Southampton was a relatively small town in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but it has an outsized claim on historians’ attention. Its claim is based on two factors. First, for reasons that are still not entirely clear, its port became one of the principal stopping points for Continental, particularly Italian, ships pursuing trade in England in the period. For about a century, foreign merchants routinely chose to offload their merchandise in Southampton and send it overland to other parts of southern England, including London, rather than sailing directly to the Thames or to another port closer to their principal market, as they would come to do in later periods. Second, its role in linking maritime trade to inland distribution networks during this unusual period was exceptionally well documented. Or perhaps more importantly, the records that were generated to document these linkages have been exceptionally well preserved. Southampton’s local records thus provide historians with an unparalleled opportunity to study how medieval and early modern towns organized their inland trading activities, ranging from long-distance exchange of high-value commodities to routine interactions with nearby market centers.

This new collection of essays on Southampton’s inland trade is based on a collaborative effort by a group of scholars working for more than a decade to turn one of the town’s most important sources — the brokage books — into a modern searchable database. The database is now freely available on the internet (www.overlandtrade.org). In addition to the database, the research team has also cleverly adapted GIS-based mapping software developed at the GeoData Institute of Southampton University to translate the data about commodities, forms of transportation, and commercial destinations into elegant visual form. Both the database and the mapping application provide the basic material that underpins the collected essays, written partly to explain how researchers constructed the database and partly to demonstrate the kinds of questions that can be addressed with the material.

The book’s seventeen chapters are organized to reflect three basic themes. The first five chapters are primarily contextual, describing the tolls and tariffs that appear in the brokage books, the transportation infrastructure used to move commodities beyond the town, and the town’s economic fortunes in the period. This section contains an interesting account of the seasonality of trade and some useful analysis of the ebbs and flows of the town’s economy, including a period of surprising prosperity in the middle of the fifteenth century when the English economy as a whole was faring poorly and a period of retrenchment and stagnation in the early sixteenth century. The second section adopts a geographical perspective, with chapters devoted to trade between Southampton and its three leading partners (Salisbury, London, and Winchester), as well as links to smaller centers both relatively close to the town and farther afield. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this group of chapters is the relative magnitude of the trade with the town’s three main partners compared to the trade conducted with other centers. In the third part of the book, the authors focus on the main commodities in circulation, with chapters on wine, spices, fish, and cloth. The growing importance of southwestern textile production is readily apparent in the brokage records, both in the form of cloth coming into the port for shipment abroad and in the form of dyestuffs and other raw materials distributed to textile producers across the region. Contributing authors also provide some interesting analysis of the roles played by local Southampton merchants and those in partnering towns in organizing trading activities.

Perhaps the most appealing part of the larger project from which the book sprang is the opportunity it provides to other scholars to reconfigure the data to fit their own special research interests. This volume of essays will provide a valuable companion to any such future work while also leaving open many different avenues to explore. As the authors involved with the project note on several occasions, inland trade is still an understudied topic. Their effort to move Southampton’s brokage books into the digital age in such a compelling form should help to change the situation.