John Heritage, the subject of this fascinating study, was born around 1470 at Burton Dassett in south-east Warwickshire. He first emerges in 1495, taking over a large agricultural enterprise on the death of his father, and leasing newly enclosed lands. By 1500, he had become a well-established wool trader at Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, where his father-in-law had bequeathed a burgage plot. Heritage kept an account book of his dealings in wool, recently discovered among the archives of Westminster Abbey, which lists the producers from whom he purchased his fleeces, and the London merchants to whom he sold them. His later life is something of a mystery, but he seems to have left the Moreton area soon after 1520 and settled in London. The lack of personal sources, such as letters, diaries or even Heritage's will, makes it unfeasible to write a conventional biography; instead, this book is ‘an exploration of the insights that an individual life can throw on the structures and trends of a particular period’. Heritage's activities are expertly placed within the context of broader economic, social and cultural trends, and used to address wider historical questions about the period, including the transition from an agrarian to modern society, and the extent to which society became less community focused and more individualistic.

Heritage did not make a great fortune or pursue a prominent public role. He was a contemporary of John Colet, Thomas More, John Skelton and Thomas Wolsey, but was unlikely to have been known to them. His brother Thomas served as Surveyor of the King's Works after being expelled from Oriel College, Oxford, but John's career was based in the Cotswolds. John married Joan Palmer, a relative of Palmer of Lemington, whom the antiquarian John Leland described as ‘a gallant fellow, and clothed in mighty colours’. Heritage's ‘country’, the area in which he traded and farmed, comprised an eight-mile radius of Moreton. The area was administratively complex, with the meeting point of four counties, and included upland and lowland landscapes. Commercial links existed to neighbouring towns, larger centres, regional capitals and London. Heritage's social ties are also explored against the religious and cultural backdrop of the period. He was an active participant in the government of Moreton as a manorial court juror between 1507 and 1515. He joined the fraternities at Stratford-upon-Avon and Knowle, and probably others, to benefit from their spiritual, social and business functions.

Heritage's account book was one of a new generation of more informal documents that emerged during this period and which rarely survive. He used a relatively rudimentary system of accounting, rather than double-entry book-keeping, but this still enabled him to track records of each purchase, as well as providing an overview of the scale of the business. Most of Heritage's contacts were within eight miles of Moreton, including the ring of market towns of Shipston-on-Stour, Chipping Norton, Stow-on-the-Wold and Chipping Camden. Many were relatively small-scale producers, with flocks of fewer than 100 sheep. Most people who sold to Heritage did so only intermittently, reflecting the competition from many other rivals. Heritage's buyers included London merchants, who exported through Calais to textile-producing centres in Flanders, and a variety of more local middlemen. Although none of the purchases can be identified with the south Gloucestershire cloth-making industry around Stroud, which flourished in this period, Heritage made his largest single sale of wool to the brother of Thomas Paycock of Coggeshall (Essex), and he probably also sold wool to Thomas Spring of Lavenham (Suffolk). These were two of the most prominent clothiers in early sixteenth-century England. Credit arrangements and payments in kind are itemised in the accounts, reflecting the shortage of coinage in the wider economy. The account book suggests that Heritage was ‘a very fallible business man’, unable to keep a full record of all his dealings, and who paid some suppliers slowly and irregularly. Unfortunately, the lack of similar surviving accounts makes it difficult to assess the extent to which his contemporaries operated in the same way.

Dyer uses Heritage's career to examine wider changes within the agricultural economy. This was an age of enclosures, engrossing, deserted villages and sheep farming. At Burton Dassett, Heritage co-operated with the acquisitive landlord, and may even have prompted him to push less wealthy and influential neighbours off the land. Heritage sold his family holding to enable the holdings to be reorganised and open fields to be turned into closes. He also encroached onto common pastures with his sheep flocks, depriving other villagers of grazing. Dyer concludes that changes within the countryside were unlikely to have resulted in significant increases in output or profits at this time, but laid the way for further developments during the sixteenth century.

While an earlier generation of historians saw these years as a key period in which changes in agriculture, property and institutions led to the birth of capitalism, more recent interpretations have tended to stress the continuities. Dyer explores differing interpretations of the period based on population and resources, the transition to capitalism, the role of the state, commercialisation and social restructuring, concluding that while there were elements of change within these five different approaches, they did not mark significant turning points. This book provides an accessible overview of these historiographical approaches, but also gives a very human account of the conditions in which Heritage lived. Dyer notes that making a living from the land and market was not easy: labour was scarce and costly, and there was intense competition between wool buyers. He describes Heritage as ‘too small a fish to be able to make waves in the economy of his day’. Yet he was more typical of the age than more famous contemporaries like the clothiers Thomas Paycock and Thomas Spring. This excellent study integrates biography, and family local history to illuminate key questions of continuity and change within the wider economy and society at the end of the medieval period.