To what extent did medieval people regard trade and commerce as immoral, more damaging than beneficial to society and the individual? What were the aims of the vast corpus of market and trade regulations promulgated in England's later medieval towns? And how different was this period from later ages, in terms of its attitudes towards the market, and the practices and behaviour of those who transacted in it? These are the large questions tackled by James Davis's new study. This ambitious and learned book explores the influence of belief and culture on market exchange, and as such represents a novel and significant contribution to the study of medieval commercialisation, and to the economic history of the period more generally.

The book's main focus is on the multifarious petty traders and producers –brewers, bakers, butchers, innkeepers, cooks, tapsters, hucksters, middlemen, and so on – rather than the less numerous greater merchants. Davis approaches their activities through three broad categories of source, each of which forms the basis of a large chapter. Chapter 1, ‘Images of market trade’, explores literary and visual representations of trade and traders. Sermons, didactic treatises and handbooks, theological texts, mystery plays, and the works of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Lydgate and many others are combed to reveal the anxieties and criticisms that contemporary moralists expressed concerning trade. Chapter 2, ‘Regulation of the market’, focuses on the laws which developed at the national and local level and sought to lay down rules on prices, the quality of goods, weights and measures, and many other aspects of trading in the public marketplace. Here the main evidence consists of royal statutes plus the results of an exhaustive trawl of the customs, ordinances and bylaws of a large number of English towns. Finally, Chapter 3, ‘The behaviour of market traders’, asks how effectively and strictly the laws described in Chapter 2 were enforced in practice. This is done through case studies of three Suffolk towns, namely the small centres of Newmarket and Clare, and the larger borough of Ipswich. The trading offences and fines listed in the towns' court records provide the key evidence for this chapter.

A major concern of these chapters is to establish how far the three categories of evidence are mutually reinforcing and point to a widely accepted and consistent contemporary view of the right purposes of trade and the appropriate conduct of traders. In other words, when one considers moralistic and religious texts, trade statutes and ordinances, and the records of actual marketing side by side, can one trace similar concerns and priorities cropping up in all three groups? To some extent one can, although, as Davis recognises, there are limits to such similarities. For instance, although both the literary texts and the trade regulations often focus on the same targets, such as the deceptions perpetrated by retailers, the motives for highlighting these offences are not identical in each case. While moralists often used the actions of these traders as a convenient illustration of the sin of avarice, the drafters of urban customs and ordinances had a much wider set of priorities when seeking to regulate and punish traders. These could include the maintenance of order and a secure supply of provisions in the town, or the generation of court income from fines for trading offences. The evidence also indicates a degree of mismatch between the idealistic precepts of the moralists and legislators, and the actual day-to-day regulation of commerce. An important example concerns the assizes of bread and ale, which were laws designed to secure a community's supply of basic foodstuffs by means of complex rules concerning quality, price, weight, and correct measures. A strict enforcement of these assizes would imply a close supervision of the activities of bakers and brewers in the interests of the community. However, as Davis shows through his Suffolk case studies, the assizes often functioned in practice as a loose licensing system imposed on all active brewers and bakers. There was in such communities little attempt to use the laws to monitor closely the activities of individual traders to ensure that they conformed to the moral standards implied in the legislation.

Clearly, therefore, to some extent different sources support different views about the social and moral acceptability of particular commercial practices. Nonetheless, Davis is able to argue convincingly that market morals, law and practice were in fact interconnected in this period, and that there existed a set of universally shared values that underpinned trade and its regulation. The essentials of this widespread view were that market exchange was essential for society, and that it could benefit the common good if conducted properly; that the operation of market forces and the taking of reasonable profit by traders ought not to be opposed; but that any gain derived from dishonesty or fraud was unacceptable. In a fourth and final chapter, Davis situates these arguments about the market morality of the middle ages within the debate, associated most closely with E. P. Thompson, about a transition from a traditional moral economy to a modern market economy. Davis suggests that there was remarkable continuity from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries in market attitudes and laws, and that these represent a more complex and less anti-market ‘moral economy’ than is usually thought.

This book will intrigue readers interested in the ideas of Douglass North concerning the role of institutions in economic performance. In his conclusion in particular, Davis relates his work explicitly to North's ideas, and does so implicitly elsewhere. In this context, the main implication of Davis's wider thesis is that medieval economic activity was influenced not only by the formal constraints of courts and laws, but also by the informal constraints represented by moral beliefs about acceptable trading practices.

This brief summary cannot do justice to the range of topics illuminated in a rich study which draws on an exceptionally broad range of primary sources and deploys an eclectic range of methods in a an effort to grasp the complexities of its subject.