ABSTRACT
WE must now follow the Elizabethan surveyors, whom we left in the fields of Maids Moreton, into the market-places of two
small country towns. By the reign of Elizabeth several hundred towns, large and small, possessed charters and ranked as boroughs. Only a few were the result of a deliberate act of plantation such as that of Hedon described in the previous chapter; the majority had followed the normal progress which led small villages to grow into large ones, and then to seek the economic and legal privileges which carried them over the border between the large village and the small town.1 Two such promoted villages were Higham Ferrers and Toddington, selected here because each was surveyed by well-known Elizabethan surveyors, the one by John Norden, the other by Ralph Agas. In the numbered key which went along with Norden's plan of Higham the first place was given not to the castle, church or college, but to the market-place; in Agas' plan of Toddington the medieval castle was no more than a curious mound in a field to the east of the town; the lord ofthe manor had built himself a new mansion out in the heath, well to the west of the town, and the central position in the plan is taken up again by a market-place. Although some other features of town plans will be touched upon in this chapter, the market-place will stand at its centre as it did in the daily life of the Elizabethan town.
