MARKET. Market in everyday English means a concourse of buyers and sellers—the distinctive feature, not essential to the "market" of the economist's vocabulary, being their assembly face to face. Derivatives of the Latin word mercatus are used in all the languages of western Europe in a sense practically indistinguish able from the English word, and to denote a "market place," and Russia has also adopted the word, through German. The idea of a fixed place and time for buyers and sellers to assemble is one of the earliest in the story of civilization.
Where markets are established, the need for some control arises: as Europe emerged from the dark ages, control fell naturally to the feudal lord, or to the church; often to an abbot who combined temporal and spiritual functions. So we find that Worcester had already a market in 873, belonging to the earl, who conveyed half the profits to the bishop. This con veyance was witnessed by King Alfred, and about goo we find Alfred's son granting the market of Taunton to the church. These markets are spoken of as already existing. Possibly they sprang up spontaneously; indeed, in Domesday Book there is evidence of a number of markets which existed before the Conquest. So in other countries, Baldwin of Flanders had founded, or chartered, markets at Bruges, Courtrai, and other towns before 96o, and Theodoric the Ostrogoth is said so early as 493 to have done the same in Italy on the collapse of the Roman empire.
After the Norman Conquest new markets were sometimes established by the new proprietors, but William I. early enacted that they should be held in "strong places" only, where they could be properly regulated. By the 12th or 13th century, it was settled throughout western Europe that the right to hold a market was a franchise, parallel with the right of holding land. As the holding of land normally involved military or other obligations, and the enforcement of justice, as well as a right to profit, so a franchise of market imposed on the one hand the obligation to maintain the market free from disorder, open and accessible, and on the other the privilege of taking cer tain profits. While the owner of land or of a franchise was en
titled to its profits, these latter were not, in theory of the feudal law, unlimited ; they might be limited in the instrument creating the franchise, and, if they were not, an attempt to levy charges which were unreasonable in fact might lead to forfeiture, as might any failure in carrying out the correlative duty of the franchise owner—in case of a market, maintaining the market in a proper state. This original conception of a market franchise, as imposing obligations equally with rights, is of a significance in modern times which should not be overlooked. If the continuity of Eng lish history has made it easier to demonstrate in England than elsewhere the origin and nature of a lawful market, it will be found on examination that its history on the Continent is not fundamentally dissimilar. Detailed examination of the history of Flemish or Italian cities reveals their markets, first in the hands of feudal overlords and then of the city government, while the sud den and violent changes of the French Revolution merely brought under popular control an institution which had existed from the dark ages.
A lawful market may thus have come into existence (I) by royal charter under the common law, by prescription from time immemorial, which raises a legal presump tion that a charter was originally granted, or (2) by statute, gen eral or private. At the present day the overwhelming majority of markets are in the hands of local authorities, proceeding under statutory powers—though many of these markets originated in a charter granted by the king to the lord of the manor or other feudal landowner, whose rights, acquired by the local authorities, are exercised with and merged in the wider rights conferred by modern statutes. Any town council may proceed under the statutes cited, with the consent of two-thirds of its members, an urban district council with the consent of a meeting of owners of property and ratepayers, and a rural district council with the con sent of the minister of health—provided always that, in establish ing a new market, the rights of one already in existence are not infringed.