Chalk Marden

Chalk Marden has stood at the meeting of the Wold road and the chalk parishes for longer than anyone can reckon, yet it appears in none of the county's muniments. It was never one of the chartered market towns and never held a grant that could lapse; it simply had a cross, a day, and people who came. The Thursday gathering at the cross has been held on a Thursday beyond any date anyone can establish. Its decline was the decline of every small market in the county as trade drew off to Sarrum over the last century; in 4558 the higgler Avice Hollom remarked at the cross that her grandmother had sold at four places and she now sold at one, and that one was Sarrum.

About nine hundred people live there now. The gathering is a market in every way except law: it has no charter, takes no tolls, keeps no court and has no officer, and no one has ever challenged it because no one has ever wanted to stop nine hundred people buying eggs. That also means it gives no remedy. A light weight or a bad coin is settled between neighbours, which covers most quarrels and none of the difficult ones; for a hearing a man must walk eleven miles to Barrow Combe or to Sarrum. With Wold Ash it is one of only two sizeable places in the county where nothing is owned by a company, held by a house or answerable to a hall. The water-bailiff of the Sarrum reach, Alice Prowse, keeps her reach book here.

Chalk Marden's real wealth is its thirty or forty higglers. Rather than wait for produce they go round the small holdings on circuits, buying eggs, poultry, butter, hides, feathers and rabbit skins, and selling on at whichever market lies nearest that day. They keep books because they have to, carry credit on a scale nobody has ever totalled, and get round each of the chalk country's holdings several times over in a twelvemonth, so they know which house no longer sells butter, which has parted with its second cow, whose son has gone to the pits. Symon Wicke's higgling book keeps the prices in its columns and what he saw in its margins, and Bailiff Marget Sperrin has said that it alone would show a bad year coming before the market did. Susanna Bray notes that two of the most useful contacts anyone has made in the county were made at the cross on a Thursday, for nothing more than standing about.

Come on a Thursday, stand by the cross, and be patient. For news of the chalk country ask a higgler rather than a vestry; the price is usually a day's carriage and an hour of civil talk. There is no officer here to complain to, so count your change.