Over the past two decades, the field of medieval economic history has been transformed by a plethora of studies devoted to markets and commercial development written by scholars such as Richard Britnell, Christopher Dyer, and Maryanne Kowaleski. James Davis's expansive new book marks another milestone in this movement, building on earlier work to ask important new questions about the cultural values and social challenges raised by commercial expansion. Davis takes the fact of profound commercial change largely for granted and focuses his attention instead on the interplay among ethics, law, and social reality, with the goal of assessing the extent to which religious and political ideologies interacted with practices on the ground.
The book is divided into three main thematic sections. The first section explores cultural constructs related to commerce that can be found in a variety of sources, including works of literature, sermons, and confessors’ manuals. Writers and clerics of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries recognized that economic life had changed substantially, presenting many new and difficult issues for society. Davis delves into contemporary discussions of a number of related issues, such as usury, the just price, avarice, and distinctions between honest and deceitful business practices. Like others who have investigated these topics, Davis finds a great deal of condemnation in the period's moralizing works, indicating considerable discomfort with the new economic realities. But unlike many others, he argues that moralists were also frequently willing to recognize that trade created social benefits as well as social problems. According to Davis, most critiques were really about commercial malpractice rather than the intrinsic nature of commerce itself.
In the book's second section, Davis explores the treatment of commerce at the level of politics and law. Once again, he finds a good deal of negative sentiment expressed in statutes, parliamentary acts, urban customals, and various other prescriptive sources. These negative sentiments gave rise to serious and sustained attempts to regulate economic activity on many different fronts. Abuse of the coinage was a perennial concern, for example, as was the use of illicit weights and measures. The regulatory framework developed over these centuries was remarkably extensive and is an impressive testament to the ambitions of the English state. The range of regulation is so extensive that Davis found it somewhat difficult to draw general conclusions about overarching goals. Two elements stand out, though, as particularly fundamental: the ongoing effort to maintain commercial activity in the public sphere and a deeply rooted commitment to maintaining the quality and cost of foodstuffs.
Section 3 presents a case study of how local authorities implemented regulation on the ground. It features a detailed study of rule enforcement in two moderately successful markets in Suffolk in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Newmarket and Clare. A relatively good collection of court rolls has survived for each place to illustrate the regulatory concerns of local officials. For the sake of comparison, Davis also includes an overview of the regulatory environment in Ipswich, Suffolk's leading town. He found that while a distinct legal and business environment existed in each place, the similarities in regulatory approach were more striking than the differences. All three were selective when deciding which rules and regulations to enforce, and they all were more dedicated to controlling dealings in foodstuffs than other commodities. The assizes of bread and ale loomed large in all three centers, as did efforts to oversee regrating and forestalling. Officials in each place were deeply committed to enforcing regulations, but they viewed existing laws as a set of guidelines for good governance and fair dealing rather than as hard rules requiring strict observance. In this respect, the cultural traits and legal environment discussed in the book's first two parts were clearly relevant to behavior, but they were also clearly tempered by local pragmatism and decision making.
Davis ends the book with an extended treatment of E. P. Thompson's well-known argument about the movement from a moral economy to a capitalist economy. While Davis disagrees that the eighteenth-century break from the past was as stark or as dramatic as Thompson contended, he does subscribe to the view that social welfare loomed much larger in the cultural dynamics of earlier periods than it has in the past two centuries. One of Davis's chief aims is to demonstrate a continuous history of social thought and regulatory practice extending right through from the medieval period to the eighteenth century. He thus takes issue with a number of early modern specialists who have posited a turn away from medieval notions of social welfare under the influence of Protestantism and colonial riches. Profound economic changes certainly did occur, he argues, but medieval principles of social justice and communal regulation were nearly as influential in 1700 as they had been in 1400.
Overall, this is an important new book that makes a major contribution to what is now a mature field. The book's structure sometimes leads to thematic repetition, but the central arguments are consistently developed and clearly articulated. Davis successfully bridges the gap between cultural history and economic history, showing how values and ideals were intertwined with the economy and vice versa. By bringing these two fields of enquiry together, Davis advances our understanding of both fields and illustrates the benefits of working across established scholarly boundaries.
