Between 1230 and 1315 a large amount of Flemish and northern French cloth reached the market of Vic, a medium-sized Catalan town to the north of Barcelona. Descriptions of cloth from a sample of over 1,000 wedding trousseaus reveal that common people were quite familiar with a wide selection of fabrics from manufacturing centres such as Bruges, Saint-Omer, Arras, and Châlons, and by the end of the thirteenth century Saint-Denis, Paris, Ypres, and Narbonne. Northern cloth had travelled over 1,000 kilometres before it reached the market stalls of Vic, reflecting the efficiency of commercial networks in bringing commodities across Europe at a reasonable transportation cost. Marriage contracts from this period specify the identity of the most frequent purchasers of these fabrics, and the identity of the women that would wear them, tailored as capes or tunics. Northern cloth was purchased by all social groups, not just the wealthy elite: even peasant households used such fabrics for their daughters' dresses. All in all, wedding trousseaus provide exceptional evidence of how commercialized both the urban and rural populations had become by the end of the thirteenth century in a society eager to buy imported commodities.D uring the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, western Europe experienced a well-documented expansion of commerce and, among manufactured goods, textiles featured as one of the main commodities in terms of the amount of product traded, people involved, and capital invested. The surge of the textile trade was paralleled by a concentration of production in some cities in Flanders and the north of France, which became manufacturing centres specializing in woollens traded over a large geographical area. 1 Fabrics from north-west Europe were undoubtedly a fine product due to the high-quality wool, beautiful dyes, and quality of weaving, which made them more attractive than other textiles. However, the focus has been always placed on the trade itself and little is known about the people who bought and wore these fabrics in the late middle ages.The recent historiography has demonstrated that during the thirteenth century the peasantry and inhabitants of small towns engaged in a more commercialized economy. The proliferation of local or regional markets reduced transaction costs