The literature on the medieval wool market is both highly specialized and of recent vintage. Indeed, only a few works—most notably Eileen Power's The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford, 1941)—listed in this book's bibliography date before 1980. This particular offering, the product of some ten years of research and preparation, attempts to do two things: first, to provide an accurate and detailed image of the English wool trade in an important period in its development and, second, to present a modern economic analysis of the efficiency and productivity of this dominant medieval international economic system. The authors succeed on both counts, although social historians might find the process of reading the text a little frustrating because of its technical focus, and economists (which this reviewer patently is not) might find the text frustrating for the assumptions of knowledge of medieval English society the authors necessarily make. Nevertheless, this book is one that both social and economic historians might find quite useful.

The English wool trade is most often discussed in its later fourteenth-century incarnation as the Wool Staple, the monopolistic system created in the reign of Edward III to control the pricing and exporting of English wool. Those who are familiar with the Paston letters recognize the Staple as one of the mechanisms by which gentry families like the Pastons gained both wealth and influence. This book touches little on the later Wool Staple; rather, it focuses on the short period of time—mostly the last quarter of the thirteenth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth—when advance contracts began to proliferate between merchants from France, Flanders, and (most frequently) Italy and many of the largest wool producers in England, especially the Cistercian houses in England, Wales, and Ireland. The authors apparently became interested in these advance contracts because of particular information they could offer that other aspects of the wool trade could not. First, they are contained as to total number and over time, making it possible to generate a solidly representative database. Second, they appear in archival sources that are readily accessible, mostly at the National Archives at Kew in the Exchequer series of pleas and remembrancers. Third, the contracts can be traced over time and compared with “spot prices” of the nonadvance wool market and can therefore demonstrate whether such contracts were beneficial to the parties involved and whether the delivery systems employed were efficient. Fourth, the period under study included the two most severe economic crises to occur in the wool market before the Black Death: the outbreak of scab (a skin disease that ruins the fleeces) in the 1270s and ’80s and the Great Famine with its accompanying waves of murrains that decimated flocks in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. This period can thereby reveal how fluctuations in supply affected the wool market.

The conclusions reached—that such advance contracts were indeed a good investment for the merchants and a good return for the suppliers and that the market system in place was both efficient and sophisticated—come from an exhaustive analysis of the data collected from a very large array of primary sources. These are supplemented by an elegant use of secondary sources that provide both comparative material and fodder for discussion and persuasion. I cannot pretend to understand the intricacies of the mathematical and statistical models used by the authors, but the conclusions reached seem plausible and reasonable, and their presentation of them is accessible. In addition, the appendixes provide summaries of data collected and an itemized list of every contract used in the book, which will doubtless be useful to anyone wishing to pursue more work on this topic.

My pleasure in the book, however, came not from its diligent numbers crunching but from some of the more anecdotal material that reveals a great deal about the relations between the sheep and wool powerhouse monastic communities—especially the Cistercians, who seem to have been the powerhouse agricultural conglomerates, like the Archer Daniels Midland of the medieval world—and their neighbors, patrons, church leaders, the crown, and the international merchants with whom they did business. I was fascinated to read, for example, that abbots sometimes engaged in the very shady practice of selling their annual wool staple more than once to different people. I was also fascinated to read about the ways in which the abbots would use the wool market to evade antiusury laws and even the laws of their own chapters general in order to acquire funds to advance their building projects and augment their treasuries and that they were not always the exemplary money managers they should have been. Although mentioned only briefly, the fact that noble patrons would sometimes bail out communities in financial straits suggests that patronage even of Cistercian houses was far more hands-on than most might assume. These elements humanized what could have been an exceedingly dry read. That it was not a painful slog is a testament to the authors, who seem to have worked hard to present their material in a way that could appeal to an array of specialized readers.

Although likely not superseded any time soon, this study should provide both a jumping point and a model for future studies on the wool market. The authors are to be commended for presenting a readable and sophisticated analysis of this essential component of the medieval English economy.