‘Smuggling’, Evan Jones opens his introduction, ‘is perhaps more the stuff of storybooks than of serious history . . . It evokes a world of smugglers’ caves and smugglers’ tunnels, of brandy and tobacco unloaded in secluded coves and of desperate fights with Revenue men on moonless nights’ (p. 1). However, as demonstrated by his book and by W.B. Stephen's account of a customs survey during the 1680s, this is very far from the truth. Early modern smuggling, these studies show, was both far less and far more than coves and caves and swashbuckling mariners. Less, because the means employed to evade ‘Revenue men’ were rather more prosaic, and involved the complicity of customs officials themselves. More, because these analyses of the customs service, and the illicit trade which that service sought to suppress, reveal just how enmeshed this kind of trade was in the economies and political culture of urban centres such as Bristol and other major western ports. The activities of customs officials and smuggling merchants, and the relationships between them, offer a revealing and hitherto largely unexplored perspective on the connections between provincial towns and their trading hinterlands; and on the varying reactions to government policies regarding trade and tax.

In a carefully constructed and richly textured work, Evan Jones takes us ‘inside the illicit economy’ of sixteenth-century Bristol through an innovative methodology involving merchants’ own records. He begins with the question of customs accounts as a source for recovering trade levels throughout the medieval and early modern period, and the debate which developed over the accuracy and reliability of this evidence, in which the unanswered – and, some have assumed, unanswerable – question has remained ‘the nature, scale and prevalence of the illicit trade’ unrecorded by customs officials (p. 7). Smuggling initially drew the attention of historians not so much for its own sake, but because it bore upon the accuracy of calculations based upon this source material, and estimates about the ratio of illicit to legal trade have varied wildly. However, as he points out, this work largely relied upon official records, and Jones’ solution is a detailed analysis of Bristol merchants’ commercial papers. Although it is usually assumed that smuggling would automatically go unrecorded, there was little reason for merchants not to note their illicit trade in their own papers, because these were rarely used as evidence in court. In chapters 5 and 6, the centrepiece of the book, Jones presents a painstaking analysis of the papers of John Smyth and the brothers William and Robert Tyndall, from the 1530s and 1540s. His methodology is a careful approach of record-linkage and comparison, between official and private records and within private papers. Using the first technique, he demonstrates not only that these merchants were engaged in both legal and illegal trade, but that this focused on certain commodities. The internal analysis of private papers reveals the traders’ smuggling strategies in greater detail, offering much more than a simple assessment of the amount that Bristol merchants smuggled, encompassing their practices for moving uncustomed goods, their relations with other merchants and with suppliers, and their legal tactics when accused. The preceding and following chapters provide the necessary context for the patterns Jones uncovers in these merchants’ accounts. The first three chapters examine the financial motivations for smuggling, including commodity prices, customs duties and the crown's endeavours to control trade; the structure of the customs service, and attempted reforms by Tudor governments; and the ‘geography of smuggling’ in the Bristol Channel. After discussing Smyth's and the Tyndalls’ activities, he broadens his perspective again to the Bristol merchant community as a whole. Here, he assesses the use of Bristol's institutions to protect illicit trade, first against crown officials themselves, in which the city elite were largely successful both because of their influence within Bristol and because customs officials were often drawn from the same mercantile grouping and regularly involved in illicit trade themselves. However, they were less able to exclude other trading centres, principally Gloucester, which established itself as a rival jurisdiction in 1582. Jones’ penultimate chapter explores the important commodities of wine and cloth in more detail, and finally he questions the role of contraband in Bristol's economy. Smuggling, he concludes, was ‘a key component’ of this economy and a ‘matter of survival’ for Bristol merchants (pp. 216, 218). The situation was probably similar elsewhere, although Jones does not condemn all use of customs records as a consequence. His thoughtful approach and clear presentation open an unprecedented window upon the smuggling activities of Bristol's mercantile community.

W.B. Stephens’ book is less ambitious, offering an account of William Culliford's survey of the customs service throughout the western ports, which took place in 1682–4. In his first chapter, Stephens introduces Culliford's career as a civil servant from the 1660s onwards, and the somewhat arcane structure of the customs service during the later seventeenth century, not substantially changed from John Smyth's day. He then considers the weaknesses of the system, especially the sale of offices, the difficulties of recruitment and the regular involvement of customs officers in fraud and bribery. As in sixteenth-century Bristol, ‘many officers were integral members of close-knit local maritime communities’ and unlikely to prosecute their fellows (p. 23). The six subsequent chapters are essentially a narrative of Culliford's investigations, commendably detailed and certainly useful for researchers interested in the later seventeenth-century history of these ports, but with a tendency towards repetition because of the similarity of situations which Culliford uncovered in his travels. Practically everywhere, it seems, at least some customs officers were involved in the illicit trade they were supposedly entrusted with preventing, although it is also significant that in most places Culliford relied upon former smugglers or officials as informers. This implies a continued, but perhaps changing, tension between local and personal interests and those of the central government. However, no sustained comparison of the different ports is offered, and Stephens’ conclusion dwells more on Culliford's personal honesty, and on the consequences of the report for the customs service, than upon the social and economic significance of the activities that Culliford revealed.

These books open up a rich field for research, but this area of study could certainly be pushed further. For example, both authors use the terms ‘honesty’ and ‘corruption’ without considering what these concepts meant for contemporaries. Most intriguing is a letter between the Tyndalls mentioned by Jones, in which the Customer and Comptroller of Bristol were described as ‘honest men’ because they did not want to prosecute the Tyndall brothers for smuggling (pp. 125–6). Jones acknowledges that this is a different definition of ‘honesty’ than that expected by the crown, but does not consider what this implies for the existence and character of a local, mercantile political culture in some ways opposed to that of the central government. This broader question of the relationship between metropolis and provincial towns (and between provincial towns themselves) receives more attention from Jones than Stephens, who touches upon it only in his sixth chapter, discussing Plymouth. The evidence concerning illicit trade and attempts to counter it would be very fruitful for further analysis of attitudes towards government policy and its impact upon local interests. Even so, these two books prove that smuggling deserves to be the subject of ‘serious history’ after all.