This Occasional Publication by the Hexham Local History Society is a valuable addition to the society's well-regarded annual journal, Hexham Historian. It is based on the late Anna Rossiter's M.Litt. thesis, submitted to Newcastle University in 1997, and its purpose is to consider Hexham in the period between the Reformation and the nineteenth century, which has tended to be neglected by its historians and the society. In particular, it focuses on the character and function of Hexham and on the town's government. The whole is amplified by extensive visual material.

The book opens with a thorough exposition of Hexham's geographical and historical context from the earliest documentary evidence in the later seventh century and extending over the next thousand years. It then moves on to offer a detailed analysis of the town's population history which is compared with the national picture to draw some interesting conclusions. For, whereas Hexham seemed to reflect the experiences of similar market towns, Rossiter also identifies two distinctive parallel influences: the impact of the pastoral nature of its hinterland on its market, and its attributes as a small industrial town. Accordingly, the second chapter concentrates on Hexham's occupational constituency which was dominated by the leather trade. However, the extent of that dominance was increasingly challenged as the century progressed, and a broad range of alternative trades in the town is also considered. Within this framework the wider economic base is analysed in the next chapter through hearth tax assessments, the built environment, records of land tenure and its exchange, probate inventories and documentation relating to credit relationships. From these it emerges that Hexham was relatively poor in comparison to other urban centres in England and that its economy was dominated by merchants and those engaged in the leather trades. The fourth chapter traces the town's government as a non-incorporated small town through the records of its manor court that ‘acted as a quasi-political institution which served as a focus for civic life’ (p. 214). These records are thoroughly interrogated to reveal the court's wide-ranging responsibilities which included social and trade regulation and maintenance of the local infrastructure. Interestingly, it also emerges that the manor court dealt with cases that more usually belonged to the ecclesiastical courts (of York in whose jurisdiction Hexham lay), which makes Hexham atypical in comparison with other parts of the country. The final chapter identifies those who exercised authority in the town as lords of the manor and as court officials, in particular those who served as one of the Four and Twenty most important representatives within the court and who were overwhelmingly leather tradesmen (as many as 90 per cent in 1634). The book concludes by considering those for whom they were responsible, revealing a strong sense of community in the town which the author speculates may have been a consequence of its being part of the regality of Hexhamshire and thus detached from its neighbours. This independence of spirit may also have explained Hexham's failure to seek borough status, reinforcing its distinctiveness.

The book would have benefited from a more robust concluding chapter, while inevitably the circumstances of the book's publication mean that it was not possible for recent work on the seventeenth-century town and the early modern north-east to be incorporated. For example, while it pays due regard to the town's situation in the border country it does not acknowledge the extent to which the border had long been more imaginary than real to its inhabitants and that the union of the crowns in 1603 was unlikely to ‘have had a dramatic effect on the social and economic situation in Hexhamshire’ as expected by the author (p. 32). It is also increasingly clear that Catholicism was no bar to participating in urban government, so that Catholics playing ‘a full part in the community and were not excluded from manorial office’ was not a specific characteristic of Hexham (pp. 231–2). That said, Rossiter is mindful of the methodological and documentary problems that are encountered in such a study and makes conscientious efforts to overcome them throughout the book. And, although the overall thesis is not as developed as it might have been, the author's comprehensive and meticulous local archival research and the amassing of an impressive range of valuable evidence makes this book a very useful contribution to the history of market towns in general as well as being of interest to those with a particular regard for the history of Hexham.