Smuggling—the avoidance of customs duties on commodities, whether imported or exported—is, to use the word in the title of Jones's book, an illicit activity. Contemporaries may have suspected—indeed, known—that it was being carried on. They may have been opposed to it, or they might have tolerated it as a necessary cost to allow the continuation of trade and employment. The problem is, of course, that the records of government are the records of trade with the smuggling omitted and therefore cannot be readily used to estimate the scale of smuggling. The insight that forms the basis of the first part of this book is that a comparison of the private accounts of merchants (which reveal their real trading position) with the records of the customs officials who oversaw the merchant's trade can reveal the scale of smuggling. Therefore, after a careful comparison of the account book of John Smythe of Bristol with the customs accounts, we do get an insight into what was smuggled and the methods used by the smugglers to avoid customs payments. It turns out though that Smyth's illicit trade was in commodities whose export was normally banned, hides and grain. It was not a matter of avoiding duties but of exporting commodities that were subject to export prohibition. In the case of grain, Smythe did purchase licences and gave up export in the war years of the 1540s. Jones offers the interesting suggestion that without the export of grain and hides, Smythe lacked commodities that he could sell for ready money in Bordeaux and the Spanish ports, so an illicit outward trade was necessary to allow a legal import trade. Smuggling was not simply about avoiding duties but about managing to maintain a balanced trade.

While the insight that mercantile accounts can provide when compared with the customs accounts is well demonstrated, the problem arises that there are no other Bristol mercantile accounts extant from the sixteenth century. The larger part of the book therefore attacks the question of smuggling from a variety of angles, mostly drawing on the records of central government although making a great deal of a single incriminating letter from the later 1550s. There is copious material here about the methods employed by merchants who wanted to spirit goods abroad (or import them) without paying the full duty on them, but much of this comes from Elizabeth's reign. There is interesting later material on the appointment of customs officials. Names acceptable to the merchant community were canvassed by them and often came from the same families as the individuals who were trying to evade customs. As offices of profit, hard cash passed hands, between both retiring and incoming officials and aspirants for office, and Lord Burghley. This in itself indicates that the customers were not living off their salaries but were receiving bribes, and if not bribes, fees to facilitate trade. While the Crown was to a degree the prisoner of the city when it came to appointing officials, enough is also said to show that they did, on occasion, sack customs officers. This is never explored, but it does suggest more oversight than Jones allows. In addition, the government did make occasional reorganizations of the customs to try and plug loopholes, including extending the customs service to south Wales in 1564. What is also clearly demonstrated—and this is perhaps a universal problem—is how the Crown's requests for information were answered by the very people who had something to gain by concealing the very information that the Crown sought. In contrast, two reported instances of violence against customs men in seventy years hardly indicates a willingness to use force to defend the city's illicit trade.

Later chapters place smuggling in a larger context: not all goods were worth smuggling, just some at some times and places. The incentive for smuggling might also differ according to the scale of the merchant's activity. The economic logic that underpinned smuggling is elucidated. Jones does try and quantify some of the illicit trades in the later sixteenth century, but he leaves the impression that smuggling was a fact of life in Bristol but also not a terribly important one.

This then is an important book, but it remains very much a Bristol study by a Bristol-based historian. There is little attempt to generalize from the study. For a conclusion, we have four pages headed “the wider picture”: this unintentionally makes the point that this is, in some respects, a rather modest study. There is much more to be said about smuggling in other ports. Moreover, the problem that the Crown had with smuggling is but a single strand in a much larger problem of corruption and falsification that encompassed the lay subsidy and the accurate recording of land valuations in inquisitions postmortem and elsewhere. When one of the major problems faced by nation-states in the second decade of this century is tax avoidance in various forms, some larger generalizations about the parallels between sixteenth-century and current conditions might reasonably have been offered. As it is, there is some very rewarding material in this book, on smuggling itself, its necessity and incentives, in the problems faced by government and its attempts to overcome them and on the implication of the dark figure inherent in smuggling for our knowledge of the sixteenth-century economy. But one would have liked a greater recognition of the world beyond Bristol and more reflection on the implications of this study, which is best read as a discussion of the limits of government in the sixteenth century.