Questions about the modern state and its formation have long preoccupied scholars. In recent years the search for the origins of the modern state in Britain has led historians further and further back in time; it has also generated a series of debates on the nature of the relationship between a monarchy that was unusually powerful and its subjects, male and female, urban and rural, rich and poor. The methodological approaches that these scholars employ have varied greatly, but at issue in all their studies has been the extent to which royal policy, legal, political, fiscal, or religious, was either coercive or consensual. Christian Liddy's examination of fourteenth-century Bristol and York falls squarely into the latter camp. The civic elite in both towns, he argues, was actively (and, indeed, aggressively) involved in the formulation and implementation of measures from which they profited handsomely but which were ultimately designed to protect and defend the realm, to finance domestic government and foreign diplomacy, and to promote successful commercial strategies. The men who made up this elite gave active expression to their commitment to the idea of shared governance in myriad ways: when they offered loans to Edward III and Richard II, assumed responsibility for collecting taxes such as the wool subsidy, secured control of the staple organizations in their respective urban centers, and negotiated commercial treaties on behalf of their king. In Parliament, these same men defended urban liberties and lobbied for legislation that would further the economic interests of their towns, but the privileges that they won collectively served a “wider, national agenda” (170). The crown eventually awarded Bristol and York charters of incorporation that bestowed on them an array of powers, including comprehensive jurisdiction over those who would disrupt the peaceful conduct of business in their towns. In Liddy's view, these developments in turn demonstrated the king's confidence in the ability of the urban oligarchies of the cities to carry out the heavy responsibilities associated with county status. The particular cases of Bristol and York, he argues, reflect developments throughout the kingdom, and the ways in which the elite of each of these centers became partners of the crown in the business of governing were symptomatic of the convergence of the interests, aims, and aspirations of the later fourteenth-century crown and its towns. This unity of purpose was in large measure a consequence of the renewal of open warfare with France and the economic and commercial dislocation that attended the escalation of the conflict. The decades between 1350 and 1400, in short, marked a crucial stage in the formation of the English state.

Liddy's scholarship is meticulous. There can hardly be a civic tax roll, a council minute book, or an Exchequer register that he has not scrutinized with a view to uncovering evidence of the extent to which merchants from Bristol or York were involved in what he calls the “apparatus of government” (50). The breadth and range of the topics he treats are equally impressive: he is as comfortable discussing the minutiae of customs duties as he is the complexity of admiralty law. He is aware, moreover, that the dividing line between the private profit that the merchants sought to increase at every remove and the public interests of the realm they served depends largely on the eye of the historical beholder, and throughout the work he makes a concerted attempt to ensure that his critique of the authors with whom he disagrees is thoughtful and articulate. Yet, for all its methodological sophistication, the book poses some crucial questions that its author ultimately leaves unanswered. The notion of an amorphous “common good,” which Liddy insists underpinned both the interests of the crown and those of the civic elite of English towns, trails tantalizingly through the introduction, the conclusion, and the five intervening chapters, yet beyond suggesting that the king and his merchants shared a belief in this notion, he never discusses clearly just what he understands by the concept of the common good. Was this the same common good that inspired the efforts of contemporary lawyers, jurists, and legislators to effect changes to the common law? Was it a common good that embraced all propertied English people, or only those whose occupations benefited mercantile interests? Similarly, Liddy makes occasional reference to ideas of “political morality” (108) and sometimes to a “public morality of governance” (141), both of which apparently informed the process of negotiation between the king and his townsfolk, but in these instances, too, the author is content to assert the existence of such noble ideas, only to abandon abruptly any discussion of their implications. Liddy is a young historian of great technical skill and considerable promise, but this book shows that he has some way to go before he can be said to have engaged fully with the theoretical perspectives that inform his topic.