The Commercialisation of English Society: 1000-1500.

Watts, John

Richard Britnell's interesting and useful book is at once about rather more and rather less than its title suggests. Its central theme is the development of market relationships, a story which Britnell tells as broadly as possible, emphasizing that these relationships are not purely economic ones, but part and parcel of a wider social and political whole. He accepts, and clearly demonstrates, the importance of demographic and monetary movements in helping to shape economic trends, but, at the same time, he reminds the reader that mediaeval England was not simply a large arable farm run for subsistence on rational lines and in an ideological vacuum, but a complex organism in which a variety (indeed a growing variety) of economic activities was interwoven with a series of cultural, social and constitutional features. These features too experienced transformations, some of them - the demise of serfdom perhaps - for reasons tightly bound up with economic conditions; others - the rise of law - largely free of economic causes, though full of importance for economic development. Some of them, notably lordship, proved remarkably impervious: as contractual relationships multiplied all around, the almost supernatural power of king and nobleman stubbornly persisted.

In many ways, the book is a triumph: a subtle and convincing attempt to draw together themes too often considered separately and to make sense of their interaction. It is short and punchy, but also well documented, with an excellent and up-to-date bibliography which runs to almost thirty pages. If it has a weakness, it lies in the inevitable tensions between comprehensive synthesis and creative argument. Not everything Britnell wants to cover fits, or fits clearly, into his all-embracing theme of |commercialization'. At times, this means a rather questionable treatment of specific phenomena (often, admittedly, those on the peripheries of the author's main interests - the role of taxation in later mediaeval royal government, for example, or the relationship between law and lordship in later mediaeval aristocratic society). More often, it means that the argument becomes attenuated, so that while the coverage of most topics convinces, their place in his overall scheme of things could sometimes be more clearly explained. Even so, this seems a small, and predictable, price to pay for such an ambitious and thought-provoking work.