So while there were sizeable urban populations throughout the medieval period - Paris, London, Chester etc. - the overwhelming majority of the European population lived in an agrarian, rural context in which the village, rather than the town, was the predominant settlement. That doesn't mean that you weren't familiar with town - indeed in England you're rarely more than 20-30 miles away from a market town - but that your main centres of food production were not necessarily urban. While baking was absolutely not usually carried out at home apart from kitchens of the wealthy, it doesn't necessarily mean that people were travelling to the nearest town for their daily bread. Indeed, most town markets were held on a weekly basis and the right to hold a market was actually tightly controlled by royal charter and could frequently be the cause of significant legal squabbles. In the vast majority of cases, especially within the context of a village, baking would be carried out in communal ovens.

Typically, villagers would pay a miller to grind their flour, which they would either then use to make a dough at home and take to the communal oven, or pay a baker to make into dough and then cook for them. The baker, if there was one, was the individual responsible primarily for the operation of the oven itself, rather than necessarily how we might understand a modern baker, who sources flour, prepares bread and then hopes to sell it all. Bakers would have mass-baked bread and then distributed it, but this would have been to pre-existing customers who had previously supplied the flour.

Given that a fee was typically charged for the use of both the mill and the oven, baking could be somewhat lucrative. In France in particular, 'seignorial' ovens were popular (to the extent that private ovens could be banned, thus making the population reliant on the local lord) as a money-spinner, which could be doubly lucrative if the lord also owned the local mill. Even in an urban context, it's likely that you would purchase flour and then approach a baker rather than hope the market would have a baker with bread to spare.

Where we do have archaeological evidence for the mass production of bread it's often in a military context - the Anglo-Saxon burhs of Wallingford, Eddisbury and Stafford all have extant bread ovens. Stafford in particular appears to have been a major bakery centre, with ovens for both bread loaves and bannocks, but then Stafford also functioned as a logistical hub to supply disparate Mercian garrisons in remote locations where the local populations would have been unable to sustain them. Stafford was also a major productive site for pottery and butchery. The butchered meat was most likely salted or cured and then distributed in ceramic jars, and it's possible the bread was similarly stored.

Unfortunately other, likely, storage solutions such as wicker work or cloths don't leave many archaeological traces and are rarely mentioned in literary contexts. We do have references to wickerwork baskets and panniers, worn either on the head or the back, and they also sometimes show up in illuminations and illustrations such as seen here. Indeed this 14th century illuminated gospel manuscript and this 15th century illustration of a bakery show loaves of bread in wicker baskets and a baker placing a finished loaf in a man's sack respectively. This 16th Century market scene by Joachim Beuckelaer similarly depicts wares being carried mostly in wicker baskets. This 13th century martyrology also shows produce - in this case what appear to be root vegetables - being harvested and carried in back-panniers.

So, to bring this ramble to a vague conclusion, as a medieval market-visiter, you might be hard-pressed to find somebody selling you loaves of bread in the first place, but if you did, they'd probably expect you to have your own basket or panniers to carry it away in.

Follow-up question: I can imagine people were expected to bring a basket for something like bread or fruit, but what about messy stuff like meat or honey?

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