This paper investigates the development of the English commercial landscape of markets, boroughs, and fairs from the late eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries, and sets it against the background of networks of travel and communications that supported it. The great economic and social transformations during this period are well known: among the more notable are the growth of the English population by half, the increase in the number of coins in circulation from an estimated average of six million to sixty million silver pennies or more, and the foundation of a multitude of new towns across the realm. The question here considered is how did such changes map on the regional and national level. When we look at the increasing numbers of new commercial sites as indicators of economic development, which parts of England saw the most change and which the least? Given that commerce is intimately tied to exchange and movement, can we see local market activity in specific regions connecting to wider patterns in the national economy?

Already in 1994 James Masschaele succinctly proposed the existence of a hierarchy of local markets where the older and more successful ones were connected to broader patterns of regional trade. But while the scholarship, both on markets and fairs and on travel routes, constitutes established fields, it has not been brought together in a comprehensive manner to provide an overview of the burgeoning commercial activity across England. With the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools my aim is, first, to provide an overview of the travel and communications network in Anglo-Norman England; second, to map the spread of commercial sites and investigate their relationships with major transport routes; and third, to locate the development of regional commercial institutions within the broader patterns of interregional and international trade. But while this study maps sites and routes across the whole of England it cannot equally cover all of its constituent counties. Rather, attention is drawn to specific areas that illustrate the intersections of trade and travel: along the Thames, the region between London and the Fenland, and the eastern and the south-eastern coasts.