This volume is an excellent resource. While published as volume 68 of the Oxfordshire Record Society, its importance to historians of welfare and social structure stretches to the national or international stage. At the core of the book is a comprehensive listing of the details (start date, end date, details of feast days, plus any other extant sources that can be linked in) of all traceable friendly societies and like organisations in Oxfordshire. They total 755 and equate to a situation where most settlements in Oxfordshire could at some point boast a friendly society or similar organisation. In addition the volume has appendices dealing with traceable court/petty session cases involving friendly societies or their officers, listings of the societies according to pre- and post-1800 status, lists of surviving flags and banners, and so on.

The volume is prefaced by an introduction setting out the unique place of this research within the wider historiography. As the author rightly notes, this is an historiography based almost entirely on broad surveys rather than the detailed work that we see here. And we should be under no illusion about the sheer depth of work that has been deployed here. Shaun Morley corrects some apparently mistaken aspects of the secondary literature, particularly for instance with regard to the now well-known Stonesfield Society analysed by David Eastwood, but he also adds to it. Several observations might be made of the listings and appendices, for instance: that the New Poor Law coincides with an extraordinary explosion in insurance/mutuality to combat sickness and death; that many societies proved remarkably transient and fragile; that the courts usually overturned attempts by the officers and members of friendly societies to exclude other members or to restrict/deny benefits; and that feast days for such societies often coincided with or caused considerable drunken violence. There is perhaps a sense in which the introduction to the volume could have made more of these contributions. Friendly societies were one aspect of the mixed economy of welfare both before and after 1834 and it would have made the volume even more impressive if Morley had sought to locate these societies more firmly in this context. As Byung Song, Jack Langton and Tim Phillipson have suggested, Oxfordshire looks ‘odd’ in terms of the sub-regional variations that one can observe in the generosity, scope and stability of the poor law, and some engagement with this idea as a way of interpreting the geographical spread and strength/fragility of the organisations would have been good. This notwithstanding, volume 68 of the Oxfordshire Record Society really is a ‘must read’.