One cold March evening in 1743, a disgruntled butcher named John Breads stabbed to death a man whom he thought was James Lamb, the mayor of Rye, Sussex. Since Breads then danced through the streets crying drunkenly, “butchers should kill lambs” (11), there was little doubt of his involvement, although the victim turned out to be not Lamb, but his equally prominent brother-in-law, Allen Grebell, who had the misfortune to be wearing Lamb's cloak. The killing became part of town legend, and Breads's gibbeted skull is still on display in Rye Town Hall.

If the murderer's identity was clear, his motive was not, and this is the space in which Paul Monod situates The Murder of Mr. Grebell. Monod does not try to find Breads's motive; he offers instead a picture of the local tensions that might have inspired one. Although lighter in weight and tone than Monod's earlier works on Jacobitism and on kingship, this book is equally ambitious. His goal is to use the murder to show how small urban communities adapted to what Monod calls the “successful cultural revolution of the polite” (238). In Monod's view, we can best understand the changes associated with commercial society and cultural polarization by studying the regional contexts in which localities translated national priorities. The colorfulness of the Grebell murder makes microhistory an obvious genre for Monod's examination of the local meaning of large-scale change. Yet in this case, the allure of the form has led Monod to a story that cannot hold the weight imposed upon it.

Since the legal remains of the Grebell case are few, the murder is the occasion for the book, but not its center. After an opening chapter in which Monod discusses the place of the Grebell murder in Rye's self-presentation, the case itself is rarely more than mentioned. Each chapter begins and ends with a link to the Breads family, but the connections are general rather than specific and spread over centuries. For example, Monod tells us that Breads had once been jailed for feigned madness and, although the court took little interest in this during the murder trial, had claimed to have been visited by a “parcel of devils” (93). This leads Monod to a long investigation of demonology, witchcraft, and how ideas about madness shifted in the early modern era. But Monod can only point to these things: nothing specific links witchcraft or changing ideas of madness to anyone present at the trial. Because he has to keep returning to a murder for which so little direct evidence survives, Monod's analysis of Breads and Lamb remains more suggestive than convincing.

The true center of Monod's book is his argument about the role of local interests in determining the shape of cultural change in eighteenth-century Rye. The book's distinction is its long reach back into the early sixteenth century, not its thick description of a single moment. Monod disentangles the town's long-standing struggles over evangelicalism, local autonomy, economic development, and political obligation from one another and then reweaves these to show how the successive conflicts were distinct and yet repetitive. The expressions of elite anxiety shifted—witch hunts, spiritual withdrawal, political violence, and control of the poor—but the causes and often the involved families did not. Monod shows us both how and why families such as the Breads, minor tradesmen with sectarian and radical connections who had once been junior partners in local governance, eventually found themselves marginalized by families such as the Lambs and the Grebells who prided themselves on their economic reach, their national political connections, and their consumer sophistication. Divisions that could appear—from London or from the distance of the twenty-first century—to be about the divergent ideologies of Whig and Tory, in fact mirrored earlier local arguments over religious reform, economic regulation, and mutual obligation.

Monod excels in providing us with a case study of continuity within change; he evocatively recreates Rye's intimacy and its claustrophobia. He reveals the many ways in which in a small town new events often replay old ones, and tradition and reputation can align people in ways incomprehensible to outsiders. Some readers will end the book wanting to know less about the Rye that Grebell, Beards, and Lamb inherited and more about the one in which they lived and more about Rye's ordinary population and less about its elites. These are fair complaints, as is the fact that the implications of Monod's conclusions may not be clear to those less than fully versed in the scholarship of which The Murder of Mr. Grebell is a part. But Monod succeeds in showing to specialists and generalists alike how Rye's past informed its present and why even in an age of oligarchy, the adage that all politics is local remained relevant.