The 1279–80 Hundred Rolls represent the return to a far-reaching royal enquiry into tenure and landholding – a ‘second Domesday’ – and the fine-grained evidence on people and property that they provide has long been fundamental to histories of medieval agrarian social structure. On the whole, the surviving Hundred Rolls returns lend themselves less readily to urban history, but the records for Cambridge, analysed here, are a major exception. The unusually detailed descriptions of Cambridge properties, their rents, holders and descent contained in these returns have been explored before, most notably by Frederic William Maitland in Township and Borough (1898). Studies of this material have, however, used incomplete evidence: Maitland and others thought that the Cambridge Hundred Rolls consisted of just the two rolls that were printed in the 1812–18 Record Commission edition, and before now studies have been based on this material only. In 2004, Sandra Raban drew attention to an overlooked third roll which completes Cambridge's return. The distinctive contribution of the pair of works under review – which represent a collaboration between an economist (Mark Casson) and three medieval historians (Catherine Casson, John Lee and Katie Phillips) – is to bring the missing roll into an analysis of medieval Cambridge and its property market for the first time.

Compassionate Capitalism contains most of this analysis, presented in six substantive chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. Four chapters focus on the Hundred Rolls data and the thirteenth century, and consider the dynamics of the property market (Chapter 2), the town's economic topography (Chapter 3) and families and their fortunes (Chapters 4 and 5). The two remaining chapters (6 and 7) range more widely to consider ‘Cambridge in a regional and national context’, and ‘Legacy: Cambridge in the 14th and 15th centuries’. Business and Community consists primarily of a 240-page edition and translation of the now complete Hundred Rolls text, plus 13 appendices of the primary material, drawn mainly from published sources, which was used to compile the larger database underpinning Compassionate Capitalism. A final appendix provides a detailed description of a number of Cambridge's leading family dynasties, and represents a supplement to similar material forming Chapter 4 of Compassionate Capitalism.

Considered together, this work provides valuable contributions in a number of areas. Most obvious is the new translation of the complete Cambridge Hundred Roll returns, which makes this important material accessible to scholars and students. The sections of Compassionate Capitalism that concentrate on the Hundred Rolls provide a fresh understanding of a number of different topics, for instance by demonstrating the hitherto underappreciated medieval development of the eastern side of the town. They also open up new perspectives on the spatial dimensions of the property market, and in doing so demonstrate the value of a regression analysis of rents (Chapter 2). Readers interested mainly in medieval Cambridge will also appreciate the attention to the development of the suburban areas of Barnwell and Chesterton. More broadly, the discussion of medieval Cambridge's dominance of its regional economy is useful and insightful.

The project also has weaknesses, caused partly by source problems which the authors do not fully acknowledge. While Cambridge's Hundred Roll returns are exceptionally rich, the borough has left few contemporary civic records. This might be one reason why the economic activities that helped to create the wealth of its elite remain rather obscure; thanks to the Hundred Rolls, we know a lot about properties and rents in the town, but less about trade, business and production. This makes it difficult (in Chapter 5) to consider the full range of influences on family fortunes. Analysis of occupations features in Chapter 3 as part of an attempt to reconstruct spatial patterns in the town's economy, though this appears to be done mainly using surnames, which poses significant challenges. The Hundred Rolls show that many property holders had portfolios consisting of multiple messuages, shops, market stalls and so on, which were apparently sublet to others. We know little, however, about the craftsmen or stall holders who actually occupied those properties. Even the property market, a central focus of Compassionate Capitalism, is hard to reconstruct using the Hundred Rolls alone, since information is given only on the perpetual rents attached to properties, and not on any lump sums paid to purchase them. A fuller analysis of charters alongside the Hundred Rolls might have shed more light on this issue.

A final comment concerns ‘compassionate capitalism’. The authors’ focus on this concept is less searching than readers might expect, given its prominence in the book's title. There is also extensive use of the word ‘philanthropy’, and again one might have hoped for fuller justification of its use in a medieval context. There is no doubt that the granting of property by townspeople to institutions such as the hospital of St John and Barnwell Priory is a striking feature of the Cambridge evidence. The authors conclude that ‘commercial prosperity seems to have gone hand in hand with local charity, enabling the town to expand its population without any serious erosion of the quality of life’, yet they quickly and rightly qualify this verdict on the effects of donations to institutions, noting that ‘while some of these gifts were purely altruistic, self-interest undoubtedly played a part as well’ (pp. 345–6). The question of whether medieval ‘capitalism’ was more ‘compassionate’ than its modern counterpart remains open.