Ramsey, a small urban settlement in the English county of Huntingdonshire (now absorbed into Cambridgeshire) has had a history illuminated by a long run of detailed court records from 1268 to 1600, with other sources produced by its lord, Ramsey Abbey, and royal court records, deeds, and churchwardens’ accounts. It must be one of the most richly documented towns in medieval England, which has given the authors of this book a magnificent opportunity to contribute to our understanding of small towns. Anne and Edwin Dewindt completed their apprenticeships as students of J. Ambrose Raftis at Toronto, each of them making a substantial study of a rural Ramsey manor. Then they combined forces to investigate the town that stood at the gates of the Abbey, Edwin having already published translations of the court rolls in microfiche form in 1990.

They were faced with the dilemma of how to present their findings. If they had followed the later Raftis examples, they would have published a text interspersed with great tables of data relating to the activities of individual townspeople, which would have looked impressive but would have been read by only the most persistent scholars. Instead they opted to put the tables into a CD tucked into the back of the book, and made the text a fluent, carefully written account, with an emphasis on description. Occasionally the writing becomes picturesque and even whimsical. They counter the problem that small towns almost by definition are sleepy and tedious by emphasizing moments of drama, like the invasion of the park of Muchwood by the townspeople in 1585 when they disputed common rights with Henry Cromwell, the lay lord who succeeded the monastery as lord of the town. The events were the subject of proceedings in Star Chamber, which leaves us with records full of color. In fact small towns do not need such riots, or the smaller-scale stabbings and scoldings, to provide historical interest. The rise and continuing existence of a town present us with a series of challenging questions and problems, which the Dewindts acknowledge, but do not always confront.

The chapters have enigmatic titles, but their subjects follow a logical sequence, dealing with origins, the relations between the townspeople and the Abbey, the town's internal government, and urban economy and society, discussing in detail the role of women and families. This flow is interrupted by the insertion of a chapter on the parish church near the beginning, and the dispute with the Cromwells at a midpoint. The chapter on origins shows how the town grew, at an uncertain date around 1200, along the roads leading to the entrance to the Abbey. Of course the Abbey played an important role in organizing the settlement, but were people gathering on their own initiative or were the monks always in control? Once the towns were established we have difficulties in distinguishing between the urban and agrarian dimensions of the community. In the case of Ramsey two apparently rural settlements were closely associated with the town, at Bury and Hepmangrove, and the court records show that of 2,000 recorded tenants (over a long period), almost a half held some arable land. Should this lead us to doubt the urban character of Ramsey? Did peasants live alongside artisans and traders, or was it more a case of the townspeople working a little land or keeping a few animals on the side? Did the townspeople develop a sense of identity, expressed in conflicts with the lord, or more positively by building community organizations? The authors are aware of these problems, but do not address them directly. They offer no very incisive interpretation of episodes of friction in 1327 and 1400 (times of sharp encounters between towns and lords elsewhere), and decide that the lord provoked “no overt violence” (66), and they compare the lord's principal court, the court leet, with a “town meeting” (87) and mention the idea that Ramsey was run by a “shadow ‘town council’” (89) of townspeople, without giving precise evidence. Most historians would agree that much self-government was practiced, often by an elite like the group of jurors analyzed usefully by the Dewindts, but within a framework of lordship that cannot be lightly set aside.

The authors offer many statistics, but to be fully meaningful they need to be analyzed comparatively. Was Ramsey's population of around a thousand people (we are not given a very exact figure) a clue to its rank in the hierarchy of towns, in its vicinity and beyond? Was its rate of immigration higher than that of other places? Do the numbers of offenses recorded in the courts show that small towns were more violent or quarrelsome, or more prone to report offences, than rural societies? Did the families described in the last chapter have a specifically urban character? Women are revealed to have been active in the economy and forceful in defense of their interests in the later Middle Ages, but to have succumbed to male dominance by the late sixteenth century. Were they liberated by town air, or did they experience the same opportunities and restrictions as their peasant sisters?

The special case of Ramsey Abbey and its court rolls offers an opportunity to a future historian to investigate the rural context of a small town. The authors of this book confine their present investigation to the market town and its two satellites, but the court records of the nearby villages of Upwood, Broughton, and Warboys, all manors on the Ramsey estate, and all with runs of detailed court records, could reflect the weekly movement of people to buy and sell in the town's market, and also their permanent migration, over a period of two or three centuries. We could establish if the wide range of occupations in the town was matched even to a limited degree by crafts and trades in the villages. We could see how effective were the roads and waterways of the fens in linking the town to its hinterland. The monks of Ramsey, through their record keeping, could keep future historians busy with more explorations of this unusually well-documented section of medieval England.