Beautifully, and very accessibly, written, this book deserves to be recognised as an instantaneous classic. Over many years its author has surveyed, sifted, assimilated and teased convincing meanings from an astonishing array of original sources recording the voices of people once classed as ‘inarticulate’, ‘people without history’. Thanks to Wood, the terms no longer apply: Wood's ‘common people’, demonstrably, were neither inarticulate, nor were they without their own powerful senses of the agency of the past in the present. Nearly every page features examples of the author's wonderful eye for the telling, thoughtful quotation, methodically and sensitively abstracted from the ‘tens of thousands of cases concerning manorial and parochial custom’ in local, provincial and national archives of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. As Keith Wrightson observes on the back cover, ‘This is a book to be read slowly and to savour’. Let me add that it is also a page-turner, and a book to be returned to again and again.

Beyond his superb archival material, which for Wood always has precedence over theory and is used to test and reshape it, this book has several important points of departure. It is a deeply original contribution to the rich, interdisciplinary field of memory studies, for example, thoughtfully and critically surveyed in a lucid introduction. Of all the exponents of the new social history of early modern England, Wood has always determinedly probed the archives, so pervaded by the priorities of the managerial ‘middle sorts’, for insight into the lives and minds of the labouring poor. Above all, it seems to me that this book breathes new life into, and re-frames, seminal hypotheses posed by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class and in the essays collected in Customs in Common. What was common, shared by many of the upper ranks of the Commonalty and, it seems, nearly all of the ‘poorer sorts’, was what I will call ‘customary intelligence’. It is clear that Wood, like Thompson, would prefer the word ‘intelligence’, which has more active and creative connotations than ‘mentality’. Example after example, from all parts of England, triumphantly vindicates Gramsci's insistence that intellect and imagination are universal human attributes, and that, from the earliest usable sources in the late middle ages, the English ‘organic intellect’ was shaped by a profound and creative sense of custom.

At its best, intelligence creates meaning from tangible, experienced realities. This is where Wood's account of the organic intelligences of the labouring classes of early modern England parts company with the ‘Customs in common’ model. Every student of early modern localities is struck, sooner or later, by their extraordinary variety. New histories of the parish state and the precocious influence in England of trafike (commerce) and fast-moving newes, have eroded the old view that early modern localities were isolated, ‘parochial’ in the pejorative sense. Wood allows his sources to show that the labouring classes of early modern England, excluded from increasingly national and nationalist discourses and institutions of power and themselves restricted to the localities, constantly applied their imaginations and intelligences to their own, immediate, concrete social contexts. In other words, to the localities, the immediate, everyday landscapes, ecologies and social relations in which, necessarily, they situated themselves. Thus what emerges from these archives of everyday life, at a time when new, progressive, ‘improving’ accounts of the nation's history were emerging and shaping the education of the elites, is a multitude of alternative usable histories, interpretations of present disputes hewn from social memory.

Thinking about the challenge posed by the quantity, heterogeneity and above all specificity of Wood's sources, I was reminded of something Clifford Geertz said about ‘what actually happens when someone tries to “make sense” out of something known about from assorted materials. . . It is not history one is faced with, nor biography, but a confusion of histories, a swarm of biographies.’Footnote ¹ Wood's triumph is that he does, ultimately, forge an alternative history, in the singular, that makes strong historiographical sense of a process unfolding out of a multitude of local histories over many centuries. I am left with a very strong impression of an over-arching and, until now, largely unwritten world view that was the precise opposite of, and indeed, as Thompson insisted, a genuine alternative to, the emergent, property obsessed, positivist, ‘Whiggish’ version of the national history.

General considerations should not be allowed to detract from the richness of original detail deployed throughout the book. Wood divides his account into ‘four (probably overlapping) historical shifts’, roughly 1349-c.1480, 1480-c.1560, c.1560–1660, and 1660–1790. Students of each of these periods will find much to interest and illuminate them. The book will certainly be a mine of usable and striking quotations for social, literary, linguistic, religious, political and cultural historians. Let me conclude with Wood's definition of social memory, which he carefully distinguishes from ‘collective memory’. There is, he writes:

Historians of localities, and of ‘uneducated’ popular minds, may find this distinction useful. Wood makes brilliant and inspiring use of it, as readers of his book will discover.