What shops did a medieval towns have?

Answer 1

There were booths at fairs and markets where people sold things, and there were actual shops in towns and cities. These tended to be devoted to the production of one person or group of people who worked together.

The things they sold were food items, vegetables and fruit, bread and baked goods, meat and poultry, fish, grain and flour. Other shops sold cloth or carpets. There was no finished clothing, but arrangements could be made to have clothes made. There were soap makers and candle makers, and these items might have been sold together. Jewelers had shops, as did potters, glass makers, and pharmacists. Spectacles were invented in the middle ages, and so there were a few shops where people could buy lenses and glasses. Really, anything made in the middle ages was made rather primitively, but many things required special knowledge, and aside from things people made at home, most goods had to be sold in shops, so there was a fair amount of commerce in many places. Of course, there were places with no stores at all and little in the way of fairs, and in such places people had to get the things they traded for from travellers.

Shops were not very like they are today, of course. There were no cash registers and checkout lines. There were no glass display counters. There were no department stores.

Answer 2

Most merchants and tradesmen would have shops attached to their houses, which were often L-shaped in plan. The lower part of the L is the shop, facing on to a street, with the upper part of the L representing the house behind, often with a courtyard taking up the remaining space.

Drapers (cloth merchants), clothiers, spiciers (spice merchants), parchment sellers, fishmerchants, saddlers, goldsmiths, bronzesmiths, carpenters, tanners, chaucers and cordwainers (shoemakers), cobblers (shoe repairers), candle-makers, butchers and others would all have shops. Later in the medieval era, scribes who had been trained in Church schools but who did not then become monks or priests would offer their writing skills for sale in a shop, where bookbinding might also be carried out.