Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London is a valuable book. David Harry's main aim is clear: the term common profit was developed by London's governors in the hurly-burly around Northampton's 1383 downfall and heavy-handed royal meddling in the next decade when Richard II picked a warden to run the city. It came of age as expressive elements in a reconfigured “transactional policy” through which governors offered themselves as “saviours” taking citizens’ interests to heart and getting loyalty and service in return (65, 10). We call this paternalism and deference in later centuries, and something might have been said about that.

The book has six chapters. The first two examine the aftermath of political crisis when city government needed to be put on a firmer footing with liberties and authority fully intact. Resulting reforms led to a trebling in the number of bureaucrats; common councilors picked by wards; a more powerful Court of Alderman; and vocabularies of “common profit” that were strategically spun for good governance and to fix reciprocal relations between governors and governed (all the while putting governors’ interests above anything else). “The absence of further radical change,” Harry says, “suggests” that all of this was “successful” (38). Critical was Common Clerk John Carpenter's volume of London's charters and ordinances, Liber Alus, probably finished c. 1419 but begun maybe three decades earlier and possibly commissioned by Mayor Whittington in its later stages. “Common profit” is a rallying slogan in these pages, made clear in the oaths of officers and officials that stressed service and governance. Carpenter's Liber Alus was a robust avowal of London's rights and liberties that was put together in torrid times when they were felt to be in danger.

The cornerstones of the third chapter on royal entries are accounts of Richard II's 1392 ceremony attributed to a Carmelite friar and two of Henry VI's 1432 entry by John Carpenter and John Lydgate in a poem. These were framed narratives of ceremonies with scripts and stage-management with “common profit” motifs. Harry notes four key messages in Carpenter's narrative, although he only gives the details of three: London was the king's “royal chamber” and important for him; Londoners had special access to the king; and, thirdly, peace. Theater like this was “an event that maintained the political ideology of the common profit” (90). The fourth chapter, on memorializing “the exemplary dead,” examines the death monuments of worthy Londoners who believed staunchly in good governance. These civic bigwigs, mayors among them, were remembered for admirable deeds like charity to stir others to do the same: “Such as I am, so shall you be.” They were linked to the living community, and the binding tie was “common profit.” Another accepted connection was between salvation and good governance. This was further communicated within “consciously fashioned” communities of merchants and traders with ties to government and who read “common profit” religious books (148); Harry covers these in the fifth chapter. The opening of the Guildhall Library in 1425 where “common profit” was stamped in manuscripts and documents provided a home for men like them who read “divine scripture.” The last chapter also dwells on the written word in the fifteenth century, when literacy grew (although no figures on this growth are supplied). It focuses on Caxton's Caton (1484) in this age of printing and a number of his other works that all feature the term common profit, with emphasis on charity and governance in their prologues but not in the main body of the text. This inclusion, Harry says, was politically significant because it invited Caxton's mainly householder readers to take part in civic politics and better their own “moral condition” for the benefit of their city (174).

Harry's broad argument seems sound enough. He shows that the term common profit had purchase and resonance in late medieval London that he tracks down in manuscript and literary texts. Harry is good on textual representations, knowing full well that his London is not “a real city” (176) in his pages. It is a “literary product” (176). His texts and rituals matter because they were doctored and carefully sorted by “self-serving” officials “to promote a specific interpretation of events” for their ends (177). These texts frame how to see government then and now from one side only. Unlike the lion's share of work on reciprocal social relations in later centuries, Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London is about ideology, not society. There is little if anything on responses from anyone outside governing ranks, not even filtered through partisan “official” commentaries. Surviving sources might not make this possible, although we do have social histories of late medieval London and, more broadly England. This book can be heavy going at times. The writing is a bit dense in places, and there are no less than forty-two footnotes on two consecutive pages (120–21)! There is also a little unnecessary repetition; some chapters begin with fairly lengthy recaps of the argument up to that point that ought to have been saved for closing remarks (the sixth chapter is a notable culprit). But even though they interrupt the flow, these are not grave matters. Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London breaks new ground because it has far more to say about representations and rhetorics than we commonly get in work on governing late medieval London.

The results are more nuanced senses of governance above and beyond dry institutional studies. This makes Constructing a Civic Community in Late Medieval London a very timely, welcome, and important book.