Slater's town plan analysis of Doncaster (in Buckland 1989), interprets the triangular market place and the three ranges of plots around it (Market Place) as originating in one coherent (re)planning episode. Slater bases this interpretation on the apparent diversion of an earlier street (High Fishergate / East Laithe Gate) into the market place and the possible truncation of plots along the east side of High Street to form new plots facing the market place. Slater conjecturally suggests that this re-planning occurred around the 1190s at a time concurrent with the granting of increased urban privileges to the town (ibid p49-50). The site of the market place may well have developed as a result of traditional market privileges within and around the churchyard of the former St Mary Magdalene as occurred in a number of medieval market towns for example at Boston (Harden 1978), Richmond and Salisbury (Hindle 1990). This church is generally accepted (Buckland et al 1989, 49; Belford 1996, 2) to have developed from a pre-conquest foundation and been the original parish church of Doncaster. It is thought from the presence of burials and a churchyard at St Mary’s (in part excavated by Belford 1996) that this church originally held parochial status until downgraded in favour of the development of St George’s after the appropriation of Doncaster by St Mary’s Abbey in York in 1303 when these privileges are thought to have been transferred (ibid, 2). Following the putative loss of this parochial status of the church it operated as a Chantry Chapel until the dissolution of intercessionary institutions in 1548 (ibid.). Following the seizure of the chapel by the state it passed through private hands until eventual redevelopment by the seventeenth century as a Town Hall and Grammar School. This period saw the development around the former church of ‘market accretion’ buildings as temporary stalls were replaced piecemeal by more permanent structures. These buildings are visible on historic plans from 1786, 1820, 1828, and 1832 (Figs 4-7 in Ford 2006). The built structure of the market place was cleared and rebuilt (allowing detailed engravings to be made of the surviving fabric of the church – see SMR 415) in the mid 19th century when the current Market Hall and Corn Exchange were developed. Partial legibility of the exterior plan of the late 12th century market place.