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ARTICLE
Toll Disputes, Grain Marketing, and Economic
Culture in England, c. 1550–1800
Hillary Taylor
Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Email: hat27@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
Tolls were not only fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but
also had the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable role
in contemporary economic affairs. Yet, tolls and toll disputes have received little atten-
tion in studies of market regulation and have also been neglected in studies of the politics
of grain supply and marketing. This article revives tolls as an object of enquiry and sug-
gests that they occupied an ambiguous position within early modern English economic
culture. Tolls raised complex questions about how self-interest operated in a society
that conceptualized bargaining primarily in communal terms and emphasized the social
and moral obligations that should underpin it. While this was arguably true of tolls on all
goods, it was especially true of tolls on grain –a commodity that occupied a singular
place in contemporary socio-economic relations. By examining how competing parties
in toll disputes articulated and sought to defend their interests, and how their respective
tactics changed over time, this article sheds new light on the dynamics involved in
England’s transition from one way of thinking about economic activity to another.
Tolls were ubiquitous features of early modern English markets. In their basic
form, they involved payments that market owners collected from traders in
return for the privilege to sell their goods (agricultural products, livestock,
cloth, and so forth). There were specific types of tolls within this general
framework, and some markets collected tolls on grain. While ‘toll corn’–like
other tolls –could involve monetary payments, the term typically referred
to a portion of grain that was taken from the total amount that sellers brought
to market. Whether tolls were collected in money or in kind, they constituted a
form of rent-seeking, in which market owners extracted revenue by dint of
their proprietorial control over the space in which bargaining occurred.
1
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
1
Chris Briggs, ‘Peasants, lords and commerce: market regulation at Balsham, Cambridgeshire, in
the early fourteenth century’, in Maryanne Kowaleski, John Langdon, and Phillip R. Schofield, eds.,
The Historical Journal (2023), 1–20
doi:10.1017/S0018246X23000407
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000407 Published online by Cambridge University Press
After tolls were taken, they were directed towards various private or public
ends, depending on the market in question and which entity had the right
to its proceeds –manorial lords (or their representatives), urban corporations,
or individuals who leased tolls from market owners. Where toll revenue was
used to subsidize the costs involved in operating markets and maintaining
their infrastructure, traders also stood to benefit –albeit indirectly –from pay-
ing them.
Although tolls had been collected in medieval markets, the stakes changed
over the course of the early modern period.
2
The factors that occasioned this
change operated along slightly different timelines and involved different
dynamics. From the perspective of those who were entitled to toll revenue,
some of these dynamics were more positive than others. On the one hand,
there was an increase in economic activity and the price of agricultural pro-
ducts from the second half of the sixteenth century.
3
While trade was liable
to short-term disruption –for instance, during plague outbreaks –such incon-
veniences were temporary.
4
Furthermore, over the course of the seventeenth
century, there was an increase in grain yields and a corresponding increase in
the amount of produce that ended up on the internal (and eventually external)
market. In light of these developments, tolls had the capacity to generate more
revenue, and this could be especially true of tolls that were collected in kind
rather than in money. On the other hand, there was an increase in private
marketing over the course of the period, which meant that more activity
took place outside the bounds of regulated markets. Whereas transactions in
‘open’markets were subject to tolls, those that occurred in informal markets
were not.
Against this backdrop of economic dynamism, matters were further compli-
cated by the fact that tolls were open to debate. Disputes about tolls –how
long they had been taken, how much (if anything) could be collected, who
had the right to their revenue, who was exempt from paying them by dint
of their civic or tenurial privileges, and so forth –generated a fair amount
of controversy from the second half of the sixteenth century. While some
Peasants and lords in the medieval English economy: essays in honour of Bruce M. S. Campbell (Turnhout,
2015), p. 250.
2
For medieval tolls and broader market regulation, see James Davis, Medieval market morality: life,
law and ethics in the English marketplace, 1200–1500 (Cambridge, 2012), esp. pp. 137–273. For toll dis-
putes and the legal options available to market owners, see James Masschaele, ‘Toll and trade in
medieval England’, in Lawrin Armstrong, ed., Money, markets and trade in late medieval Europe:
essay in honour of John H. A. Munro (Leiden, 2007), pp. 146–83; Barbara Singer, ‘The recovery of mar-
ket toll at common law’,Irish Jurist, 13 (1978), pp. 348–71.
3
For the growth in marketing and toll revenue in particular markets, see Craig Muldrew, The
economy of obligation: the culture of credit and social relations in early modern England (London, 1998),
pp. 15–36. For toll corn revenue, see Hillary Taylor, ‘Paternalism and the politics of “toll corn”
in early modern England’,Social History, 48 (2023), pp. 214–31.
4
For measures taken in Beverley’s market in response to the 1665 plague, see J. Dennett, ed.,
Beverley borough records, 1575–1821 (Wakefield, 1933), pp. 136–8, 58–9, 78–80. The following year,
the corporation temporarily reduced the rent on tolls due to a drop in trade. For a similar deal
in Grantham, see John B. Manterfield, ed., Borough government in Newton’s Grantham: the hall book
of Grantham, 1662–1704, II (Woodbridge, 2016), pp. 58–9.
2 Hillary Taylor
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disputes arose when market owners or lessees attempted to amend existing
tolling customs with the aim –as their detractors alleged –of increasing
their revenue, others arose when traders sought to evade paying tolls on their
own initiative. These controversies played out in a variety of ways and in a
variety of venues, depending on the market in question and the particular
constellation of entities involved in the conflict. In short, tolls were not only
fundamental to the operation of early modern English markets, but also had
the capacity to generate tensions that belied their seemingly unremarkable
role in contemporary economic affairs.
Tolls and the disputes they generated have received little scholarly atten-
tion.
5
Recent work on market regulation has noted the extent to which it
was inflected by contemporary ideas about what constituted ‘just’economic
practice and examined the measures that were in place to protect consumers
and punish traders whose activities were deemed inimical to their interests.
6
A sizeable body of work has likewise examined how the politics of grain supply
and marketing were shaped by paternalism; moral prohibitions against profit-
ing at the poor’s expense; and authorities’concerns about preventing unrest
among market-dependent consumers.
7
To varying degrees, these analyses
have all emphasized the extent to which economic activity was shaped by con-
temporary cultural commonplaces, even as the central government became
less inclined to engage in interventionist market regulation –particularly
with reference to grain –over the course of the period.
8
Market tolls and the controversies they generated offer a window into
alternative aspects of economic life in early modern England and some of the
practical and conceptual tensions it entailed. In light of the diversity of tolling
practices from one market to the next, controversies about toll corn –like the
politics of grain supply and marketing more broadly –had the potential to
create tensions and alliances between different socio-economic groups and
interests. While these were most evident during periods of dearth, they
were informed by widespread assumptions about the ethical considerations
that should inform economic activity, as well as the provisions that should
5
The most sustained accounts remain the relevant passages in Alan Everitt, ‘Marketing of agri-
cultural produce’, in Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian history of England and Wales, IV (Cambridge, 1967),
pp. 466–589; J. A. Chartres, ‘Marketing of agricultural produce’, in Joan Thirsk, ed., Agrarian history
of England and Wales, V.II (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 406–502.
6
Charlie Taverner, ‘Moral marketplaces: regulating the food markets of late Elizabethan and
early Stuart London’,Urban History, 48 (2021), pp. 608–24.
7
The literature on these issues is sizeable. For orienting discussions, see E. P. Thompson, ‘The
moral economy of the crowd in the eighteenth century’,Past & Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; John
Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’,Past & Present,
71 (1976), pp. 22–42; John Walter, ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’,in
J. Walter and R. Schofield, eds., Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society
(Cambridge, 1989), pp. 75–128; John Bohstedt, The politics of provisions: food riots, moral economy,
and market transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Farnham, 2016).
8
For government regulation of grain marketing, see R. B. Outhwaite, ‘Dearth and government
intervention in English grain markets, 1590–1700’,Economic History Review, 34 (1981), pp. 389–
406; Buchanan Sharp, Famine and scarcity in late medieval and early modern England: the regulation
of grain marketing, 1256–1631 (Cambridge, 2016).
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be in place to simultaneously insulate the poor from the difficulties occasioned
by harvest failure and minimize potential disorder. However, in contrast to
controversies that arose in other aspects of grain supply and marketing –which
had the capacity to pit market-dependent consumers and various authorities
against those farmers and grain dealers who evinced little concern for the
poor and instead conducted themselves with an eye towards their own gain –the
fault lines in toll disputes were often less clear-cut.
9
This was because tolls occupied an increasingly ambiguous position within
early modern English economic culture. They raised complex questions about
how self-interest operated in a society that conceptualized bargaining primar-
ily in communal terms and emphasized the social and moral obligations that
should underpin it. While this was arguably true of tolls on all goods, it was
especially true of tolls on grain –a commodity that occupied a singular
place in contemporary socio-economic relations. Although rhetoric about
the needs of poor consumers did feature in toll-related controversies, it was
most likely to be invoked by traders who attempted to avoid paying tolls, par-
ticularly when they were called upon to justify their actions. By examining how
competing parties in disputes about toll corn articulated and sought to defend
their interests, and how their respective tactics changed over time, this article
sheds new light on the dynamics involved in England’s extended and uneven
transition from one way of thinking about economic activity to another.
I
Tolls were part and parcel of market regulation in early modern England. By
requiring traders to operate in open markets and charging them for the privilege
of doing so, authorities ensured that bargaining occurred where it could be mon-
itored and regulated. Where grain was concerned, most regulatory measures were
designed with consumers –particularly poor consumers –in mind. Some, such as
the assize of bread, operated in normal and dearth years alike.
10
Others –such as
the 1552 Act against Regators, Forestallers and Engrossers and the subsequent
Books of Orders –weretheproductsofcrisisperiods.Althoughsuchmeasures
aimed to minimize and punish activities that had the potential to foment popular
unrest and seditious ‘grumbling’, they were also paradigmatic expressions of the
paternalism that informed the central government’s approach to market regula-
tion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
11
As was the case with tolls on other goods, a dizzying array of tolling prac-
tices operated from market to market. In some markets, toll corn was bound up
9
For the nature and (relative) persistence of these alliances across the period, see Walter and
Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order’; Thompson, ‘Moral economy’; Douglas Hay, ‘The state
and the market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’,Past & Present, 162 (1999), pp. 101–62.
10
For the assize of bread, see James Davis, ‘Baking for the common good: a reassessment of the
assize of bread in medieval England’,Economic History Review, 57 (2004), pp. 465–502.
11
For ‘grumbling’, see John Walter, ‘Public transcripts, popular agency and the politics of sub-
sistence in early modern England’, in Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, eds., Negotiating power in
early modern society: order, hierarchy and subordination in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2001),
pp. 123–48.
4 Hillary Taylor
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with civic interests, and corporations controlled the right to the revenue.
Elsewhere, lords leased toll corn to urban notables or private individuals.
12
Some lords retained their claims to toll corn, and when they embarked on cam-
paigns of fiscal seigneurialism, amendments to existing tolling practices were
among the innovations that they enacted in their drives for revenue-
maximization.
13
Other lords were content to lease out tolls on other goods
but maintained that they did ‘not intend’to surrender their interest in toll
corn.
14
Some corporations also adopted this tactic of leasing some tolls,
while retaining their right to toll corn.
15
Arrangements of this sort enabled
market owners to get a fixed income from and to delegate a portion of market
regulation to lessees, while saving the potentially more valuable toll corn for
themselves.
While toll corn provided market owners or lessees with financial benefits, it
could also be directed towards public or charitable ends. In some markets, toll
corn was sold, and the profits were put towards the upkeep of local infrastruc-
ture. Elsewhere, it enabled grain to be distributed to the poor via extra-market
channels or presented opportunities for members of the gentry to demon-
strate their paternalism.
16
In the early 1630s, the countess of Derby, who
owned the market in Uxbridge, gave the toll corn ‘to the benefit of the
poore of the town’.
17
These disbursements –according to her supporters in a
dispute with locals who attempted to appropriate the toll revenue for them-
selves –had been ‘to the great reliefe of the poore’and were an indication
of her ‘noblenesse’and largesse.
18
Toll proceeds in cash or in kind were also
distributed to the poor through more formal channels, with charitable trusts
operating in some markets.
19
Fragmentary accounts from eighteenth-century
Haselmere indicate the role that tolls could play in local economies of poor
relief: grain (wheat and rye) was distributed to ‘poor and decaying inhabitants’,
while money was paid to poor individuals and to place poor boys in
apprenticeships.
20
12
For details of the bishop of Durham’s leases in seventeenth-century Durham and Stockton, see
Durham University Library (DUL), Old University Manuscript E.I.9, fo. 35r; DUL, MSP 98, fos. 320r,
323r. For Gateshead leases, see Durham Cathedral Library, ALL 11/44.
13
Taylor, ‘Paternalism’.
14
Northamptonshire Archives, E(B) 552.
15
For select examples, see The National Archives (TNA), E134/1653/Trin2; Dennett, ed., Beverley
borough records, pp. 143, 177.
16
For the importance of access to grain via extra-market channels, see Walter, ‘Social economy
of dearth’.
17
TNA, PC 2/41/224.
18
TNA, PC 2/41/365; PC 2/41/224.
19
In 1676, an almshouse was built and financed with Haselmere’s toll revenue. See Surrey
History Centre (SHC), LM/761/5. Trustees of toll charities were sometimes accused of misappropri-
ating funds, and I plan to discuss this in a subsequent article. For allegations against trustees more
broadly, see Steve Hindle, On the parish? The micro politics of poor relief in rural England, c. 1550–1750
(Oxford, 2004), pp. 136–7.
20
SHC, LM/759/2; LM/747; LM/746. For money generated by the sale of toll corn being distrib-
uted to the poor in early eighteenth-century Northampton, see Charles Cox, ed., Records of the bor-
ough of Northampton (2 vols., Northampton, 1898), II, p. 181. For Chester’s mayor temporarily
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The collection of toll corn could become particularly sensitive during per-
iods of dearth and more widespread adversity. In at least one instance –in
Hampshire in 1649 –a crowd appropriated toll corn that they may have felt
had been unjustly siphoned off the market in the midst of harvest failure;
that members of this crowd were described as ‘idle and dissolute’suggests
that their intervention was not well received by the authorities.
21
As with
other aspects of grain supply and marketing, regional authorities engaged in
dialogue with the central government in their efforts to ensure that sufficient
amounts of grain were available to poor consumers. In 1587, the sheriff of
Cornwall wrote to the privy council about grain scarcity affecting the county
and noted that he and some justices of the peace had suggested that regional
markets temporarily suspend their collection of toll corn. This would ensure
that more grain remained in circulation and would be conducive to the relief
of the ‘poore’. (It would also have been a convenient reformation: the tolls
were ‘verie much myslyked’by grain sellers, who presumably resented surren-
dering grain that could otherwise be sold.) But the proposal was unpopular
among Cornish market owners, who persisted in collecting toll corn and, in
doing so, displayed the relative limits of the moral economy.
22
Regardless of who ultimately enjoyed the right to toll corn, in many mar-
kets it was collected by members of the labouring population who were
hired or appointed to do so. In exceptional markets, labouring toll collectors
were allowed to keep the toll corn as payment for doing additional work
such as cleaning the market streets, but more often they were paid wages
and surrendered the grain to the market owners or lessees who employed
them.
23
As low-level functionaries, toll collectors were usually the first to
encounter recalcitrant traders in the marketplace, and some decided that it
was preferable to let them evade tolls rather than risk conflict or injury by
pressing the issue.
24
A labourer who collected toll corn in late sixteenth-
century Reading described how he occasionally encountered ‘wranglinge peo-
ple’who objected to paying toll and ‘lett them passe for avoydinge of a
tumulte’.
25
One of multiple women who collected toll corn in eighteenth-
century Chester recalled how ‘for quietness’she had occasionally taken smaller
volumes of grain than the amount that was officially due.
26
For some toll
surrendering his claim to the toll corn so it could be ‘distributed among the poor’, see Ipswich
Journal, 15 Jan. 1774.
21
TNA, SP 25/94, fo. 451. See also SP 25/94, fo. 487. For the wider context, see Steve Hindle,
‘Dearth and the English Revolution: the harvest crisis of 1647–1650’,Economic History Review,61
(2008), pp. 64–98.
22
TNA, SP 12/199, fo. 70.
23
When some toll collectors, such as the trio of worsted weavers who collected toll corn in late
seventeenth-century Kidderminster, were accused of taking excessive amounts of grain, they main-
tained that they had no reason to do so because they only worked for wages and were ‘honest’. See
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24.
24
For a corporation paying an unspecified amount to a toll collector for treatment ‘for the cure
of his wounds in demanding toll’in the 1670s, see Dennett, ed., Beverley borough records, p. 156.
25
TNA, E134/12Jas1/Hil1.
26
Cheshire Archives and Local Studies (CALS), ZCL/120 c. One woman described how she inher-
ited the position from her mother and recalled that she had helped collect tolls ‘ever since she was
6 Hillary Taylor
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collectors, the enforcement of market regulations was less pressing than their
desire to avoid trouble.
II
Disputes about toll corn fell into three genres; in a given dispute, elements
from one or more of these genres could be involved. In the first, traders
accused market owners or lessees of changing existing local tolling practices
to collect more toll; this typically entailed complaints that they had increased
the size of the toll dish (Figure 1) or the proportion of grain that was collected,
sometimes during periods of dearth –presumably in an effort to capitalize on
the price fluctuations occasioned by harvest failure. In the second, sellers alleged
that market owners or lessees had introduced new tolling practices –for instance,
by attempting to collect tolls from those who were customarily exempt from
paying them or by collecting passage tolls on grain; market owners and lessees
were likewise tempted to implement such changes in the context of rising
prices. In the third, traders sought to evade paying tolls altogether –seemingly
in the absence of any controversial innovations on the part of market owners
or lessees; such evasion occurred during dearth and comparatively normal
years alike. When sellers refused to pay tolls, market owners and officials
had various options –including distraining their grain or initiating legal action
against them. While each genre of dispute had its own unique dynamics, they
all involved competing interests. For market owners and lessees, tolls were
opportunities to maintain or increase their revenue; for traders, tolls were
inconveniences that diminished their own revenue. In the various types of
documentation produced in toll disputes, market owners (or their agents),
lessees, and traders discussed their interests in different ways.
Some market owners and officials had a vested interest in regulating the
behaviour of lessees who were accused of tampering with established tolling
practices. By doing so, they demonstrated their willingness to act in support
of traders’interests and, in theory, removed any principled objections that sel-
lers may have had about operating in the open market. When a lessee in York
was accused in 1552 of ‘taking undewe and excessyve’toll in a ‘counterfayt’
dish that had not been approved by the mayor and aldermen, he was ordered
to spend three market days in ‘the cage’in the Pavement marketplace as pun-
ishment.
27
Elsewhere, those who frequented markets took their complaints to
lords. In 1771, fifty-eight inhabitants of Chesterfield petitioned the duke of
Portland to complain about the lessee’s behaviour. First, where Chesterfield’s
toll had previously been taken from those who bought grain, the lessee started
to take ‘toll for corn as soon as brought into the market whether sold or not’.
The petitioners claimed that tolls were now ‘paid for the same thing several
times over’, suggesting that both buyers and sellers were being charged.
thirteen or fourteen’. For a complaint about a toll collector’s wife taking excessive tolls in late
sixteenth-century Southampton, see David Pennington, Going to market: women, trade and social rela-
tions in early modern English towns, c. 1550–1650 (New York, NY, 2015), p. 157.
27
Angelo Raine, ed., York civic records, V (York, 1946), p. 73.
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Second, the lessee implemented a new passage toll on grain that was trans-
ported to or through Chesterfield on market and non-market days alike.
Finally, he increased the size of the toll dish; as the petitioners told it, he ‘con-
fine[d] himself to no standard’and instead collected arbitrary (and unreason-
able) amounts of grain as he thought ‘proper’.
28
An order was subsequently
issued to clarify –and reduce –the tolls in Chesterfield’s market.
29
Toll evasion was a persistent enough problem that urban authorities episod-
ically issued orders reminding sellers that there were penalties for failure to
Figure 1. Copper dish used to collect toll corn in Guildford’s market, late sixteenth or early seven-
teenth century, Guildford, Surrey. While the majority of the text engraved on the dish has worn off
over time, ‘TOLL’and ‘DON’remain legible.
Image: Hillary Taylor.
28
Nottinghamshire Archives, 157 DD/P/60/26. After the 1670 Act for Ascertaining Measures of
Corn and Salt, those who were entitled to toll revenue were meant to pay for a standardized brass
measure (the so-called ‘Winchester bushel’), which was to be publicly displayed in the market.
While tolls themselves were not standardized across markets, toll corn was meant to be collected
‘in proportion’to this standard. The Chesterfield petitioners claimed that although a previous les-
see had indeed adhered to the standard, the lessee in question did not. For a 1671 controversy
about who was meant to pay for the new brass measure in Brackley, see Northamptonshire
Archives, E(B) 564. For the unpopularity of standardized measures and the persistence of non-
standardized measures, see Richard Sheldon et al., ‘Popular protest and the persistence of custom-
ary corn measures: resistance to the Winchester bushel in the English west’, in Adrian Randall and
Andrew Charlesworth, eds., Markets, market culture and popular protest in eighteenth-century Britain and
Ireland (Liverpool, 2006), pp. 25–45.
29
Nottinghamshire Archives, 157 DD/P/60/27. In addition to clarifying tolls in relation to the
Winchester bushel, the toll on cheese was reduced on the grounds that cheese would be ‘agreat
object’in Chesterfield’s trade after the canal was completed, perhaps indicating that lower tolls
were regarded as being conducive to incentivizing commercial activity.
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operate in the marketplace. Rather than focusing on the impact that backroom
bargaining had on consumers or prices in the open market, some corporations
stressed their interests and revenue. In October 1615, Chester’s council noted
the ‘harm done to the commonwealth of the city and its customs’by traders who
sold grain in ‘innhouses and cellars’and evaded tolls in the process. In an effort
to suppress such practices, the council restated a mid-sixteenth-century order
and noted that any grain brought into Chester should be openly sold on market
days and outlined fines for non-compliance.
30
While such measures were partially
intended to ensure that transactions occurred where they could be monitored
and regulated, the corporation’s motives were not entirely high minded.
Around the same time, it observed that the collection of tolls on other
goods –including cattle imported from Ireland for sale in Chester’smarket–had
lapsed; it ordered that some of these tolls be reimposed and that ‘ancientt
books’be consulted to establish lapsed customary tolling precedents.
31
Here,
as elsewhere, officials were concerned not only with maintaining existing
toll revenue, but also expanding it.
Corporations were prepared to spend money to initiate or participate in
legal proceedings about their toll interests. The case of Leeds, which was
granted a royal charter in 1626, indicates how preoccupied urban officials
and lessees could be with maintaining toll revenue, as well as defending its pri-
vileged inhabitants’exemptions from paying tolls in other markets. In the
early 1660s, the corporation noted: ‘sundry suites & controv’sies are likely to
arise (many p’sons p’tending themselves dicharged from the paym[en]t [of
tolls] by reason of some ancient tenures or other grant)’.
32
By 1664, it was
reserving £80 annually to spend on the ‘management & defence of any suit
or action wherein the corporation is concerned’and, in subsequent decades,
it spent money on many toll-related disputes –including the prosecution of
those who refused to pay tolls in Leeds’s market.
33
In 1701, the corporation
feared that toll revenue was ‘in danger to be lost if speedy care [was not]
taken to preserve [it]’, so it set up a committee which was tasked with
reviewing ‘papers’related to tolling practices; hiring ‘sollicitors’as needed;
and ‘preserving, recovering & defending the just right and privilege of the
corporation…either at law or equity’.
34
Some disputes about toll corn –and tolls more generally –ended up in the
equity courts.
35
Although the common law courts could also handle toll
30
Margaret Groombridge, ed., Calendar of Chester city council minutes, 1603–1642 (Blackpool, 1956),
p. 79. This order had previously been issued in 1547, 1564, 1567, 1573, and 1585. For a similar 1660s
order by Guildford’s mayor, see SHC, BR/OC/2/7/2.
31
Groombridge, ed., Calendar of Chester city council minutes, pp. 39, 181.
32
J. G. Clark, ed., Court books of the Leeds corporation: first book, January 1662 to August 1705 (Leeds,
1936), p. 12.
33
Ibid., pp. 14, 59, 135. For toll suits between Wakefield, Leeds, and Hull, see pp. 52, 112, 118, 136,
141. For Durham’s mayor and aldermen borrowing money from a charitable bequest to pay for suits
about toll corn in the 1660s, see DUL, Old University Manuscript E.I.9, fo. 53r.
34
Clark, ed., Court books of the Leeds corporation, pp. 174–5.
35
The exchequer suits that make up the core of this section turned on competing claims about
the tolling customs of particular markets. For orienting discussions of custom and the litigation
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disputes, the documentation generated in equity suits offers the richest and
most accessible record of how market owners, lessees, and traders sought to
justify and defend their claims in court. While internal evidence often suggests
that the disputes in question had rumbled on for some time, matters tended to
come to a head during or shortly after prices had risen as a result of harvest
failure. In years of bad harvests, sellers may have balked at the prospect of los-
ing a share of their grain to tolls, while market owners or lessees were presum-
ably keen that their revenue should not be further diminished by recalcitrant
traders. In some cases, market owners or lessees sued traders who refused to
pay tolls, citing their evasion of market regulations and attendant attempts to
undermine the rights and interests of those who were entitled to toll revenue.
Elsewhere, traders sued market owners they accused of amending customary
practices related to the collection of toll corn. Some disputes involved suits
and counter-suits and dragged on for years. Indeed, in some instances, the
amount of money spent in legal fees may well have eclipsed the revenue
that litigants stood to lose by paying tolls or gain by receiving them.
In the equity courts, those who objected to tolls tended to draw on certain
themes. Tolls were variously presented as being at odds with the demands of
equitable market dealing; the duties of good lordship; and the needs of the
poor. The sincerity of such rhetoric is debatable, particularly when it was
deployed by individuals who sold significant quantities of grain on the market
or were otherwise engaged in questionable marketing practices. Nevertheless,
for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of those who
objected to paying tolls relied on these discourses; some persisted in doing
so after the central government had become increasingly ambivalent on the
question of market regulation.
Some suits involved generic complaints about how comparatively wealthy
and powerful individuals were inclined to ‘oppress’their inferiors.
36
When a
lessee in late sixteenth-century St Neots instituted a practice of collecting
toll corn, witnesses described him as ‘a gentleman of great wealth, [who]
might pleasure and displeasure many inhabitants’of the town and surrounding
area. His tolling innovations –which traders resisted and were eventually sued
for –were supposedly symptomatic of a deep-seated tendency to abuse his
power at his inferiors’expense.
37
After a toll dispute came to a head in
Hinckley in the early 1620s, the defendants and their witnesses championed
a group of naïve and impoverished grain sellers, who had supposedly been
that it could generate, see Andy Wood, The memory of the people: custom and popular senses of the past
in early modern England (Cambridge, 2013); J. P. Bowen and A. T. Brown, eds., Custom and commercial-
isation in English rural society: revisiting Tawney and Postan (Hertford, 2016).
36
For such rhetoric in equity courts, see Andy Wood, ‘Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of
class in early modern England’,Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), pp. 803–26.
37
TNA, E134/3Jas1/East20. Here, Payne’s son (a later lessee) sued those who refused to pay toll
corn and argued that the toll revenue had been put towards paving the market and other main-
tenance, which traders benefited from. For a case from the late 1590s in which the bailiffs and
their appointed toll collectors claimed that toll corn was used to subsidize the cleaning of
Caistor’s market, but traders claimed that the practice had been initiated ‘only [with the aim
of] advancing and inritchinge themselves’, see TNA, STAC 5/P23/1.
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cheated by the lessees and their toll collectors. Hinckley’s market officials had
‘many tymes taken of many poore and simple people’arbitrary and excessive
amounts of grain ‘without any due regard to the quantity brought to be sold’
and purportedly used threats of legal action to coerce traders into
submission.
38
Elsewhere, traders who objected to tolls described how their efforts to sup-
ply grain to the poor had been frustrated by grasping lords and their toll col-
lectors. A yeoman from Messingham described how, during the harvest failures
of the late 1590s, he had attempted to transport barley down the River Trent to
sell ‘in the weste partes where they stoode…in great neede’.
39
But his undertak-
ing was thwarted by toll collectors in Gainsborough, where a London merchant
had recently acquired the manor and its associated market; started collecting
tolls on grain that was transported along the river; and changed existing toll
customs in a bid to increase his revenue.
40
When the mayor and burgesses
of Reading sued a handful of traders who refused to pay toll corn in the
early seventeenth century, the defendants and their supporters likewise called
attention to their own charitable marketing activities; in doing so, they
obliquely suggested that the mayor and burgesses’recent changes to tolling
practices were motivated by a desire to increase their revenue. One
witness described how he once bought ‘Dancke [Danzig] rye at London in a
deere yeare and brought yt to Reading…and used parte of yt himself and
solde also thereof to poore folks’.
41
That defendants in these suits were
often themselves accused of selling grain directly out of their houses on mar-
ket and non-market days indicates how slippery the competing claims in toll
disputes could be.
A protracted dispute about toll corn in Kidderminster’s market from the
late seventeenth century gives a sense of how hollow traders’theoretical con-
cerns for the poor could be in practice. On the surface, this controversy
revolved around the size of the dish that was used to collect toll corn. The bai-
liff, burgesses, and their hired toll collectors maintained that the size of the
dish was reasonable; had not been changed in recent memory; and was smaller
than the dishes used in neighbouring markets. Their detractors, by contrast,
38
TNA, DL 4/73/24. These ‘poor people’had allegedly ‘payd [toll corn] many tymes through
feare and to avoyd suits and troubles’. Witnesses for the complainants also alleged that
Hinckley’s toll revenue had historically been used to subsidize dinners and ‘frendly entertaining’,
but the revenue had recently been redirected towards the lessees’private benefit.
39
TNA, STAC 5/A39/37. Members of the Lincolnshire gentry also claimed that excessive tolls
had been taken on grain they brought to Gainsborough to sell to ‘the poorest sorte of people to
bringe downe the high prices of the markets’. In the protracted legal dispute about tolls in
Gainsborough, the lord was ultimately successful.
40
For the corporation of Leicester intervening when its freemen’s grain was distrained after
they claimed exemption from these Gainsborough tolls, see Helen Stocks, ed., Records of the borough
of Leicester, 1603–1688 (Cambridge, 1923), pp. 142–4.
41
TNA, E134/13Jas1/Hil1. He added that when he did so, he had not paid toll because he was a
freeman of Reading; other witnesses offered conflicting accounts of how long Reading’s freemen
had been obliged to pay tolls on ‘English [and] outlandish corn’that they brought to sell in the
market and suggested that freemen and non-freemen alike had historically been expected to
pay tolls.
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claimed that Kidderminster’s‘old iron toll dish’had been replaced with a lar-
ger brass dish at some point in the 1670s.
42
Furthermore, whereas nearby mar-
kets purportedly had several toll dishes of variable sizes, Kidderminster now
had only one dish ‘of the same bignes’, which the toll collectors neglected
to fill in proportion to the amount of grain individual sellers brought to mar-
ket.
43
The issue came to a head in 1694 when John Tayler, who sold ‘great
quantities of wheat, rye, and mangcorn’in Kidderminster, embarked on a
toll-evasion campaign. Indeed, by some accounts, he was simply the public
face of wider opposition to the local toll regime, which had allegedly ‘occa-
sioned great compleints in the country [among] all sorts of people’–including
‘the poore’.
44
According to the worsted weavers who collected tolls in
Kidderminster, Tayler brought ‘one or two bags’to the market and sold by
sample; left the remainder of his grain in an inn; and refused to pay tolls
altogether.
45
In their estimation, there was a logic to Tayler’s actions: his
toll evasion began in the early 1690s when ‘the price of corn was raised’as
a result of harvest failure.
46
In the ensuing exchequer suits and counter-suits, Tayler claimed that his
toll evasion was born partially out of convenience but primarily out of prin-
ciple –specifically, his concern for poor consumers.
47
By the late seventeenth
century, Kidderminster had a sizeable population of clothworkers –a demo-
graphic who were historically well represented among grain rioters.
48
In sug-
gesting that local officials were siphoning excessive amounts of grain off the
market, Tayler simultaneously defended his actions and implied that they con-
stituted an antidote to policies that had the potential to foment disorder.
49
Multiple witnesses were enlisted to support his case. The innkeeper who
allowed Tayler to store grain claimed he remarked that ‘if he had anything
to give he would give it to the poor and not to them that had no need of
it’–that is, the bailiff and burgesses.
50
A servant who sold Tayler’s grain
suggested that Kidderminster’s toll regime disproportionately impacted consu-
mers and recounted how his master had remarked that the ‘toll dishe was to[o]
42
If Kidderminster had indeed acquired a new brass dish, this presumably related to the Act for
Ascertaining Measures of Corn and Salt (1670).
43
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24.
44
TNA, E134/6WandM/Mich27.
45
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24; E134/6WandM/Mich27. For a suggestion that the practice of col-
lecting toll corn died out organically in eighteenth-century Northampton as traders began selling
by sample, see Cox, ed., Records of the borough of Northampton, II, p. 191.
46
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24.
47
TNA, E134/7WandM/East22. He was allegedly ‘old and lame’and found that his servants were
unable to ‘looke after’all his grain in the open market, so it was easier to sell by sample.
48
For clothworkers’involvement in grain riots, see Buchanan Sharp, In contempt of all authority:
rural artisans and riot in the west of England, 1596–1660 (Berkeley, CA, 1980); John Walter, Crowds and
popular politics in early modern England (Manchester, 2006).
49
For the comparatively large number of grain riots in the 1690s, see Bohstedt, The politics of
provisions, p. 97. For the wider climate, see Brodie Waddell, ‘The economic crisis of the 1690s in
England’,Historical Journal, 66, 2 (2023), pp. 281–302.
50
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24. For an earlier controversy about who was entitled to
Kidderminster’s toll revenue, including toll corn, see E134/1653/Mich19; E134/1653/East12.
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big which…was a greter injury to the poore than to [him]’.
51
Another of his
servants heard him tell ‘poor people that…if their purses would not reach to buy
a strike of corne he would sell any of them halfe a strike or a pecke or halfe
pecke’.
52
But on further examination, Tayler’s relationship with the poor was
not as benevolent as he made it out to be. Some witnesses noted that although
he eventually started bringing more grain to the market, he had only done
so after the ‘poor people and rabble of the town…threatened’him into doing
so.
53
By this logic, Tayler’s alliance with the poor was a marriage of legal
convenience that added a patina of legitimacy to his toll evasion.
However, those who objected to paying toll corn did not always defend their
actions with reference to discourses about equitable marketing or the needs of
the poor. Instead, they cited ambiguities in local market customs; privileges
that supposedly exempted them from paying tolls; and extenuating circum-
stances. A case from Durham’s Chancery Court provides a representative
example. In Durham, toll corn was called scavage corn, and in the seventeenth
century the bishops of Durham leased it to groups of individuals who occupied
positions of local authority (including former or future mayors and aldermen).
In 1637, the lessees sued a Durham maltster named Margaret Forster and a few
grain sellers who refused to pay scavage corn. While grain prices could move
independently of each other, in 1637 wheat, oats, and barley were all expen-
sive; furthermore, in comparison to the other two types of grain, the price
of barley had risen considerably from its average price the previous year.
54
Forster and the sellers with whom she dealt effectively objected to paying
tolls because they were running a forestalling racket. The latter allegedly
brought ‘greate quantities of bigg barley & oates’directly to her house on
weekdays (Saturday was the market day). This was bad enough, but the lessees
argued that such illicit activity encouraged ‘divers other countrie men, who
formerly furnished [Durham’s market] with their corne…to sell the same off
the market…unto bakers, brewers, maltsters and other inhabitants’–simultan-
eously diminishing the volume of grain that the lessees could collect and driv-
ing up the price in the market.
55
In stressing that the actions of a toll-evading
minority would likely inspire others to operate outside of the market,
Durham’s lessees were not unique. That such concerns were expressed by offi-
cials who attempted to stamp out toll evasion in their own markets is perhaps
indicative of a wider awareness that tolls were unpopular, and traders simply
needed inspiration to embark on their own course of resistance.
In the Durham suit, the defendants’arguments read more like excuses than
principled objections, and the court ruled in the lessees’favour. Forster
claimed that there was no custom of tolls being taken on grain that was
sold on non-market days. The dealers argued that if they were constrained
51
TNA E134/7WandM/East22.
52
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24.
53
TNA, E134/6WandM/East24.
54
Andrew Appleby, ‘Grain prices and subsistence crises in England and France, 1590–1740’,
Journal of Economic History, 39 (1979), pp. 880–1. For a dispute about tolls on grain –especially barley
–transported to Ipswich by water, see TNA, E/134/1649–50/Hil8.
55
DUL, Old University Manuscript, E.I.9, fo. 108.
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to operate only on market days, it was difficult for them to find horses to
transport the grain to Durham, and they would be unable to ‘vent their
corne…for their owne necessities’. The logic of the Chancery decree suggests
that officials used the dispute to reinforce regulatory measures in Durham’s
market; address complaints that were circulating among traders; and rectify
ambiguities that might, if left unchecked, generate future toll-related conflict.
If such measures were partly intended to safeguard the lessees’claims to the
toll corn, they also provided a degree of protection to traders, thereby (in the-
ory) diminishing the temptation to operate outside of the market.
56
How successful such local interventions were in the long term is difficult to
establish. By the early eighteenth century, the toll evasion had apparently
become widespread enough to attract criticism in print. An anonymously
authored 1718 tract about problems afflicting the grain trade offered an
account of the consequences that private marketing and sale by sample had
for regulated markets: ‘tolls [had] sunk to nothing’, and once-thriving market-
places had become reduced to ‘little else besides toy-shops and stalls for baw-
bles and knickknacks’.
57
The author offered multiple explanations for why this
state of affairs had arisen. Many famers allegedly did not frequent the market,
preferring instead to conduct transactions with ‘jobbers’directly from their
houses. Others deliberately sold grain on non-market days. Still others used
the market but sold grain by sample ‘in a bag or handkerchief’; this technically
enabled the bulk of sales to occur outside of the market. The author was pri-
marily concerned about the consequences that such practices had for poor
consumers and argued that the Edwardian statute against regrators, forestal-
lers, and engrossers –now ‘look’d upon and slighted as obsolete and dor-
mant’–needed to be enforced as vigorously as it had been in the past.
58
But
in making these points, there was a sense in which the author was fighting
a rear-guard action. Sale by sample was increasingly common; by the second
half of the eighteenth century, if not before, some supposed that it was a more
efficient and ‘methodical’way of conducting transactions.
59
Furthermore, the
relevant regulatory statutes were repealed in 1772, even if some justices con-
tinued to make intermittent attempts to enforce them.
60
Some market owners and their representatives were more concerned about
the impact that private bargaining had on their revenue. At Holywell in 1735, a
56
Among other regulatory measures, the Chancery decree ordered that toll collectors adhere to
the customary toll measure and not use their hands to ‘upheep’extra bits of grain into the dish. For
the full catalogue of regulatory orders, see DUL, Old University Manuscript E.I.9, fos. 110r–111r. For
a subsequent decree in favour of the lessees in a 1660s dispute, see DUL, Old University Manuscript,
E.I.9, fos. 112r–114r.
57
Cambridge University Library, 7200.d.10; Anon., An essay to prove that regrators, engrossers, fore-
stallers, hawkers, and jobbers of corn, cattle, and other marketable goods, provisions, and merchandizes are
destructive of trade, oppressive to the poor, and a common nusance to the kingdom in general (1718), p. 18.
58
Ibid., pp. 20, 10.
59
For these remarks about the market in King’s Lynn, see Anne Orne, ed., Matthew and George
Culley: travel journals and letters, 1765–1798 (Oxford, 2002), p. 214. For the increase in private market-
ing, see Everitt, ‘Marketing of agricultural produce’.
60
Hay, ‘State and market in 1800’.
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maltster was accused of conspiring with a farmer to evade tolls. While the
pair’s first transaction had been conducted in the market, they had arranged
for subsequent deliveries to be taken directly to the maltster’s kiln. Local
authorities feared that this resistance –were it to spread –would have dele-
terious financial consequences for lord who owned the market. One observer
noted that ‘near 4000 quarters of barley are malted in [Holywell] and the loss
of the toll of it will be considerable’.
61
Indeed, if the qualitative comments pro-
duced in this dispute are any indication, tolls could present opportunities for
members of the English gentry to benefit financially from what were, in effect,
tributary exactions from traders who used markets on property that they
owned but did not frequent. As one commentator noted: ‘the chief part of
[the lord’s] present income from the Welsh estate consists in tolls, which
will suffer much by these practices’.
62
In this dispute, some of the lord’s repre-
sentatives had a less than crystalline sense of how those who evaded tolls
could be brought to heel. As one put it, perhaps inadvertently indicating the
degree to which regulatory statutes had fallen out of fashion by the early
eighteenth century: ‘There are acts of Parliament that relate to badgers and
forestalling markets but I am not acquainted with em but this I am well
assured of [that] at Stockport they toll every [grain transaction].’
63
The lord who owned the manor of Birmingham –home to a weekly corn
market –found himself in a similar predicament in the early 1720s and sought
legal advice about how to secure toll revenue. The advice was mixed. In response
to a question about what could be done against traders who ‘evade[d] payment
of toll corn’by operating on non-market days, the lawyer noted: ‘Iamof
opinion there is no remedy in this case.’However, where traders refused to
pay tolls on market days, he believed that ‘a sack of corn’could be distrained
as compensation. What could be done to prosecute those who sold by sample
and kept the bulk of their grain in ‘an inn or place out of the market’was
murkier. He was sceptical about how this could be successfully prosecuted
and appeared to allude to a shift in legal thinking about tolls, at least in the
equity courts: ‘The remedy (if any) I think is in a court of equity for the
fraud but I very much doubt whether any relief can be had there for toll is
not favourd’.
64
Indeed, whether sales by sample were liable to tolls continued
to be something of a legal grey area in common law into the early nineteenth
century, at which point a precedent case established that they were not.
65
As informal marketing became more widespread, some towns had to com-
bat more organized threats to their toll revenue. The corporation of Chester
found itself in such circumstances in the 1750s when Mary Daffy, who
owned property on the margins of Chester but lived in London, recruited
61
Lancaster Archives (LA), DDKE/9/133/10.
62
LA, DDKE/9/133/10.
63
LA, DDKE/9/133/10.
64
Derbyshire Record Office, D3155/C/243–4.
65
For a discussion of why sale by sample was not liable to tolls and the relevant 1803 case, see
Frederic Gunning, A practical treatise on the law of tolls (London, 1833), p. 65; John Cantwell, A practical
treatise on the law of tolls and customs, as well those payable in the city of Dublin as in every city, corporate
town, fair and market in Ireland (Dublin, 1817), pp. 10–11.
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her sister to place an ad in a local newspaper announcing the creation of a
new, toll-free corn market in Gloverstone. Gloverstone was adjacent to the cas-
tle and technically situated outside the city’s jurisdiction; a market had oper-
ated there for some time in an ambiguous relationship to the open market.
66
According to two aldermen, Gloverstone’s market had historically been fre-
quented by ‘country’bakers who used it to ‘avoid a dispute’with the freemen
bakers of Chester and because they were selling improperly weighted bread that
was liable to seizure in the regulated market. Such small fry, however, were not
deemed to pose a real threat to the integrity of Chester’s market and its toll
revenue, and the corporation had apparently not gone to the trouble of crack-
ing down on their activity for much of the eighteenth century. As one alderman
observed, marketing in Gloverstone was done by ‘very poor persons’and was
too ‘trifling and insignificant…[to] make the objects of complaint’.
67
The situation changed after the creation of the new market. To make mat-
ters worse, ‘bakers, maltsters and other dealers in corn’flocked there, when
they had previously (and perhaps grudgingly) used Chester’s market.
68
As a
result, the amount of grain sold in the open market had ‘greatly sunk’, and
the corporation’s revenue ‘greatly diminished’.
69
A porter who collected toll
corn in Chester’s market estimated that ‘not half so great a quantity of corn’
was now sold there.
70
According to Daffy’s sister, there was nothing shocking
about the new market’s popularity: traders used it because the ‘magistrates of
Chester [had] frequently exacted tolls very unduly from persons who brought
corn to be delivered in the city’.
71
Unsurprisingly, the corporation felt
otherwise.
72
As in other disputes, Chester’s officials sought legal advice regarding who
they could prosecute and on what grounds. But the issue was ambiguous. A
Lincoln’s Inn lawyer noted that if Daffy’s claim to a grant that entitled her
to operate the market could be disproven, the corporation could seek to
‘recover damages against her in an ac[ti]on on the case for erecting a market
to the prejudice of the city’.
73
What could be done against those who sold grain
in Gloverstone was more ambiguous. As he put it:
I do not see that the city has any remedy…unless…the farmers might be
prosecuted for selling their corn out of a market which I am inclined to
think they cannot [be] because where a market [is] held they are not
bound to inquire into the title of the person who holds it.
74
66
For the fortunes of Gloverstone’s market in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see
CALS, ZCL/118 h.
67
CALS, ZCL/118 g.
68
CALS, ZCL/118 a.
69
CALS, ZCL/118 g.
70
CALS, ZCL/118 c.
71
CALS, ZCL/118 h.
72
CALS, ZCL/118 d. Specifically, it felt that the Gloverstone market was an ‘illegal attack upon
the right of [Chester’s] antient marketts’.
73
CALS, ZCL/118 a.
74
CALS, ZCL/118 a.
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The corporation eventually sued Daffy and her sister in King’s Bench,
although the former died before the suit was resolved.
III
Tolls had been collected –and evaded –in medieval English markets. But the
situation changed from the mid-sixteenth century, as the volume of economic
activity and the price of agricultural products increased. In light of such devel-
opments, market owners and lessees stood to accumulate revenue and sought
to defend their interests accordingly –even if toll revenue was not put towards
private ends in every market. If the concerns of market owners and lessees
changed over the course of the period, the same was true of traders. In con-
sidering what was historically specific about their objections to tolls, parallels
can be drawn with Christopher Hill’s analysis of another type of controversial
exaction: namely, tithes. As he observed: ‘opposition [to tithes] was no doubt as
old as Christianity in England; but the sixteenth century economic develop-
ments made [some socio-economic groups] especially conscious of tithes as
a burden’. Furthermore, as was the case with tithes, tolls could be regarded
as providing ‘succor [to] non-producers’: they required traders, at least some
of whom produced the products they sold, to surrender a portion of the pro-
ceeds to those who enjoyed proprietorial control over the market.
75
Indeed, according to the Digger Gerrard Winstanley, tolls enabled a minor-
ity to profit, when –in a just society –land should be freely available for the
use of all. In his estimation, tolls heaped extortion upon extortion: ‘inferior
tenants and labourers [bore] all the burdens, in labouring the earth, in paying
taxes…beyond their strength’, while the gentry ‘live[d] idle upon their labours
[and carried] away all the comfortable livelihood of the Earth’. He suggested
that ‘country people’–not being freemen –were ‘much troubled’because
they could not ‘sell any corn or other fruits of the Earth in a market town,
but they must either pay toll, or be turned out of the town’. Ventriloquizing
them, Winstanley remarked:
this is a most shameful thing, that we must part with our estates in taxes…
to purchase the freedom of the land, and the freedom of towns, and yet
this freedom must still be given from us, into the hands of a covetous
Norman toll-taker, according to the Kings old burdensome laws, and con-
trary to the liberty of a free commonwealth.
76
In making these points as part of a broader and more radical critique of
contemporary socio-economic relations, Winstanley was something of an out-
lier. For much of the period, traders who objected to tolls lacked a robust con-
ceptual framework that they could draw upon to articulate their criticism; this
75
Christopher Hill, Economic problems of the church: from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament
(Oxford, 1956), pp. 120, 130.
76
Gerrard Winstanley, The law of freedom in a platform: or, true magistracy restored, in Ann Hughes
and David Loewenstein, eds., The complete works of Gerrard Winstanley, II (Oxford, 2009), pp. 284–5.
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was especially true in settings where toll revenue was directed towards the
maintenance of market infrastructure or was re-distributed to the poor in
cash or kind. Furthermore, as Craig Muldrew has suggested, contemporaries
did not conceptualize marketing activity primarily in terms of self-
interest –an ahistorical notion from neo-classical economics that does little
to elucidate the complexity of economic life in early modern England.
Rather, they thought about the market in terms of ‘communal duties and obli-
gations’and emphasized the role trust and contractual reciprocity played in
bargaining.
77
Tolls fell slightly outside of this framework. Although many
objections to tolls were rooted in some form of self-interest, this was not
quite something that traders could come out and say explicitly –not least
because inherited ways of conceptualizing, conducting, and regulating eco-
nomic activity continued to retain some traction throughout the period.
This mismatch between the substance of objections to tolls and the horizons
of what was ‘sayable’–coupled with the fact that, for much of the period, the
courts appeared willing to side with those who owned markets or leased tolls
against those who attempted to evade them –meant that contemporaries were
obliged to frame their critiques in alternative and more palatable ways. Some
did so by citing extenuating circumstances. Others noted their rights and pri-
vileges as freemen who were supposedly exempt from paying tolls by dint of
their town’s charter, or as tenants whose leases exempted them from paying
tolls.
78
Still others objected to tolls (and alleged tolling innovations) on the
grounds that they violated the tenets of equitable market dealing; the obliga-
tions involved in good lordship; or diminished the amount of grain available to
poor consumers. On balance, these were reactive critiques of tolls as they were
taken in concrete circumstances, rather than abstract critiques of tolls as
rent-seeking extractions.
However, as the period progressed, tolls were increasingly liable to be cri-
ticized as exactions that supposedly obstructed commerce. While these attacks
occurred on different fronts and assumed different forms, they had the cumu-
lative effect of broadening the ways in which contemporaries could not only
critique, but also conduct, marketing activity. By the early eighteenth century,
some economic commentators outlined why tolls were problematic. While
Nehemiah Grew was, in his The meanes of a most ample encrease of the wealth
& strength of England in a few years (1707), largely concerned with England’s
overseas –as opposed to internal –trade, he made some transferable points
about the relationship between commercial activity and duties of various
sorts. He argued that customs were a ‘heavy clog’that circumscribed English
merchants’ability to operate to their full potential because they had to
keep a portion of their goods ‘dead at home, to answer them’. If trade was
to flourish, customs should be decreased. Grew also took issue with a toll called
‘light money’, which was collected from foreign ships and used to subsidize
77
Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early
modern England’,Social History, 18 (1993), p. 168.
78
For Durham’s Chancery siding with the lessees against a tenant from Newton who claimed
exemption from tolls in Durham’s market, see DUL, Hogg MS 1/27, pp. 63–9.
18 Hillary Taylor
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000407 Published online by Cambridge University Press
‘the lights sett up to direct them in their passing along the English coasts’.As
he told it, the toll was counterproductive: it gave ‘occasion to all foreigners, to
avoyd coming near us, as much as they can’. If vessels were able to enter
English harbours freely, Grew argued that the wider economic benefits
would dramatically eclipse any revenue generated by the tolls.
79
If such objections to tolls were explicit, others were more oblique. Some tra-
ders balked at paying tolls and adopted various methods to avoid doing so. But
it was also increasingly the case that established, regulated markets lacked the
capacity to handle the growing volume of internal trade. In these circum-
stances, more activity occurred outside the bounds of the open market, not-
withstanding the sporadic efforts of market owners and officials to ensure
that unauthorized activity did not occur on their watch. As a result, a larger
(though unquantifiable) share of transactions escaped toll collectors. While
market owners or lessees could attempt to stop a train that had already left
the station, many traders were likely content with the direction of travel –it
created circumstances in which they were able to realize impulses that had his-
torically been kept in check.
80
These developments were not foreordained; their progress was also uneven.
Nevertheless, by the second half of the eighteenth century, they had become
sufficiently entrenched that some market owners and officials appear to have
conceded that there was little use in resisting them. Some markets –such as
Pontefract in the 1750s –abolished the practice of collecting toll corn in an
effort to ‘encourage’trade, while others abolished tolls on other goods for
similar reasons.
81
Furthermore, where critiques of tolls had previously been
expressed in more rarefied circles, they increasingly gained wider circulation.
Newspapers disseminated commentaries on tolls, as well as accounts of dis-
putes that had arisen when traders evaded tolls in particular markets. After
York announced its intention to suspend its collection of toll corn, the
Newcastle Courant noted that the corporation’s decision should be ‘applauded’
because it was ‘likely to greatly improve the market’.
82
A 1768 report in the
Derby Mercury went a step further, outlining the supposedly baleful impact
that tolls had on commerce and advocating their abolition on a national
scale. Although this report appeared in the wake of the harvest failures of
the mid-1760s, it expressed sentiments that enjoyed currency in comparatively
normal years. Shifting the focus from consumers to traders’interests, it noted:
79
Nehemiah Grew, Nehemiah Grew and England’s economic development: the means of a most ample
increase of the wealth and strength of England, 1706–1707, ed. Julian Hoppit (Oxford, 2012), pp. 72–4.
80
For later examples of toll evasion, see Richard Perren, ‘Markets and marketing’,in
G. E. Mingay, ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales,1750–1850, VI (Cambridge, 1989),
pp. 240–1. For a mayor issuing an order that grain dealers stop evading tolls in Hereford by selling
outside of the market, see Hereford Journal, 11 Feb. 1789.
81
Derby Mercury, 7 Jan. 1757. The Pontefract corporation’s abolition of tolls on grain was accom-
panied by their buying ‘a large quantity of corn, to supply to the poor inhabitants’. For details
regarding a lord’s decision to abolish tolls on grain and cattle in Minchinhampton, see Gloucester
Journal, 18 Nov. 1793.
82
Newcastle Courant, 31 Dec. 1791. For a report concerning Chester’s suspension of collecting toll
corn, see Chester Courant, 14 Jan. 1800.
The Historical Journal 19
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as various schemes have been proposed of late to render the dealing in
corn more common, and encourage the bringing it to market, it is thought
nothing would be more favourable thereto, than to make all corn markets
toll-free, which would obviate the difficulty the dealers therein now lie
under in that respect.
83
By such logic, tolls were among the vestiges of an earlier mode of economic
life: obstacles that not only discouraged trade, but also unduly benefited
those who provided a ‘service’in the form of access to regulated markets
over which they exercised monopolistic control.
84
Early modern toll disputes
might well be regarded as arcane; on closer inspection, they appear as the mor-
bid symptoms of an extended transitional moment.
Acknowledgements. Richard Bell, Amy Erickson, Ed Legon, Craig Muldrew, Jack Sargeant,
Robert Stearn, Alex Walsham, and Keith Wrightson humoured many conversations about tolls
without complaint; I am grateful to them for their thoughts and to Jean-Christophe Agnew,
Craig Muldrew, Jack Sargeant, and Keith Wrightson for their feedback on earlier iterations of
this article. I would also like to thank John Gallagher and the journal’s anonymous reviewers
for their suggestions; attendees at a session of Cambridge’s Early Modern Economic and Social
History seminar for their questions; Durham University for supporting portions of this research
through its Residential Research Library Fellowship; and the staff at Guildford’s guildhall for allow-
ing me to photograph the toll dish in their collection.
83
Derby Mercury, 1 Jan. 1768. For a report in which the corporation of Tewkesbury’s insistence on
collecting toll corn from traders who attempted to evade payment was described as ‘impolitic and
injurious’, see Worcester Journal, 2 Dec. 1813. For an 1817 argument that there ‘should be no tolls,
customs, or market-dues’in Ireland, see Cantwell, A practical treatise, p. 36.
84
Although Adam Smith was critical of monopolies and the regulation of grain marketing, he
was relatively silent on market tolls. He was, however, fairly enthusiastic about the potential eco-
nomic benefits of toll roads and argued, among other things, that via proportionately higher tolls
on ‘carriages of luxury…the indolence and vanity of the rich [would] contribute…to the relief of the
poor’by reducing the cost of transporting goods across the county. See Adam Smith, The wealth of
nations (London, 1982), p. 312.
Cite this article: Taylor H (2023). Toll Disputes, Grain Marketing, and Economic Culture in England,
c. 1550–1800. The Historical Journal 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000407
20 Hillary Taylor
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X23000407 Published online by Cambridge University Press
