English Markets and Royal Administration before 1200
A REGULAR relationship between early markets and hundredal organization has sometimes been suggested, but has never been explored. Studies of hundredal administration3 have not illuminated the association between local trade and local government which students of Anglo-Saxon law were led to expect.4 The separate development of economic and legal studies has caused the original problem to recede from view, so that the relevant questions are no nearer an answer now than they were seventy years ago. Yet the extent to which private trade in the early Middle Ages was facilitated, obstructed, or regulated by the institutions of government has enough interest to merit investigation for its own sake as well as for its bearing on the development of marketing institutions in later and better-documented periods.