Cloth-weaving was specially carried on at Stamford; but as a rule it is probable that every district supplied its own clothing.

English merchants attended the great fair at St.Denys, in France, much as those of Central Asia now attend the fair at Kandahar; and madder seems to have been bought there for dyeing cloth.

In Kent, Sussex, and East Anglia, herring fisheries already produced considerable results.

With these few exceptions, all the towns were apparently mere local centres of exchange for produce, and small manufactured wares, like the larger villages or bazaars of India in our own time.
Nevertheless, there was a distinct advance towards urban life in the later Anglo-Saxon period.

Baeda mentions very few towns, and most of those were waste.