The Merchant Taylors’ Company is one of the oldest and most influential of London's livery companies. As such, its history is very deeply intertwined with that of the city and nation. The authors of the present work have done an able job describing the contours of the company's history in a series of narrative chapters, with the vast majority of consideration given to the company's early centuries.

A group of craftsmen, closely linked to the Fraternity of St. John the Baptist, emerged in London by the year 1300, with letters patent from the crown in 1327 issued to the “Tailors and Armourers” of the city. Over the next two centuries, the company grew in wealth and prestige in city life, cementing its position as one of London's most successful and influential guilds. Like other leading companies, it concerned itself closely in the regulation of its trade, but its governors increasingly were men involved in mercantile activities. This trend led to a royal charter of 1503 renaming the company the “Merchant Taylors.” In the sixteenth century, the guild altered its communal rituals in accord with the religious changes of the period. Despite the presence of prominent figures on competing sides of the confessional disputes of that era among the company's leadership (such as the early Protestant Richard Hilles and the Catholic Sir Thomas White), the Merchant Taylors functioned effectively and built a solid reputation for charities that benefited provincial towns as well as the metropolis. During the political crises of the seventeenth century the company “kept its head low” (197), a strategy that was not applicable to the devastation of the Great Fire of 1666, which destroyed vast amounts of its capital and severely strained its ability to meet its obligations. By the late seventeenth century, the company was firmly in the hands of governors who cared little for the artisinal tradition. From that point onward, it was largely a fraternal and charitable organization, which in many respects it remains to this day.

This book is very much an “official” history of the Merchant Taylors’ Company in the sense that, as the authors indicate in their preface, the company's History Committee “entrusted” them with the task of undertaking their study. There is nothing unusual about this relationship—indeed it is typical of the way that other company histories have been commissioned and produced in recent years—but the appearance of this disclosure at the outset of the work communicates to the reader that the primary intended audience of the work is the company and its members. Following from that, the endnote and bibliographic references quite naturally skate over the surface of the boiling cauldron that is the historiography of London. Still, this is a richly illustrated volume that contains many anecdotes and supporting materials (such as lists of company officers) that would be of some interest to historians of London and to historians of craft guilds in other towns. Given the book's limited historiographical engagement and high price, there would seem little need for most college and university libraries to add it to their collections, but the authors certainly have achieved their main goal of producing a work that serves the company's interests while having the potential to be of some use to professional historians as well, and that is no mean feat.