What is the name for a market town where people trade goods?

The story behind the answer

In medieval Europe, a market town was a settlement legally granted the right to hold weekly markets and annual fairs by a king or lord. The entire community—its guilds, courts, and burgage plots—revolved around trade; the marketplace was merely the central square within it. A trading post was typically a small, remote outstation, and a bazaar describes market districts common in the Islamic world and Central Asia.

These market rights spurred urban growth after c. 1000 CE, attracting merchants and peasants with protection and profit. Famous fairs, like those in Champagne, knit northern Europe to Mediterranean networks, helping standardize weights, credit instruments, and commercial law—foundations of later European banking and urban culture.