In this thought-provoking and deeply researched book, Christian Liddy argues that the central focus of urban politics in later medieval English towns was the nature of citizenship, the contested “identity, role, rights, and responsibilities” (2) of those who possessed the “freedom,” that complex of economic and political privileges and duties that characterized urban citizenship. Although late medieval English civic leaders presented their towns and cities as epitomes of orderly and peaceful governance, for Liddy, as his title indicates, this picture of order belied a reality of urban political culture in which contestation was the dynamic force. Citizenship, he argues, encompassed ideas in tension with one another, perhaps most strikingly in the inherent contradiction of a citizenry that was characterized both by equality and hierarchy, defined on the one hand by a common status with privileges that all shared and on the other by expectations of deference and obedience to the wealthiest amongst them, the probi homines or worthier men. Throughout the period between the emergence of English urban governments in the thirteenth century (and the concomitant development of the medieval English idea of the citizen) and the Henrician Reformation, “the apparent unanimity of the civic records disguises a politics that were fractious and argumentative” (17), particularly as citizens outside positions of power challenged the rule of the mercantile elites. Liddy's analysis challenges early modernists’ arguments that the concept of English citizenship derived from classical texts brought to England late in the sixteenth century, arguing rather that they emerged from the practical experience of urban life and politics going back to the thirteenth century. He situates medieval English urban politics in a European frame, particularly in the context of the important scholarship on cities in the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. He argues that, despite some disparities (particularly the presence of a powerful centralized monarchy), the internal workings of English and continental cities were more similar than different.

Liddy focuses on England's five largest urban centers during the late medieval period: London, Norwich, Coventry, Bristol, and York. The study explores a series of themes related to citizenship over five substantive chapters bookended by an introduction and conclusion. In chapter 2 he uses the oaths sworn by men entering the freedom to consider the multiple meanings of citizenship. In late medieval England the urban franchise was confined to adult men who were members of mercantile or artisanal guilds; citizens made up about 10 percent of the urban population. The oath by which a man entered the citizenry simultaneously bound him to obey his mayor and aldermen and admitted him to a corporate identity he shared with all freemen from the mayor to the humblest citizen artisan. The tensions between these vertical and horizontal associative ties allowed for and indeed encouraged contestation. In chapter 3, Liddy considers conflicts about urban space, particularly encroachments on public streets and urban enclosures, as a crucial issue that crystallized “a disputatious mode of citizenship” that simultaneously conceptualized the importance of “public” or “common” space and emphasized its restriction to citizens rather than the unenfranchised. Chapter 4 explores the distinctive temporality of urban politics, particularly the time-limited tenures of civic office and the calendar of annual election. Who among the citizenry should be permitted to participate in those elections remained an enduring and indeed, as Liddy argues, a structural element of conflict. In chapter 5, on communication, Liddy considers how civic leaders struggled—not altogether successfully—to control information, through proclamations, regulation of speech, and insistence on confidentiality and secrecy. In the last chapter Liddy takes as his subject the appearance of formal written constitutions of English towns in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which both emerged as an attempt to find a solution to the conflicts in urban political society and in turn came to be wielded as ideological support in quarrels over subsequent generations.

At numerous points, Liddy makes the important point that the archives of civic governments—upon which urban historians have, by necessity, overwhelmingly relied—were carefully crafted and curated. Urban leaders often concealed dissent beneath a documentary record that emphasized peace, order, and good government. Liddy's analyses take advantage of the fissures that these records nonetheless contain, their internal contradictions, to show that the unanimity of the corporate voice that a city's records present is not only a mirage but that the rhetorical insistence that the magistrates’ voice was the corporation of the city was a power play in itself. One might quibble that at times the logic of this insight is not fully pursued, perhaps particularly in the extent to which urban politics and citizen politics are equated throughout the book. The archives of English urban governments encompass, both as a practical reflection of jurisdiction and as rhetorical position, the parts of urban life that concerned the citizenry; much less represented, and indeed in some cases almost invisible in the civic archive, is the 90 percent of the urban population outside the franchise. The 90 percent—which included not only citizens’ dependents and poor unenfranchised workers but also privileged groups such as the clergy, stranger merchants, and aristocrats and gentlefolk with urban residences—also had an urban politics, which was not concerned solely with (their lack of) citizenship. But Liddy is, of course, right that understanding the complexities inherent in the urban franchise is essential for our understanding of medieval English cities, and his book will be required reading for medievalists and early modernists alike.