Outside Edinburgh and to a lesser extent the three other major regional centres, it is likely that life in many towns was marked by the sight of failing levels of population, abandoned workshops and a new relationship between town and country. The modest growth areas in the later fifteenth-century economy lay in salt and fisheries, which benefited small ports such as Crail in the Firth of Forth and Dumbarton on the Clyde. There were, too, the beginnings of a search for new overseas markets, helped by the abandonment of the Bruges staple in 1477 and its eventual settling at Veere in Zeeland, a more convenient and less restrictive distribution centre. Later some burghs, like Inverness, would stage a recovery through the export of salmon, but the structure of the town must by then have been distinctly different from the fourteenth century when it had been based on its trade in wool and hides. The later medieval burgh, still governed by the Burgh Laws of the twelfth century and the Statutes of the Guild of the thirteenth, survived almost completely intact; but it was, though still small, likely to be a very different working town.