hawkers are difficult to take into account in any assesement of retail facilities, and indeed, might be thought to undermine the already shaky foundations of much of the preceding analysis.
