Market Day

A medieval market was a legal privilege, not an activity. Somebody had to grant it, it excluded competitors within a set distance, and it produced rent for whoever held it.

That is why the towns of Powys are where they are. Every one of them holds a charter granted by a Marcher lord, a Welsh prince or the crown, and the shape of the street plan follows from the grant.

The charters

Montgomery in 1227, from Henry III, alongside the new stone castle. Llanfyllin in 1293, granted by a Welsh lord rather than an English one, which is unusual. Machynlleth in 1291. Welshpool, Knighton, New Radnor, Builth and Hay all took their status from the same process.

The privilege mattered because it was exclusive. A market at one town suppressed trading at neighbouring settlements within a radius, which is why the market towns of Powys are spaced roughly a day's return journey apart on foot with a beast.

The shape it made

A wide street or a rectangular space. Machynlleth's Maengwyn Street is essentially one enormous linear market place with buildings hung off it. Presteigne and Montgomery have the same logic in different forms.

Infill. Where you find an island of buildings in the middle of a wide street, those are permanent stalls that became permanent shops, usually in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Once you know to look for it you see it in half the towns in the county.

The market hall. Llanidloes has the last surviving half-timbered market hall in Wales, standing on open oak arches at the crossroads so that trading could continue underneath while the town's business was done in the room above. It dates from around 1600 and it is the single best building in Powys for understanding how a market town worked.

The fairs

Distinct from markets. A fair was annual or twice-yearly, ran for several days, drew people from a much wider area, and dealt in livestock rather than groceries.

Fair dates are recorded in every trade directory and they are worth reading, because they are the calendar the rural year actually ran on. Stock was sold, rents were paid, debts were settled, servants were hired and a good deal of drinking was done.

Hiring fairs are the ones that have most nearly vanished from memory. Farm servants — ploughmen, carters, dairymaids — stood in the street at Michaelmas or May to be looked over and engaged for the year, sometimes wearing a token of their trade. It was a labour market conducted in public, and it persisted in parts of Wales into the twentieth century.

What survives

Welshpool holds what is regularly described as the largest sheep market in Europe. On sale days the town fills with lorries and the entire agricultural economy of half of mid Wales is visible in one field.

Llanidloes, Sennybridge, Builth, Rhayader and Knighton all still hold livestock sales. The trade has consolidated onto fewer, larger sites, as everything else has.

The Royal Welsh

The modern descendant of the fair is at Llanelwedd across the river from Builth Wells, where the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society bought a permanent site in 1963.

For four days each July it holds something in the order of 200,000 visits, which makes it the largest agricultural show in Europe. There is a winter fair and a spring festival as well.

It performs exactly the functions a medieval fair did — trading, judging stock, settling business, meeting people you see once a year — at a scale that would have been unimaginable to anyone who obtained a charter.

What to look for

Wide streets and triangular open spaces at road junctions. Infill blocks in the middle of them. Market halls, market crosses and the stumps of crosses. Names: Market Street, Broad Street, Beast Market, Horse Fair. And the dates of the fairs, listed in any nineteenth-century directory for every town in the county.