Colchester's growing requirements during the fourteenth century inevitably impinged upon local landlords and their tenants in a variety of ways. Rising population and standards of living there increased the consumption of grain, malt and meat, while expansion of industrial output implied greater sales of wool and leather in the market place. The evidence of both the cloth industry and the food trades suggests that during this period Colchester's development counteracted the debilitating effects of recurring epidemics upon agricultural production, since the town was quick to recover from the disaster of 1348 and continued to expand its demands beyond the point of mere recovery. By the first decade of the fifteenth century purchases of wool and malt, if not of bread grain and meat, were surely at least double what they had been during the 1340s. But the capacity of this urban development to benefit local agriculture was weakened by other changes affecting agricultural trade. To the extent that lines of supply lengthened as the town grew, the effects of that growth were spread over a wider area and the advantages for neighbouring villages were reduced. And insofar as population declined in the countryside as a result of recurrent epidemics, increases in Colchester's demand were likely to be offset by a contraction of rural trade.

The significance of the first of these considerations has already been shown in the context of Colchester's expanding trade through Hythe, one of whose major components was cereals. The wool trade was similarly wide-ranging. Colchester's supply was not restricted to the marshlands of the Colne and the Blackwater.