The final text in the long list of the groundbreaking scholarship of Margaret Spufford, this book continues Dr. Spufford's investigation into the lives of ordinary people—perhaps best understood as the understudied nonelite. When Dr. Spufford became too ill to complete the revision, Dr. Susan Mee, the last of her numerous research students, prepared the manuscript for publication. It was published in January 2018, in Oxford University Press’s Pasold Studies in Textile History series. The great strength of this book, the authors’ use of several underutilized but remarkable resources—probate accounts, probate inventories, and poor relief records—may challenge readers who are unfamiliar with quantitative inquiry. Summarizing quantitative research often requires an abundance of tables, lists, figures, and case studies—interpretive descriptions that theoretical scholars often avoid.

In the opening chapter, “Probate Accounts and Clothing,” the authors describe their process. They situate their work within material culture, an area of study that attracts economic, social, and art and design historians, as well as literary scholars and museum professionals. They describe how they addressed the shortcoming of one source, the probate accounts, which rarely offer occupations and status indicators, by comparing the names in probate accounts with those same names in wills and inventories. By this method they were able to establish sartorial identities for 8,600 people. In the second chapter, “The Cost of Apparel in Seventeenth-Century England, and the Accuracy of Gregory King,” the reader will discover the 1688 table, the “Annual Consumption of Apparel.” This tool became valuable to economic historians because people below gentry status would not have had their portraits painted, so information about what they wore would be scarce; Gregory King's “Annual Consumption” document became the only source of information about the apparel habits of this group. While some scholars have questioned the information offered by this table, Spufford and Mee deem it a credible source.

Chapters 3 through 6 discuss the sartorial habits of the poor, laborers, husbandmen (and their peers, who left goods worth up to £100), yeoman (and their peers, leaving goods worth £100–£300), and “chief inhabitants” (who had in their probate accounts £300 and above). The subtitles for each chapter focus on minute topics, such as the care of garments, their storage, trimmings, and colors, as well as the use of secondhand clothing, undergarments, gloves, mantuas, and mourning apparel. In chapter 7 the authors examine questions about people who created, sold, and bought clothes: tailors, seamstresses, and tradesmen, and the customers for tailor-made and ready-made merchandise. The data in this chapter attempts to rectify the long-standing idea that the eighteenth century marked the first consumer revolution, arguing instead for an evolution in sartorial consumerism that dates back to at least the 1600s.

The final section of the book contains some of the most valuable material. It consists of a short chapter, “The Clothing of the Common Sort,” which synthesizes the preceding material as it insists that this work exploits “an underused and little known source, the probate account,” which allows “fresh insights” as it “breaks new ground” (255). It reminds the reader that even denizens who relied on philanthropy might have some choice in their clothes, while those who wore the livery of an elite may have endured a stigma. We are also made aware of the tendency of the “common sort” to choose new clothing and footwear, rather than secondhand, at least for children and adolescents. Following this chapter, the reader will appreciate two glossaries (garments and accessories), two bibliographies (manuscript and printed sources), and three indexes (textiles and garments, general, and people). This final volume of the Pasold series is a welcome addition to that collection, and a fitting conclusion to the scholarly contributions of Dr. Margaret Spufford. Evidence collected and interpreted here will be appreciated by cultural materialist researchers of every stripe.