This festschrift in honour of Richard Britnell's distinguished career in the social and economic history of pre-modern Britain begins with ‘An appreciation’ contextualizing Britnell's career within an evolving academia, and providing an historiographical framework for the volume. Not surprisingly, in light of this sensitive beginning, this festschrift is more successful than many in presenting a thematically cohesive body of research, most of which will be of interest to the historian of small towns and their rural hinterlands. In part, this cohesion is achieved because many of the essays in the volume are, or contain significant elements of, revisionist writings regarding areas of social and economic history addressed in Britnell's own work. For example John Hatcher's opening chapter, ‘Unreal wages’ reassesses and revises downward both the extent to which the English peasantry would, in reality, have benefited from increased wages of the post-plague era, and the supposed ‘early modern plunge’ (p. 23) in wages and standards of living. This chapter, one suspects, will become standard reading for students of the late medieval peasant economy. John Langdon's succeeding contribution, ‘Minimum wages and unemployment rates in medieval England’, while a narrow case-study, conveys revisionist elements in its attempt to establish ‘a basal or lowest wage’ (p. 25) for skilled and unskilled workers, including occasional labour and ‘reserve’ labour of women and youths.
The next two chapters – Derek Keene, ‘Crisis management in London's food supply, 1250–1500’; John Lee, ‘Grain shortages in late medieval towns’ – deal with civic responses to late medieval and early modern grain shortages. Keene's discussion is wide-ranging and authoritative, offering a new series of wheat prices for London and drawing on comparable crises/responses abroad, while Lee's essay is a case-study revisiting the crisis-induced 1520 Coventry census of residents and food supplies. Both essays suggest that civic authorities felt a growing need to be seen to respond to food shortages. Similarly, John Davis’ essay, ‘Market regulation in fifteenth-century England’, comprises a single-document study regarding ‘assizes’ of sixteen urban trades, and suggests a ‘symbiotic and hybrid’ (p. 104), royal and local, process leading to trade legislation. Mark Bailey's essay, ‘Self-government in the small towns of late medieval England’, focusing on seigniorial boroughs, also explores the interplay between top-down and bottom-up expressions of authority, challenging the notion that small town residents enjoyed little autonomy to run their own community affairs. In particular, Bailey's essay discusses the practice of townsfolk leasing burghal and trading institutions from the lord.
Chapters 7 and 8 – Christine Newman, ‘Marketing and trading networks in medieval Durham’; Peter Larson, ‘Peasant opportunities in rural Durham’ – deal with urban and rural Durham in the later Middle Ages. Newman's essay assesses the economic fortunes of the boroughs of Gateshead, Darlington and Wearmouth (alias Sunderland), determining that Gateshead and Darlington were ‘well positioned to take advantage of any potential commercial opportunities’ (p. 137), while Wearmouth was, in geographical terms, poorly situated. Larson surveys post-plague records of the bishop of Durham in a study of the land market – looking for peasant property accumulation – and of other production-orientated activities, determining that ‘control of lands and control of people shifted away from the Bishop’ (p. 164) as a new strata of significant landholders emerged.
The final four chapters of this volume, while academically rigorous and broadly reflective of Britnell's interests in commercialization, feel the most disparate within the context of the collection. Maryanne Kowaleski's essay, ‘The shipmaster as entrepreneur in medieval England’, is a wide-ranging and authoritative study of the importance of the shipmaster, extending well beyond his entrepreneurial role. Martha Carlin's essay, ‘Employee fraud in medieval England’ discusses a thirteenth-century text concerning how a reeve, bailiff or shepherd might use his office to defraud his employer. James Masschaele's essay, ‘The public life of the private charter in thirteenth-century England’, examines common situations in which charters could be challenged, their drafting and related usefulness as evidence and the role of witnesses to charters, concluding that trust in private charters was grounded in an understanding that they were open to public scrutiny. Lastly, Christopher Dyer's essay, ‘Luxury goods in medieval England’, prompts readers to consider ‘luxury goods’ as a relative term, emphasizing the ‘controlled extravagance’ (p. 222) of high-status consumers and the key exchange in ordinary goods which underpinned most urban trade. The volume concludes, as is customary for a festschrift, with a bibliography of writings by Richard Britnell.
Some criticisms could be levelled at the volume. For example, some of the chapters would have benefited from a map or maps, such as Lee's discussion of Coventry's grain supply, by ward, or Newman's discussion of Durham boroughs in relation to their geographic position. Some essays, such as those by Hatcher and Kowaleski, are substantially more wide-ranging than others. A comprehensive index would have been preferable to an ‘Index of people and places’. But these are minor points in a useful volume which contains much of interest to the urban historian, and will be of general importance in advancing a number of research agendas to which Britnell has made notable contributions.
