Although focused primarily on the growth of local and regional markets, this important study discusses relevant aspects of urban history, industrial and labour history, the development of overseas trade and changes in the land market. In one sense, therefore, it stands as a self-contained economic history of south-eastern England during the century after 1450. In another sense, it provides a major contribution to a larger debate about the recovery of the late medieval English economy and the extent of market growth during a critical period in which recession turned to sustained recovery.
Pride of place is given to changing relations between town and countryside, as the disappearance of small holdings was balanced by land purchases by those outside the village community, especially London merchants and local gentry. As large numbers of small village markets disappeared from c. 1440–70, trade became increasingly concentrated in urban centres, especially in Surrey and Sussex, although the former seem to have retained their importance in Kent. By and large, new economic developments were contained within the existing infrastructure of towns and markets across the three counties: by the 1520s, 13 large towns and around 40 small towns with populations of less than 1,000. Was the region already more highly urbanized than others of comparable size? The implication is that it may well have been: Christopher Chalklin has shown that by the 1660s, about a third of Kent's population were town dwellers, but no comparable estimates are offered here.
Revitalization of the regional economy proceeded through several channels: the growth of the Kentish cloth industry from the 1480s; the gradual expansion of the London food market, dependent especially on Kentish grain; and the modest growth of cross-channel trade, including the import of high-value goods such as wine, drinking glasses, dyestuffs and linens, exchanged for grain, firewood and timber, tallow, hides and skins and woollen goods. Above all these developments, however, the author singles out the expansion of beer-brewing as the most significant, in terms of its early establishment (the later fifteenth century) and the rapidity with which it spread. Retailing and brewing were both profitable, particularly for alien brewers who dominated the export trade, and a broader stimulus was exerted on the rural economy through the extensive cultivation of barley and the commercialization of malting. Small domestic brewers, especially women, were adversely affected as the taste for hopped beer reduced the demand for home-brewed ale.
A good deal of descriptive information is assembled about wage rates and conditions of work, but in the absence of serial data, few clear generalizations seem possible. Low rents and food prices after 1450 generated increased purchasing power, and by the 1520s, roughly 53 per cent of taxpayers across the region were wage-dependent and buying food for at least part of the year. Until population pressure built up in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, these conditions suggest a moderate degree of prosperity, especially when viewed alongside complaints about the spread of leisure pursuits such as card-playing, gambling, tennis and bowls. In addition to these pleasures, Canterbury residents could also try their hand at ‘closh’ (skittles played with a mallet), but needed to travel as far afield as Sandwich to find a brothel in the late 1490s. Improbably, the latter was under municipal control. If, as the author concludes, the economic changes of the period were not in themselves pivotal, they nevertheless provided the basis for future growth. But hopped beer and card games must have seemed poor compensation for the disappearance of customary land, and an ever-widening division between the upper and lower levels of society.
