Market

Although statutory markets are now the rule, when most mar kets belong to local authorities, the prerogative right of granting a royal charter for a market still exists and is still occasionally used. It is useful where a new market is required to meet a new demand, and a landowner or company is willing to meet the necessary expenditure but the local authority is not. The land owner or company, instead of following the costly and dilatory method of promoting a private act of parliament, may seek a charter, the procedure for granting which is of great constitutional interest. The application is made to the home secretary, as the constitutional channel for communications between the Crown and subject (see article GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS : Home Office). The home secretary consults the attorney general, who directs an inquiry as to whether the grant, if made, would infringe an existing market, and, if the answer is in the negative, the home secretary passes the application to the Crown office from which the actual grant is issued.

In countries whose constitutional development has followed other lines, the establishment of markets is a simpler process than in England. Thus in France any commune is entitled to set up a market with the consent of the conseil-general of the departement, provided (as in England) that no existing market is infringed. In Germany and Austria the matter is one for the police authority; in Italy for the prefect.

Ownership of Markets.

Markets may be classified, not only according to the method of their establishment, but according to their ownership. In early days they were normally in private hands—for the good reason that the lord of the manor, the abbot, or other feudal landowner was in most places responsible for public order. Where a strong municipality existed, an exception might be made, but, speaking generally, municipal control of English markets was not usually found until the 19th century— notwithstanding that Covent Garden, granted to the duke of Bed ford in 167o and sharing with Smithfield and Billingsgate the fame of being the best known of all English markets, is still in private hands.

Markets may be further classified as wholesale and retail, and according to the commodities which are bought and sold. Some are for cattle (and to these special sanitary restrictions apply in England as in France and other countries) : others are for vege tables and fruit : others again for general merchandise. In a primitive community, as soon as the stage of having a market has been reached, the exchange of most commodities is likely to take place there. With the incalculable increase in the bulk of

property under industrial conditions, with the opening of shops and stores, with grading, sampling and warranties, with facilities for sale by telephone, and generally with the changes which go to make up material civilization, much less proportionately of the business done will be done in markets. The question then arises, how far markets fulfil a useful function, and fulfil it adequately, in the modern world. The answer is that they still play a part in price determination, and that where—as still occurs in old fashioned English markets and still more upon the Continent— producers meet consumers face to face their produce finds its way into consumption in a fresh condition and the benefit of any temporary surplus is more likely to be passed on to the public than where middlemen intervene. It is proverbial that markets are patronized in continental countries, for these reasons, by the ordinary householder who makes little use of them in England. Obviously in a wholesale market dealings are by middlemen, but these, though in a different way, assist the same function of price determination.

Market Courts.—We have seen that, in feudal legal theory, a market owner was required, as an obligation co-relative to his right of taking profit from the market, to maintain public order in the market. This he did by a court of "piepoudre." The name is said either to be derived from "pied poudreux," the mediaeval Latin "pede-pulverosus," meaning a pedlar or itinerant trader, or to denote that the court was essentially one of summary jurisdiction. Whatever the exact derivation, it fits well with the fact that the court sat only during the market or fair, under the presidency of the lord or his steward, often with a jury of market traders, and disposed then and there of disputes on contracts, prices and other civil issues, as well as of innumerable complaints about unsound provisions, sanitary offences, false measures, assaults, pilfering and general disorder. The court usually asserted a right to try all cases arising in the market except felonies and claims to land, but sometimes (as at Chester and Cardiff) a felony was not excluded. In these privileged markets not merely the usual pillory and tumbril, but also the gallows was available. The court of piepoudre died throughout Europe with other feudal juris dictions, and the matters with which it dealt now fall to be dealt with (if at all) by the police and by ordinary legal process.