This admirable book is the outcome of many years of scholarly research on the medieval economic and social history of Wiltshire and surrounding counties. It will be of interest to those studying late medieval economic change at a regional scale, as well as county historians. The author uses a wide range of manuscript sources, printed documents and past studies to provide a nuanced but largely positive analysis of economic developments over the period c 1380–1520. As such, the book is a worthy addition to the University of Hertfordshire's valuable series of studies in regional and local history, not least because of its good use of supporting maps, photographs and tables.

The book's main theme is the growing commercialization and specialization of farming and craft production in the period. This is seen to have led to a growing contrast between the county's two main landscape areas: the chalklands, where sheep–corn husbandry came to dominate, and the clay vales, where farming took on a more pastoral bias. In the chalk country, there were many large estates and farmers built up substantial holdings partly from former demesne lands, while in the clay vales, where small manors predominated, demesnes were leased earlier and land units remained generally smaller. Central to these changes was the burgeoning cloth industry, which stimulated rural production around Salisbury, in west Wiltshire, and in the north east near Marlborough. The book provides useful analysis of the economy of Salisbury – which rose to become a major national centre in the later Middle Ages – and the county's other, smaller towns, all of which were intimately connected to the surrounding countryside. Hare also pays due attention to the exposure of the economy to fluctuations in cloth exports and the severe social consequences of this at times of crisis such as 1450.

A Prospering Society has many virtues. The greatest of these is that it combines broad coverage with concision. Thus in a relatively slim volume we find such varied topics as landlords and rents, the mobility of the rural population, the peasant land market, the internal economy of the village, the urban hierarchy and town occupations, and the social and economic context of political revolt. There are also valuable sections on the county's landscape, on earlier agriculture before the Black Death, and on the broader national economic context. The discussion of sources is frank about the limitations: the surviving documents have some serious weaknesses and gaps, particularly for the fifteenth century, and they tell us much more about the chalklands than the vale and about lords and big farmers than smaller tenants (pp 4–5, 59, 80).

Hare rightly acknowledges the scope for further work, though his well-written and deeply researched book will surely be the foundation upon which it is built. Future investigation may elucidate the causes and timing behind the divergence between the chalklands and vales which is evident by the sixteenth century. But it will doubtless also underline the complexity of the patterns that emerged. After all, some vale areas were strongly affected by the growth of the cloth industry (p 178), and many vale parishes offered better soils and more diversified economies than the thin chalklands of east Wiltshire and the Salisbury Plain (p 18). Hare's evidence leads him to focus on what he describes (perhaps with some exaggeration) as the ‘large-scale capitalist agriculture’ of the late medieval chalklands (p 208), but it would be interesting to uncover more about economic and social life in the clay vales and the wooded areas of western and eastern Wiltshire, which included a number of royal forests (with their own records). In these landscapes there were varied opportunities for commercial enterprise and a more equitable social structure than in the chalklands, where landless wage labourers were coming to be dominated by farmers. The documentation of the vales and woodlands may be scrappy, but it will repay close analysis.