Commercialization and Urbanization in Medieval England

Through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, England’s economy underwent rapid commercialization, driven both by landowners (royal, seigniorial, and ecclesiastical), who established numerous markets and towns, and the peasants and town dwellers who made use of them and engaged in increasingly specialized production (Britnell, Reference Britnell1996). Development was uneven; there is regional variation in the rate of urbanization and the relative proportions of towns and rural markets, for example (Laughton & Dyer, Reference Laughton and Dyer1999; Jervis & Morton, Reference Jervis and Mortonin press). Small towns have occupied a central role in narratives of commercialization, being specialized centres of making and trading, closely embedded within their rural, agrarian, context (e.g. Hilton, Reference Hilton1985). A range of sources, including pottery distributions and historical records, have been used to reconstruct urban hinterlands (e.g. Dyer, Reference Dyer1996, Reference Dyer2003: 105–09; Galloway, Reference Galloway, Dyer and Giles2005), with the concept of hierarchy implicit to these discussions. Regional urban hierarchies, based on population, economic complexity, and taxable wealth have been developed for many areas of England (e.g. Slater, Reference Slater1985; Postles, Reference Postles1987; Laughton et al., Reference Laughton, Jones and Dyer2002). Inherent to the idea of hierarchy is the notion that ‘bigger is better’; economic development is dominated by larger towns, with London at the apex, and regional centres such as Chester and York being dominant forces, whose hinterlands overlap with the local market areas of smaller towns. Such an approach masks the social and economic complexity of small towns and potentially over-emphasizes the role of the demand from larger towns in driving commercialization (Britnell, Reference Britnell and Galloway2000). Recent studies (Jervis, Reference Jervis2025a, Reference Jervis2025b) argue that hierarchical frameworks reinforce a false dichotomy between urban and rural, being a barrier to understanding the wider consequences of small-town life (Dyer, Reference Dyer2002). Instead, they develop approaches that consider urbanization as a transformative process which extends beyond towns and is characterized by diversity. Here, I draw questions of scale and difference into focus by revealing and interrogating ways in which commercial relationships relate to the specific developmental trajectories of towns and their regions, and how these small-scale interactions form part of urbanization and commercialization as variegated processes.

From an archaeological perspective, commercialization can be seen in the distribution of a range of objects, including pottery (e.g. Mellor, Reference Mellor1994; Spoerry, Reference Spoerry2016; Mepham, Reference Mepham2018). Pottery distributions facilitate reconstruction of regional economic networks, showing how pottery moved through a range of mechanisms within and beyond the market (e.g. Jope, Reference Jope, Foster and Alcock1963; Moorhouse, Reference Moorhouse1983). Pioneering analyses by Vince (Reference Vince1983) and Streeten (Reference Streeten1985), for example, have reconstructed in detail the dynamics of both ceramic production and exchange in parts of England; however, the locally specific character of pottery has inhibited larger scale analysis. A common approach has been to attempt to discern an urban ‘signature’ by comparing urban and rural assemblages. Repeatedly, such analyses have shown that, whilst some urban households had particularly diverse assemblages (e.g. Brown, Reference Brown1997), such a signature is not clearly evident. While urbanization stimulated innovation in pottery production (Jervis, Reference Jervis2025c), urban and rural assemblages are broadly comparable, although with subtle differences in the relative quantities of some vessel forms (e.g. Hayfield, Reference Hayfield1988; Mellor, Reference Mellor, Dyer and Giles2005; Jervis, Reference Jervis2012; Mepham, Reference Mepham2018), a pattern reflected in other forms of material culture (Egan, Reference Egan, Dyer and Giles2005).

This study advances these long-standing debates by using network analysis to reveal patterns in ceramic exchange networks. Network analysis is a means of understanding the flow of resources between active communities, drawing out relations between archaeologically observable phenomena (Brughmans, Reference Brughmans2013: 633). Such an analysis provides an empirical basis to advance the study of the twin processes of urbanization and commercialization, which is not framed by a concept of hierarchy but by an understanding of connectivity.

Defining Ceramic Networks

The ability to link pottery to specific production areas, as well as its ubiquity in archaeological contexts, makes it an ideal material for network analysis. This study is based on an analysis of a pottery exchange network for the period spanning c. AD 1250–1400 in much of southern and midland England. This is a broad period, in which there was substantial demographic, economic, and political change. Such a date range is necessary due to the imprecise nature of ceramic dating, a particular challenge when working at scale. The start date of AD 1250 is associated with the diversification of ceramic assemblages, particularly the increasing prevalence of glazed jugs (Figure 1; Table 1); the end date corresponds with a widespread transition towards later medieval industries characterized by highly fired and plainer wares such as the Late Medieval Reduced Wares typical of the southern Midlands (Slowikowski, Reference Slowikowski2011).

Figure 1. Example of some types of ceramic vessels referred to in the text. A: London-type Ware jug (BM 1899.0508.4; height: 325 mm). B: Lyveden/Stanion Ware jug (BM OX.10269; height: 260 mm). C: Surrey Whiteware jug (BM 1865.0701.1575; height: 260 mm). D: Brill-type Ware jug (BM 1965.1006.4; height: 420 mm). © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Table 1. Summary of key pottery types referred to in the text.

East Anglia and the counties of Dorset and Cornwall, as well as northern England, have been excluded for lack of suitably quantified and documented assemblages and inconsistent use of terminology. The network analysed is based on data collated from reports on pottery excavated from 736 sites in 265 towns in southern and midland England (the reports’ full bibliographic references are not cited here but can be found in the dataset available at http://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.28264694). This dataset includes the node (a list of the towns and production regions) and edge (a list of the relations between nodes), tables, a list of sites included in the analysis, and a list of the pottery types included and their date ranges. Further methodological description is also available in the Supplementary Material accompanying this article.

Due to variability in reporting, the network is based on a weighted presence/absence approach, whereby pottery types are defined as a major (a weighting of 1) or minor (a weighting of 0.5) component of assemblages. Because most medieval pottery from this region cannot be confidently assigned to a known workshop, ware types were grouped into broad production regions, which, along with the towns, form the nodes in the network, with the pottery being the edges linking the two. Data were imported to Gephi, a widely used open source package with the capability to visualize and undertake basic analysis of complex networks for interrogation.

This analysis resulted in the production of a network graph (Figure 2) representing the links between production regions and towns. Where these links are major types, the join (edge) is represented in red, and where the link is minor, it is represented in blue. Small towns are represented as pink dots and larger ones as blue dots, with the size being a representation of the number of production regions supplying the town. Production regions are represented by black dots. The data were also imported into ArcGIS Pro for representation as a heat map (Figure 3). Here, towns are mapped to represent the diversity of their ceramic assemblages based on the number of production regions present, with the darker areas of the heat map depicting those parts of the study area with the most diverse ceramic assemblages.

Figure 2. Network graph showing the ceramic links between production regions (red dots) and towns (black dots) in southern and midland England. The dot size relates to the number of connections. Red lines: major types. Blue lines: minor types. Key places referred to in the text are labelled. See Figure S1 in the Supplementary Material for a large-scale labelled version.

Figure 3. Heatmap showing the density of connections in the ceramic exchange network in relation to main roads, navigable rivers, and key places referred to in the text. Rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019) and roads from Oksanen and Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024).

A network based on pottery distributions is only ever a partial representation of economic relationships, both because our understanding of pottery is always incomplete and because pottery could move independently of other commodities. Nonetheless, this mapping reveals some broad patterns. Particularly diverse ceramic assemblages occur in the Severn Valley in western England, the Thames Valley to the west of London, and the Fenland of eastern England. The Severn facilitated the northward movement of products from the Bristol area and the southward movement of products from Worcestershire, with assemblages supplemented by pottery brought overland from Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. Thames Valley assemblages are typified by products from Surrey and the London region, alongside local wares, while pottery from Fenland towns was sourced from a wide area of eastern England.

In other areas, assemblages are less diverse. Across south-eastern England, they are typified by a limited range of local products with topographic features appearing to have formed boundaries to the movement of ceramics. For example, a group of towns following the chalk ridge of the North Downs in Surrey and Kent are characterized by products from the Kent/Surrey border. The Chilterns, a band of hills running north-west of London, and the Cotswolds, a hilly area covering eastern Gloucestershire and western Oxfordshire, also acted as barriers to the movement of pottery; for example, the core distribution of greywares produced in Hertfordshire and Middlesex does not extend west of the Chilterns, although assemblages from towns such as Dunstable, on main routes running through this upland area, include some wares from beyond the immediate region (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 4. Top: Location of places mentioned in the text in relation to key roads and rivers. Bottom: historical counties of England. Image created by using OS Boundary data, rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019) and roads from Oksanen and Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024).

Recent work (e.g. Sindbæk, Reference Sindbæk2007, Reference Sindbæk and Knappett2013; Hodder and Mol Reference Hodder and Mol2016; Knutson, Reference Knutson2021; Palsson, Reference Palsson2021) has brought formal network approaches into dialogue with relational theory such as Deleuze and Guattari’s (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1984, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) assemblage thought. In simple terms, an assemblage is a collection of diverse entities, their critical characteristic being that the relations between those entities are productive. If we take a network to be a representation of relationships, then it is what Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987: 11–13) term a ‘tracing’. Tracing does not generate something new but is a process of replication. To view a network diagram as a representation of some singular past reality overlooks the productive capacities of relations. We might make simple inferences about the extent of a town’s hinterland, but in doing so neglect how ceramic networks might be entangled with and shaped by other relations (Jervis, Reference Jervis2025a, Reference Jervis2025c). The alternative is to ‘map’ relations, whereby we seek to understand the new possibilities generated through interaction. This contrast can be illustrated through the network presented here. Whilst, in broad terms, larger towns have more diverse assemblages than smaller ones, several large towns have extremely homogenous assemblages. Salisbury, for example, was a major religious and commercial centre, but its ceramic assemblage is mostly limited to very local products from workshops established to serve the urban market. Salisbury’s regional importance is demonstrated by the distribution of the wares produced at Laverstock on the outskirts of the city, which are a defining feature of assemblages between the valleys of the Hampshire Avon and Test (Mepham, Reference Mepham2018). Tracing this pottery distribution would illustrate that Salisbury commanded a large hinterland, but mapping these relations demands we consider why this pattern developed here but not around other large towns such as Exeter (see below), and its consequences for the situated forms of urbanization and commercialization which could emerge.

Palsson (Reference Palsson2021) demonstrates the productive potential of bringing network and assemblage approaches into dialogue, building on the fact that both networks and assemblages are inherently spatial, multi-scalar, and dynamic. Both approaches challenge the spatially delimited and hierarchical approaches which have characterized the study of medieval towns and their hinterlands. My analysis therefore examines the ceramic relations encapsulated in the network not as representative of an economic whole but as constitutive of an emergent economic patchwork.

Pottery Networks and Urban Assemblages

The pottery assemblage from Henley-on-Thames (Oxfordshire), which marked the navigable limit of the Thames, provides a starting point. Tracing Henley’s pottery assemblage reveals the movement of pottery up the Thames from London, with small quantities of London-type Wares and larger quantities of Surrey Whitewares, both common in London, present. London-type Ware is found further upstream at Reading (Berkshire) and Abingdon (Oxfordshire), as well as in towns such as Dunstable and Wycombe on key overland routes into London, but did not penetrate other overland markets, whereas Surrey Whitewares have a wider distribution (Figure 5; see Pearce & Vince, Reference Pearce and Vince1988). Most of the other pottery comprises local products, some possibly from a documented thirteenth–fourteenth-century workshop in Henley (Mellor, Reference Mellor1994: 200). Figure 5 shows presence/absence data for five key pottery types in the region. The distribution of Thames Valley wares can be seen to cluster around the Thames, while largely absent further north. In contrast, wares produced in the Oxford region are primarily found in the area north of the Chilterns, characterizing assemblages from places such as Thame and Bicester, and down the Thames as far as Reading. Brill-type wares, typically in the form of highly decorated jugs, are a substantial element of the Henley assemblage, and occur across this area. They were probably shipped downstream from Oxford. The Henley assemblage is thus distinct from those to the north of the Chilterns.

Figure 5. Distribution of key wares in the Henley-on-Thames region. Black: present. White: absent. Rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019).

To understand how these relations shape urban life and economy, it is helpful to see Henley as an assemblage. Assemblages are fluid compositions, formed in moments of gathering (i.e. territorialization), but always pulled apart as their components are incorporated into other assemblages (de-territorialization). Clay offers a simple example: it is incorporated into the potting assemblage, creating a relationship between pottery and wider environments. As clay is territorialized into pots, it is pulled beyond, or de-territorialized from, its environment. This relationship is transformative, commodifying clay, possibly leading to the charging of clay rents, and pulling clay and pottery into regimes of manorial administration. This illustrates how assemblages and their constituent parts are continually transformed through generative relations. To think of towns like Henley as assemblages is to understand them as dynamic coagulations of diverse parts, always expanding beyond the perceived limit of urban life (Jervis, Reference Jervis2025a).

Thinking of urbanization as an ongoing process of transformation emphasizes how urban modes of life emerge from relations rather than being a defined characteristic of towns (see also Sindbæk, Reference Sindbæk2007). Although the functions of pottery could be met by other materials (see Blake, Reference Blake1980), urban households became dependent on ceramic vessels and, by extension, distant pottery workshops and the market networks through which these vessels moved. Towns existed in a range of relations to production centres. Henley was dependent on several centres, particularly for decorated jugs, whereas other towns, such as Salisbury, were able to support a dominant local industry. Urban life’s dependence on ceramic vessels pulled pottery beyond towns, de-territorializing it to generate and sustain landscapes of pottery production which were, in turn re-territorialized, i.e. reincorporated into the urban assemblage, generating further dependencies. Sets of relations created and exacerbated difference, and caused urban lifeways to spill beyond the spatial limits of the towns themselves.

The inability to define a specifically ‘urban’ ceramic signature demonstrates how pottery from urban excavations does not reflect a singular ‘urban culture’. Rather, urban ways of living emerged situationally through the relations which we can map from our materials; there is no single form of urban life. We can understand it as what Deleuze terms a ‘virtual’ capacity of relations. For Deleuze (Reference Deleuze1994: 208–12), reality exists as ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’. The ‘actual’ comprises those things which are perceptible at any given moment, whereas the ‘virtual’ comprises the capacities of things made actual through intensive relations. The example of clay illustrates this: the ‘actual’ characteristics of clay are its geological composition that gives it plasticity. The clay has ‘virtual’ capacities to be made into a pot and fired, or to be commodified through clay rents. These capacities are real but only become ‘actual’ once the clay is incorporated into intensive, generative, relations, which, in turn, may give rise to new capacities; once filled with hot liquid, the pot has the capacity to scald, but this is not a capacity exhibited by an empty pot. These virtual capacities are, therefore ‘immanent, emergent and changing’ (Harris, Reference Harris2021: 54); they are a process of becoming.

This takes us from tracing urban lifeways through the occurrence of distinctive material culture signatures, to asking what the role of pottery was in the emergence of contextually situated urbanization processes. Henley’s pottery demonstrates the significance of river traffic. Along with other towns such as High Wycombe (Buckinghamshire) and St Albans (Hertfordshire), it played an important role in London’s grain supply (Galloway & Murphy, Reference Galloway and Murphy1991: 6–7). Several London merchants held property there, including granaries where grain from an area stretching from north-east Oxfordshire to the Oxford region could be stored. The grain market drew Henley into London’s metropolitan assemblage, with the sustained interests of London cornmongers amplifying this process over time, creating an urban form of life unique to Henley but resonating with similar processes elsewhere (Jervis, Reference Jervis2024). London area ceramics formed part of this process, a material articulation of a bi-directional trading relationship along the Thames, through which Henley developed contextually specific capacities for urban and economic becoming.

Grain was brought to Henley overland across the Chilterns, often carried by manorial tenants who were obligated to undertake carrying service (Postles, Reference Postles1987: 19–20). It is therefore significant that Henley’s pottery is distinctive from that found north of the Chilterns, indicating how flows of pottery and grain were independent of each other. The grain trade drew a wide hinterland into an urban assemblage, which was transformative in the way it shaped the actions of demesne (manorial farm) managers and, by extension, rural labour and agrarian landscapes, as the repeated provisioning of the market served to exacerbate and sustain difference. Pottery reveals a different set of connections, through which Henley’s presence was transformative as it, along with other towns in the region, stimulated and sustained local pottery industries.

This discussion illustrates how material relations led to a distinctive mode of emergent urban life in Henley, which, through material linkages such as pottery and grain, resonated with, was shaped by, and shaped urbanized life elsewhere. Through these relations we can perceive the actualization of regional economic capacities for specialized production and bulk exchange, which took place in dialogue with this ongoing urbanization process, one process working to transform, yet sustain, the other.

Virtuality and the Medieval Economy

Market development was central to the commercialization of medieval England. Places like Henley-on-Thames often lie at an intermediate level within a commercial hierarchy, below large towns such as London and Oxford, but above smaller rural markets and fairs (e.g. Postles, Reference Postles1987). This hierarchical ordering emerges from a tracing of commodities and wealth through an exchange network shaped by a mixture of local, regional, and international demand. Understanding these commodities as transformative elements of urban assemblages enables us to perceive relations between towns differently, as a ‘meshwork’, defined as ‘an interlocking system of complementary economic functions’ (DeLanda, Reference DeLanda2000: 32–33). Whilst a hierarchy is a relatively rigid system of categorization, in which the importance and complexity of places are closely related, in a meshwork it is the relations between commercial sites that matter. Rather than asking how big a town’s hinterland is, or seeking to insert a town into a hierarchical scheme, this approach questions the implications of the flows of goods as generative components of urban life.

Seeing urban lifeways as a virtual capacity of relations, rather than existing before those relations, emphasizes urban diversity. It also allows us to rethink the relationship between towns, commodities, and the broader concept of economy, whereby ‘the economic’ is a virtual component of every social system (Deleuze, Reference Deleuze1994: 186; Roffe, Reference Roffe, Braidotti and Bignall2019: 28). There are clear resonances between this statement and the substantivist approach defined by Polanyi (Reference Polanyi1944), in which ‘formal’ economic laws based on a notion of rationality are considered inappropriate for the study of ‘pre-capitalist’ economies. The approach proposed here is different, as reading economic change as emerging through generative flows means that trajectories of development are unpredictable and cannot be distilled into a simplistic capitalist/pre-capitalist dichotomy. Deleuze and Guattari’s (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1984) writing challenges capitalist hegemony by imagining the potential for other forms of life; society has the capacity for economy to be made actual in a variety of ways. As argued elsewhere (Jervis, Reference Jervis2025c), this perspective chimes with Brenner’s (Reference Brenner1982) argument that capitalism need not be the inevitable outcome of ‘feudalism’. Medieval urban and rural societies were not monolithic, and it follows that different developmental trajectories could emerge from relations which we might broadly recognize as ‘economic’.

This invites us to perceive the medieval economy not as a single ‘thing’, but as relationally constituted at multiple scales, with change articulated through relations from which we can piece together a larger whole. Rather than representing economic trends, flows of commodities encapsulate the relations from which these trends emerged. As an example, we can look at the area around Exeter (Devon) in south-western England, a highly connected node within the network. Exeter’s pottery was mostly sourced from the immediate area, in east Devon and Somerset, but with smaller quantities coming from south, west, and north Devon, as well as more distant locations (Allan, Reference Allan, Rippon and Holbrook2021). Exeter exemplifies what might be expected of a large and commercially important city, with a diverse assemblage dominated by material from its immediate hinterland but with evidence of far-reaching connections. Whilst the urban market stimulated local production, understanding the occurrence of the minor wares here requires us to examine the relationship between ceramics and other flows constitutive of urban life in south-western England.

Figure 6 shows the distribution of three main pottery types in Devon. North Devon Wares occur as a major ware in towns in northern Devon such as Bideford, Barnstaple, and Great Torrington, but are found only occasionally as a minor type further south, accounting for less than one per cent of Exeter’s pottery (Allan, Reference Allan, Rippon and Holbrook2021: 490–92). The distribution of Exeter Area Wares is centred on Exeter, but it occurs as a major type in towns across southern Devon, whilst the distribution of South Devon Wares is largely limited to the south-west of the county, occurring as a minor type in Exeter.

Figure 6. Distribution of key wares in the Exeter region. Large black: present as major type. Small black: present as minor type. White: absent. Rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019) and roads from Oksanen and Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024).

Tracing flows of pottery reveals diversity in the composition of assemblages, but we can go further by mapping the relationship between pottery and other flows, to understand how ‘the economic’ surfaces as a capacity of urbanized life in this region. Devon has a diverse landscape and economy, with livestock rearing being a particular feature of upland areas in the north and west, and crop growing dominant in the south and east (Kowaleski, Reference Kowaleski1995: 10–17). The primary commodity from northern Devon imported to Exeter was livestock, with Crediton, to the north of Exeter, being a particularly important livestock market (Kowaleski, Reference Kowaleski1995: 294). Crediton’s ceramic assemblage is significant because North Devon Wares account for around forty per cent of the material, the remainder largely coming from eastern Devon and the Exeter area. Analysis of the credit relationships of Exeter merchants suggests that their commercial links were primarily with eastern and, to a lesser extent, southern Devon. The towns in north Devon were linked to Bristol (Kowaleski, Reference Kowaleski1995: 69). Pottery was seemingly not traded directly between Exeter and northern Devon, although small quantities were acquired at intermediary markets such as Crediton as a by-product of the livestock trade, or found their way to Exeter through other means, perhaps as the personal possessions of migrants from northern Devon.

Fish was the main commodity linking Exeter and the towns in south Devon. In the early fourteenth century, most local fish imports into Exeter came from east Devon but the ports of south Devon became increasingly important (Kowaleski, Reference Kowaleski2000). Exeter was a major port for the redistribution of other southern Devon products, including roofing slates and tin. It is through these coastal and riverine links that we can envisage the bi-directional movement of pottery on the back of other trade between eastern and southern Devon. By the late fourteenth century, this coastal trade accounted for seventy per cent of the shipping through Exeter, and small-town merchants acted as middlemen for the redistribution of a range of commodities, probably including pottery (Kowaleski, Reference Kowaleski1995: 225–30).

The network of ceramic exchange was thus an assemblage, entangled with flows of other resources, reflected in the contrasting directionality of pottery supply. In isolation, the ceramic evidence suggests that the towns in southern Devon are more connected than those in northern Devon, but once these flows are mapped rather than traced, their intersections with other flows of materials interrogated, we find this not to be the case; these towns are connected, but differently. Whilst Exeter can be placed at the peak of a regional commercial hierarchy, the evidence from the small towns hints at a meshwork; flows relate to the emergence of forms of urban life with distinctive relational dependencies. Whereas a hierarchical approach would seek to identify similarities in the volume and character of commercial activity, a meshwork approach reveals difference, showing how the nodal role of towns led to the emergence of distinctive material worlds.

Pottery distributions are not reflections of a singular regional economy which can be traced, but residues of a patchwork of intensive relations that constitute that economy. From this standpoint, the commercialization of England was not a single process; it emerged through localized intensities which, following DeLanda (Reference DeLanda2016: 19; see also Crellin, Reference Crellin2020: 173–75), can be understood as a ‘phase transition’ whereby numerous small-scale changes eventually accrue to form a perceptible transformation.

Assemblages and Productively Partial Analysis

Our understanding of the medieval economy can only ever be partial. Whilst tracing this evidence leads to an approximation of a thing we define as ‘the economy’, mapping builds an understanding that is productively partial. Rather than seeking to reconstruct a singular totality, we accept the fact that our evidence provides a fragmentary picture with the potential to be related to other strands, revealing other economic processes.

The concept of ‘meshwork’ as encapsulating the economic role of towns within regions can be further explored through examples from eastern England (Figure 2). The small towns around the Fen edge are among the most connected within the ceramic network. This area is linked to the coast by the rivers Nene and Great Ouse, with Ermine Street continuing in existence as a key north–south overland route. Whilst the high degree of connectivity demonstrated by ceramics can be linked to this infrastructure, closer analysis reveals diversity in the composition of assemblages, from which we can infer differentiated capacities for urbanization that intersected with economic processes in specific ways. Two towns, St Ives and Huntingdon (both now in Cambridgeshire), form a basis for analysis (Figure 7).

Figure 7. Places supplying pottery to Huntingdon and St Ives. Rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019) and roads from Oksanen and Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024).

St Ives was the site of an important fair and is located at the effective navigable head of the Great Ouse, with mills restricting shipping upstream to Huntingdon (Masschaele, Reference Masschaele1997: 216). It functioned as a gathering point for grain to be shipped from King’s Lynn (Masschaele, Reference Masschaele1997: 220–21). The pottery assemblage from St Ives reflects its position on the navigable stretch of the river, with wares from Norfolk (Grimston Ware) and Ely being common, although probable Huntingdon products also occur.

In contrast, the assemblage from Huntingdon, the most connected small town in the network, is orientated towards the west. Although Huntingdonshire Fen Edge Sandy Ware produced in the town (Spoerry, Reference Spoerry2016: 66) is dominant, the primary glazed ware here is Lyvden/Stanion Ware from Northamptonshire, brought to Huntingdon overland. Masschaele (Reference Masschaele1997: 210–11) demonstrates that in this landscape a fully-laden cart could cover distances of up to 25 km in a day, making major regional towns such as Bedford, Cambridge, Ely, and Northampton accessible to Huntingdon traders. Bourne wares, produced in south Lincolnshire, could have been shipped downriver to Yaxley, the navigable head of the Nene (Masschaele, Reference Masschaele1997: 190), before being transhipped overland in small quantities (Figure 2). Other wares were also likely to have been brought overland, from Essex, Surrey, and Hertfordshire. The pottery suggests that the lack of regular shipping beyond St Ives contributed to the limited importance of Ely and Norfolk wares here, reflecting Masschaele’s (Reference Masschaele1997: 191) conclusion that it was roads, rather than rivers, that offered the more viable transport option in this region.

The ceramic evidence from St Ives and Huntingdon shows how the economic capacities of urban assemblages are determined relationally, in this case highlighting the importance of communication links. The evidence from Huntingdon is complex; on the one hand, the town adheres to a typical picture where pottery was primarily sourced from a local industry, and its role as a regional hub is demonstrated by the wide distribution of this pottery (Spoerry, Reference Spoerry2016: 66–67). On the other hand, the small quantities of pottery from a diverse range of locations point to Huntingdon’s connectivity, although all of these types are relatively minor components of the assemblage. Huntingdon was a step in the transport of grain surplus to east coast markets, but St Ives was the key town for its onward shipment (Masschaele, Reference Masschaele1997: 216). In topographic and ceramic terms, both St Ives and Huntingdon are highly connected, but, despite their proximity, this connectivity was different; St Ives was a point of redistribution orientated towards coastal markets and Huntingdon was a nodal point in overland trade networks.

Using the ceramic exchange network as a starting point allows us to map the connectivity of these places, to understand how towns that appear to have similar degrees of connectivity might see this emerge and be sustained by different types of commercial relationships. At places such as St Ives, Huntingdon, and Henley-on-Thames, the outward trade in agrarian produce shaped ceramic assemblages, with material present from the places to which grain was exported. However, the supply of grain existed in different types of relation to ceramics in each town. At Henley, where grain was largely carted from demesnes across Oxfordshire, the Thames was key to pottery supply. At Huntingdon, a nodal point in regional road networks and connected to a range of inland markets, the supply of agrarian produce and ceramics is more tightly integrated, reflected in the diversity of pottery sources and perhaps related to the role of Huntingdon merchants as middlemen in overland trade. At St Ives, inland links, as demonstrated by pottery at least, are largely limited to Huntingdon, from where grain was transhipped to be exchanged down the Great Ouse, with the St Ives fair primarily functioning in the exchange of imports traded into the east coast ports (Carus-Wilson, Reference Carus-Wilson1962: 195). This contrast illustrates that flows of goods as depicted in a network graph are not reflective of an economic system but, rather, represent the residues of the generative relations through which ‘the economic’ surfaces. Rather than thinking of the economy as a coherent whole, we can understand it as a patchwork, whereby individual patches have implications for the form that the wider whole might take, and in which the texture and effect of relations can be widely differentiated. Rather than asking what the medieval economy was and how it changed, this approach investigates how the relations that constitute the economy generated difference.

Understanding the relationship between pottery, urban modes of life, and economic emergence can be further explored through contrasting assemblages from two adjacent areas: the inner Midlands (Northamptonshire, west Oxfordshire, and north Buckinghamshire) to the west and Essex to the south. Towns in the inner Midlands stand out as having fairly diverse assemblages, sourcing pottery from multiple regional centres, as illustrated in Figure 8b, which depicts flows of pottery to urban and rural sites in the region. At the region’s heart is Northampton, where wares from across the Midlands and the London region have been recovered (e.g. Brown, Reference Brown2021). This is a landscape characterized by nucleated villages and open fields. It has a high density of village markets, which played a key role in regional exchange networks (Reed, Reference Reed1978; Goodfellow, Reference Goodfellow1987; Laughton & Dyer, Reference Laughton and Dyer1999: 332). Reed (Reference Reed1978) draws attention to the close association between markets in northern Buckinghamshire and overland routes, contrasting this with the area south of the Chilterns where the market network appears more insular, as indicated by ceramic assemblages. This was a region of intensive arable production, with pottery manufacture well attested in the peripheral forested areas with abundant supplies of wood and clay, for example at Potterspury, Brill, and in Rockingham Forest (Mellor, Reference Mellor1994; Foard, Reference Foard2001).

Figure 8. A) Location of places and key pottery production centres in the inner Midlands. Rivers derived from Oksanen (Reference Oksanen2019) and roads from Oksanen & Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024). B) Network graph showing the relationship between production centres and settlements in the inner Midlands: orange dots: towns; yellow dots: production centres; green dots: rural sites.

Within this landscape, small village markets played an important role in the exchange of the products of rural industries and small quantities of agricultural surplus. Ceramic assemblages are typically dominated by the most local products, but supplemented by smaller quantities of wares that may have been acquired through occasional use of larger markets or from itinerant chapmen (pedlars). For example, the assemblage from Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire) is dominated by products from Brill to the west, Milton Keynes to the north, and Hertfordshire to the east, whilst at Olney (Buckinghamshire) wares from the kilns at Olney Hyde and Potterspury (Northamptonshire) dominate, but with small quantities of material from elsewhere. This model of dynamic regional exchange is supported by the fact that, despite their diversity, there is nothing particularly distinctive about these urban ceramic assemblages; the large rural assemblages from the region (Mynard & Zeepvat, Reference Mynard and Zeepvat1991; Zeepvat et al., Reference Zeepvat, Roberts and King1994; Ivens et al., Reference Ivens, Busby and Shepherd1995; Audouy & Chapman, Reference Audouy and Chapman2009; Chapman, Reference Chapman2010), show a fairly decentralized market network between the core agricultural landscape and the industries at its periphery. The rich agricultural landscape of this area, coupled with a relatively high population density and strong communication routes, all combined to create a situation where connectivity is a regional characteristic, reflected in this loose relationship between town and country.

A contrast can be drawn with areas of south-eastern England, where the settlement pattern is more dispersed (Wrathmell & Roberts, Reference Wrathmell and Roberts2003: 105–08). An example is Essex, where pottery assemblages show a considerable lack of diversity (Figure 9). Hedingham-type finewares, produced at several centres in north Essex, were exchanged northwards into East Anglia and southern Essex, but Hedingham-type coarsewares have a more limited distribution. Walker (Reference Walker2012: 111–16) highlights the significance of key roads in the distribution of this pottery. In Colchester, the largest town in Essex, most pottery came from within four miles, in marked contrast to the diverse assemblage from Northampton (Cotter, Reference Cotter2000: 354). Hedingham Ware was probably distributed along with the carting of wool from East Anglia to London, whereby pottery could be picked up on the return journey (Walker, Reference Walker2012). A similar mechanism may account for the movement out of the town of Colchester of pottery produced there. Colchester was primarily a local market that did not have a substantial hinterland. Poor soil quality made it reliant on the Colne Valley and coastal areas; the grain trade largely looked beyond the county, and only limited quantities were sent to London and to the east coast market (Britnell, Reference Britnell1986: 47). In contrast to assemblages in the north and east, where Hedingham and Colchester types dominate, those in the south-west are characterized by wares from Harlow and Mill Green.

Figure 9. Composition of ceramic assemblages from Essex. Roads from Oksanen and Brooks (Reference Oksanen and Brooks2024).

In this area of dispersed settlement in south-eastern England, urbanization and the economy emerged differently than in the inner Midlands. As in the Midlands, towns were generally small, playing a distinctive role as waypoints in the overland distribution of wool and livestock towards London (Britnell, Reference Britnell1981). The contrasting characteristics of these two regions, however, had implications for the supply of pottery. In Essex, the grain supply was relatively limited. This was through local markets, but, compared to the examples of Henley-on-Thames, Huntingdon, and St Ives, there was relatively little potential for the bulk disposal of large quantities of surplus to cornmongers, creating a much closer relationship between producers and local markets. Pottery is likely to have moved on the back of the trade in wool and dairy produce. In the Midlands, grain was abundant, with rural and small-town households typically able to grow sufficient quantities for their own subsistence, selling the surplus locally. The network of small markets across this region facilitated the exchange of non-agrarian products, including pottery, from beyond the core of the agricultural landscape, with the abundance of agricultural surplus, high population density, and links to larger towns, themselves regional redistribution hubs, creating a regional exchange network. These examples illustrate how capacities for difference emerge at the intersections between urbanization and the wider networks of which pottery was a part. Understanding this relationality allows us to perceive economic difference, addressing the way that economy exists as a differential virtual capacity of living in and with particular landscapes, rather than being an overarching system reflected in material evidence.