This is a particularly welcome addition to a new generation of London company histories. The authors are both distinguished historians, with an assured sense of the wider context in which the company of tailors of London have conducted at various times both their own craft and a range of charitable and educational activities. The paradox of such an institutional history is that it must omit a large portion of the history of tailoring in London. Tailors certainly plied their trade in the little-documented period before the fourteenth century in which they begin to appear in the records as an organised body, and thereby qualify for treatment in such a history as this one, while in more recent centuries, as in all the livery companies, the membership has had a steeply diminishing involvement in the practice of the craft itself. The parts of this book which give the best idea of what tailors actually made for their customers are a few vivid pages respectively on the late Middle Ages and on the eighteenth century. The volume is largely concerned with other issues: a fact which itself reveals much about the nature of what had already by 1500 become one of the richest companies in the metropolis. Indeed, the company's wider political and social connections are emphasised from the outset. The association or fraternity of master tailors in the late medieval period included a large category of non-tailor members, whose friendship was doubtless deemed useful to the craft in certain ways, and who in turn participated in devotions to the tailors' patron saint, John the Baptist, and in their communal feasts. Also of wider significance is Matthew Davies's revelation of the importance of a distinct fraternity maintained by the yeomen tailors: qualified craftsmen lacking the means to set up shop independently. A major theme of the later chapters is the educational role of the company. A livery company's patronage of education often began with the initiative of an individual who happened to be a company member – such as Thomas Whyte, the merchant tailor and former Lord Mayor of London who in the 1550s founded St John's College, Oxford, with the administration of which the company only subsequently became involved. But Ann Saunders stresses the seriousness with which the members of the company took their responsibilities as governors of a number of schools. There is an inevitable tendency to allow a study such as this to be infected by a certain institutional complacency; yet a good case is made here for seeing the Merchant Tailors as largely virtuous custodians of the company's considerable fortune. To recipients of their charity, they could appear as ministers of justice, as they did to boys at one of their schools, who petitioned in 1645 for some longed-for holidays: