Eliza Hartrich's insightful Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England, 1413–1471 offers a sharp reassessment of late medieval English political culture through a focus on towns and cities. It makes an impressive case for the concept of the urban sector, defined as both a set of specific political interests and as the sum of interpersonal and business networks that connected townspeople together. This heuristic allows Hartrich to move fluently between local and national politics, showing how disputes peculiar to an individual town could align with (or skew) broader public discourse. Despite this conceptual clarity, however, Hartrich refuses to be drawn into the metanarratives of late medieval English urban life; the specters of “urban decline” or the “rise of oligarchy” are quickly exorcized by an argument that places more emphasis on what we might call structural volatility.

What has been termed the new constitutional history of late medieval English politics has tended to neglect towns—or to consider them only as an afterthought to landed society. Hartrich shows with great acuity why towns should be considered within the mainstream of political life. As focal points of economic activity, they represented a major source of taxable wealth for the crown; as nodes within official communication networks, they were vital to the circulation of news and propaganda; occupying strategic locations on major roads, they could be militarily significant in the sporadic conflicts of the Wars of the Roses. While Hartrich is careful not to present the urban sector as a coherent bloc, she shows that politically it represented more than the sum of its parts—one that, as she argues, ought to take a more pivotal place in the narrative of this period.

The first chapter sets up some of the more enduring features of urban politics across the later Middle Ages, and the way in which they helped to constitute an urban sector. Particularly compelling here is her insight that the dichotomous “town-crown” relationship, long the frame of reference for urban historians, also worked to create relationships between cities themselves. When town representatives sought a new charter, went to sue litigation at the court of Common Pleas, or sent MPs to parliament in Westminster, they came into contact with other such representatives and were able to identify common interests, strategies, and programs. Similarly, commerce brought together business networks into a more or less coherent mercantile lobby, bound by both personal contacts and the credit they lent to the crown. While the book is clearly written throughout, this chapter stood out for its lucidity; I will certainly be setting it for my own undergraduates as a survey of urban political society in late medieval England.

The subsequent chapters, making up the body of the book, present a political narrative beginning with the reign of Henry V and ending with Edward IV's reclamation of the crown in 1471, broken up into four discrete passages of time. The second chapter gives a pacey account of the years between 1413 and 1435, a period in which Hartrich argues that trends in urban politics stemmed less from urban interconnection than from the cues given by royal government. Particularly interesting here is the evidence for a growing concern with the politics of counsel among town governments after 1422, who rushed to define the responsibilities of members of their own councils just as that for the infant Henry VI was taking shape.

As the strength of royal government melted away, however, so too did the institutional links of the urban sector. They were replaced by more “informal and ephemeral networks between individual merchants” (74). Chapter 3, examining the years from 1435 to 1450, shows the effects of this change. Where the crown had previously sought tax from town corporations that were relatively accountable to their inhabitants, now it raised money through loans from rich merchants, leading to confused, clientelist policy making. Interestingly, this tendency towards the “privatization of power” also had countervailing effects as these merchants, many of whom occupied high civic office, leveraged their influence with the crown to gain corporate privileges for their home towns. It was very easy, in such circumstances, for some of them to confuse their own interests with those of the “common weal,” emerging in this same period as the modish keyword of English politics.

Chapter 4, tracing the period between 1450 and 1461, shows that after a decade of stagnating institutional ties, town governments saw little reason to involve themselves in the incipient struggles of elite politics. They stayed neutral in the turmoil of the early 1450s, fearing the loss of their liberties if they backed an unsuccessful challenge. Yet towns would soon become involved in the wars, so what changed? Hartrich argues that the sack of Sandwich by the French navy in 1457 demonstrated the real risks of a king unable to defend his subjects; this, along with the changing allegiance of Calais Staple merchants and the fear of Margaret of Anjou's northern army in 1461, drove shy urban Yorkists into the open. In their manifestoes of 1459 and 1460, York and Warwick began to use the language of commonweal and common profit and found an attentive urban audience.

The final chapter takes us through the first decade of Edward IV's reign, a period of dramatic change driven by exogenous economic forces. The slump in international trade and the devaluation of the currency in 1464–65 hit elite merchants hard but left artisanal workers serving local markets to profit from the expanding population. This change in fortunes soon made its effects felt in urban politics as the common citizenry sought to hold elite officeholders to account. The growth of tensions in urban political life through this decade made towns fertile grounds for the renewed warring of 1469–1471, as internal rivalries began to align themselves with the national factions.

Hartrich makes a compelling case for integrating the “urban sector” into the new constitutional history of fifteenth-century England. Consistently maintaining a careful balance between linear and structural explanation, she concludes that “the role of the urban sector in English politics thus continually fluctuated, but not in a way that was uncoordinated or haphazard” (227). While I would have been interested to see Hartrich explore the implications of this idea of political change—was it characteristic of this period in particular, or can it tell us something more general about the temporality of late-medieval urban politics?—such arguments would have taken us beyond her remit. In presenting us with a novel account of this critical period of English political history, Hartrich has made a lasting contribution to scholarship.