Now and then someone stretches a point too far over ground too thin to back it up; nice ideas suddenly seem shaky; arguments leak authority. Frank Rexroth tries hard to show that an underworld was lodged in Londoners’ minds around 1400, but I do not think that he proves his point. Revealingly, he writes that a conceptualization he calls “transparency” was “so self-evident” at the time that there was no word for it (96). Also, courts did not “invoke concrete instances” of people inhabiting underworlds, relying instead on talk of reputations (207). But reputations for what? Sex (no fees mentioned), late-night high jinks, and drinking binges are nothing out of the ordinary at all.

This is striking in a book on how “reality and thinking about reality determined each other” (18). One tricky difficulty in pinning down perceptions is finding enough continuous depth in contemporary words forming solid thoughts that became accepted. Rexroth does not do so in either policies or prosecutions. He calls his evidence “excellent” (17), but I am less sure that it says what he wants it to. Typical wrongdoing is by someone like William Taylor who hung around Shoe Lane in the dark, hassling passersby, or two women who had sex with two priests and “unknown men.” Taylor was a nasty piece of work, but these were run of the mill slipups. Like others, he appears once and disappears for good. And what about numbers? “A large number of people” fell on the wrong side of the law when the need for “unity” became pressing as war dragged on, Rexroth says; the “highpoint” was in autumn 1340 when forty-seven troublemakers were nabbed in twelve wards. A “unique” day, Rexroth writes, but we have only two years of records before this crackdown. John of Northampton started a “persecution” of London's lowlife when he became mayor in 1381, netting two beggars in November, one in the next month, and two more in February 1382 (47–48, 145).

This book was first published in German in 1999, and not a word has been added or changed since then except in translation. The nub of the matter is that an underworld grew in times of crisis: the Hundred Years War, Black Death, and constitutional change (1376–84). Policing was improved in wartime. Wardmotes were put under city courts for the first time on record (a moot point as little survives from earlier times). Ideas of a “massive external threat” (unconvincing as the war was often a cold one with the bulk of fighting on French turf or at sea) turned London into “symbols” of panic leading to the first official hounding of an underworld (56). And shortly after as earth-shaking plague left folk dazed and uneasy, laws stiffened resolve, singling out workshy beggars as categories of anxieties. Next John of Northampton began “a spectacular fight against falsity and immorality” (143); the central plank was the first decree aimed at underworld deviance and violence (the “great statute” Rexroth calls it), homing in on key figures, bawds, procurers, strumpets, scolds, pimps (“priest[s] of the counter-world” [179]), adulterers, and ruffians. The results of these encounters were more discrimination, new norms, and aldermen with ideas that “a secret, immoral counter-society” marked by sloth, stealth, depravity, brutality, trickery, and contagion “imperiled” the “majority society” (304–6). Purity and transparency were linchpins of new norms—John of Northampton was “a virtuoso of transparency” (143). Things ought to be wholesome, virtuous, and crystal clear, not cloak-and-dagger, crafty, or seedy. The underworld also had an institutional spine (brothels, sleazy pubs, evening markets) but so too did new norms in forms of better policing, city courts, handouts, almshouses (filled with a few well-thought-of elderly folk, symbols of discrimination), wardmotes (now able to name “agents of the counter-world at least once a year” [289]), public punishments (“a masterstroke of the visualization of urban patterns of thought” [172]), and proclamations. All told, this “symbolic system” offered forums to fix underworlds in minds, helping Londoners to get to know their city better (110). But there was no cast-iron border dividing citizens and criminals into lands without linking bridges. Magistrates knew what an “honest” man was: a pillar of the community, hard working, clean living, kindly, and religious minded. But the underworld and right-side-up world were tangled from top to bottom. Citizens lined their pockets by renting rooms to troublemakers. Also, the underworld with its grubby brew of sex and binges was a delicious danger, and Londoners were told to keep the lid on their “physical urges” and thirsts (287).

Rexroth is sure that his term “underworld” is sound, as sources show that “a common way of life and shared values” held it together through thick and thin (66). It was its own “community” kicking against larger London from inside. But fuzzy terminology weakens the case: as well as “underworld,” Rexroth coins other terms for London's basement that mean other things—“society,” “world,” “milieu.” Sloppy wording does not bode well for the crux of the matter: On what level(s) did underworlds exist? It is in the eye of the beholder, Rexroth says: one existed so long as someone somewhere accepted it as true. Thinking is naturally important for Rexroth and Londoners back then, but the risk is to stray an insinuation or assumption too far, seeing phantom significances, squeezing each drop of support from sources. Londoners “perceived and accepted” the “symbolic system” pumped out by magistrates, Rexroth writes, but there is little evidence of this (110). Another large claim is that aldermen were sure that, like a Trojan horse, an underworld sneaked in through the gates, and now crooks swarmed everywhere. But there is no thought from them that closely resembles “underworld,” no stock of group words like “brotherhood” sufficient to show belief in a suffocating and parasitic underworld. Instead we have Rexroth's words and how he imposes himself on sources. “Many defendants doubtless knew and maintained contacts with each other,” he writes, but none are established (55). The underworld seemed to “share” “guild-like organizational traits,” he says, but no ranking or planning shows up except claims that pimps and procurers were top dogs (307). There was no drive to tame the underworld; the 1382 “great statute” did not father a stream of statutes resembling a crusade. I take the point that thirteen “strumpets,” eight “bawds,” and handfuls of “strumpetmongers,” “scolds,” and rowdy houses brought to the twelve-monthly Portsoken wardmote in 1465 (and its ilk elsewhere) kept troublemakers in the mind's eye, although this does not prove that visions of underworlds swirled around the guildhall. This book is about crime, not underworlds. Talk of transparency or purity should not be confused with full-blown underworlds. Its raison d’être was to define crime, so that policies and prosecutions followed perceptions. There is no need to insert underworld here; crime will do.

If anything, imagining underworlds came later with the liber vagatorum, which got off the ground after 1550. But a flaw in this book is that it takes no stock of later rogue writing nor engages deeply with work on worlds of crime later on. This brings us back to the mistake of publishing this book without any changes: reading it we travel back in time to 1999, and it feels like it. Rexroth let things stand as they were because his book had “assumed its place in the history of scholarship” (ix) but not in the English-speaking world. And finally, why include forty-two pages of contemporary documents at the end of this book, nearly all in Latin, when the aim of any book is surely to spread knowledge as far and wide as possible? The gist of most highbrow English protestant and scientific writing in the early modern period was to write in the vernacular to attract attention.