This book is about the Suffolk textile industry in the late Middle Ages, and, as such, represents the first full-length monograph on the subject. It is divided into two parts, the first of which comprises two chapters that set the Suffolk textile industry within its national context. The second part consists of four chapters that trace the production of woollen cloth in Suffolk from the sheep's back through to its distribution via woolmen, and the spinners, weavers, dyers, fullers and shearsmen who created the finished article. The penultimate chapter before the book's short conclusion concerns the clothiers who marketed the cloth.
Nicholas R. Amor uses information from a wide variety of sources including wills, occupations of men and women in textiles from the poll tax of 1381, and the scale and geography of cloth production revealed by cloth inspections documented in the Suffolk aulnage accounts of the 1460s. He is to be especially commended for his groundbreaking use of pleas of debt, trespass and other misdemeanours extracted from the thousands of cases recorded in the rolls of the Court of Common Pleas. In part he has benefited from the Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT) project at the University of Houston, which has photographed the original plea roll documents and indexed each case for the majority of the late medieval examples of this class of records. Amor looked at some 60 rolls, which date from between 1381 to 1530, representing in excess of 250,000 cases. He has clearly made significant use of the AALT indexes, but has also done a great deal of work with the originals – a third of the rolls he cites are not yet covered by the AALT. These records enable Amor to reconstruct in great detail the various elements and actors in the medieval Suffolk textile industry, and set them in context.
The first chapter is ambitious in scope, comparing the scale of the Suffolk textile industry with that of the rest of England at the end of the fifteenth century. In addition to surveying the existing regional literature, Amor underpins his discussion with evidence of 2,326 cloth workers mentioned in plea rolls from the period 1483–1500. He concludes that by 1500 Suffolk was the premier textile county, both in terms of cloth production, and in terms of the numbers of cloth workers and clothiers. This pre-eminence of Suffolk is perhaps open to question. Cloth production is based on aulnage data of the 1460s, which suffers from the problem that while the information for Suffolk is relatively accurate, the figures for some of the other major textiles counties are understatements. Recent work by Sugden using a sample of pleas of debt in the AALT indexes for the period 1483–1524, weighted to take account of the effect of county populations, ranked Suffolk behind Yorkshire and Somerset. Still, at the end of the day, differences in the relative ranks of different counties are not crucial to the book's argument. Even if Suffolk may not have been the premier textile county, it was still of great importance.
The second chapter examines the success of the industry in Suffolk as compared to elsewhere in terms of the influence of physical geography, economic factors, adoption of technology and societal differences. This is the least satisfactory part of the book, although in part this reflects the difficulty of the exercise. Attempts to explain the differential location of an industry are fraught enough for the data-rich nineteenth century (see for example Crafts and Wolf's work on the geography of the cotton textile industry in Britain in 1838), but this reviewer agrees with Mark Bailey that for Suffolk in the late Middle Ages, the sources are simply too weak for robust conclusions to be drawn.
The real meat of the book is in the second section. Here Amor's innovative quantification and mapping of the occupational and debt data from common pleas is deployed to striking effect. In the third chapter the geography of wool production is revealed by mapping court cases that mention sheep or shepherds. There is also much that is new concerning the distribution of wool by woolmen, including typical journey distances of woolmen carrying fleeces (10 and 20 miles). Cloth production and dyeing, the subject of the next two chapters, again provides much new and interesting information concerning spinsters, weavers, fullers and dyers, such as the insignificant contribution of fulling mills to the industry. The penultimate chapter on the rise of the clothier is particularly powerful. The plea data show rapid growth in the number of clothiers from 1440, with a disproportionate concentration in the hundred of Babergh in terms of numbers, wealth and connections to the lucrative London market. This, coupled with evidence for their development of the putting-out system, with clothiers bypassing woolmen by buying direct from producers, and debt evidence, demonstrates that clothiers had come to dominate the industry before 1500.
While there is much to like about this book, there are also some puzzling anomalies. In a number of instances it is not clear which common plea rolls provide the evidence behind particular sections. For example, database CP40B, which underpins a numbers of figures and tables in the book, is given a date of 1480–1500, and is variably described as being based on eight and ten plea rolls. In fact, the National Archive references given in the text are for 11 plea rolls, which date between 1483 and 1500 (p. 24 and p. 222). The inclusion of 14 maps is to be applauded, but their intelligibility suffers from the names of towns being so small as to be unreadable, and the absence of conventional legends. Quantification of the data is also very basic and on occasion could be presented much more clearly. These criticisms do not detract from the overall value of this book. It not only fills a significant gap in the historiography of the textile industry, but its pioneering use of tens of thousands of court records, an approach that could be applied elsewhere besides, has enormous potential for a more nuanced understanding of economic development in the late medieval and early modern periods.
