Market Towns That Failed: What Became of the Medieval Market Places of England and Wales

Between the Norman Conquest and 1516 the English Crown licensed markets on a remarkable scale, each grant a bet that a place would grow into a town. I parse the Online Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516 into derived variables for 2,411 places, 2,590 markets and 2,936 fairs and follow each of the 2,173 placed market places to today using OS Open Names and Census 2021 built-up areas. The Gazetteer records 1,879 royal market grants; 88% fall between 1200 and 1348, with a peak of 254 in the 1250s, and grants collapse after the Black Death. Today 665 market places (31%) are towns or cities, 144 have been absorbed by larger towns, 1,168 (54%) are villages and 196 are hamlets or have gone from the map. Success fell steeply with the date of the first grant: 54% of markets held by custom are towns today, against 11% of places first granted a market in 1300 to 1348. In a logistic regression, borough status (odds ratio 3.6), a mint, a fair, a major river and a Roman road all raise the odds of being a town today, while a market already on record within Bracton's six and two-thirds miles roughly halves them (0.54). Of the market towns listed by Everitt for about 1600, 74% are towns today, against 8% of the other medieval market places. The places that became towns were mostly those already central before the charter boom. Markets and fairs data derived from Samantha Letters, Online Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516 (Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research), which is copyright; only derived variables are included. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/medieval-markets/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/medieval-markets. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/medieval-markets/.