Ceapmenn and Portmenn: Trade, Exchange and the Landscape of Early Medieval Wessex

It would seem that the influential views of Henri Pirenne have finally been given a decent funeral.1 No attempt here is made, therefore, to exhume the “adventurers,” “vagabonds,” and those who “seize the many opportunities ... which commercial life offered” by using their “wits to get a living.”2 But an exploration of the “niches for self-determined action, free market activities, and craft production for unknown consumers,” and what Joachim Henning has termed “innovative impulses for town development,” is intended to cast light on “the true keepers of the light of the urban economy”: the traders and craftsmen who lived in emporia, in wics, in old Roman towns and in all sorts of settlement agglomerations.3 The true keepers in this context were the traders and townsmen—the ‘chapmen’ and ‘portmen’—of Anglo-Saxon Wessex and by reconstructing the geography of trade through a central corridor of this outlier of the Frankish economic sphere, the dynamics and developments over time within two major agricultural specialisms—sheep and cattle farming—can be explored to demonstrate that both the industries themselves and those concerned with their successful management exerted a pull that influenced key developments in the political control of the late Saxon economy.