Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 163

(pbk). Much has now been discovered about the hierarchies of medieval towns, and their hinterlands. The work on London’s grain and fuel supply is best known, but there are a number of regional studies of towns, and on the ‘spheres of influence’ of market towns. John Lee’s book on Cambridge expands greatly our understanding of town-country relations by taking as its example a provincial town with a population of four to five thousand in the period 1450–1560, which can be set beside published studies of Exeter in an earlier period, and of Worcester a little later. Cambridge exercised commercial domination over Cambridgeshire, and its marketing zone extended to a ring of smaller towns which lay near to the edge of the county, or even straddled the boundary, at such places at Royston, Linton and Newmarket. The pattern of towns of Cambridgeshire seems to accord with central place theory, resembling in this respect Leicestershire and western Suffolk. The pattern of marketing has persisted, as is revealed by a study cited by Lee of shopping in Cambridge in 1965.

Cambridge was not a conventional provincial town, however, because it contained a large body of clergy living in rich institutions, which demanded quantities of basic supplies of food, fuel and building materials; the wealthiest, such as King’s College, consumed luxuries on a considerable scale. Other towns would occasionally be visited by a great lord’s household, but at Cambridge a number of large households were permanently resident. Accordingly a proportion of the goods brought into Cambridge came from a distance, from London, the cloth making centres of the south-west, and other sources well beyond Cambridgeshire. Some of the town’s everyday trade also involved contacts outside the county, particularly with Lynn, which was easily accessible by water, and with the wooded countryside of north-west Essex, as Cambridge was not well supplied with wood fuel and building timber in its immediate vicinity. By the end of the period coal was being shipped in quantity from the Tyne. The town was also associated with a peculiar institution, the Stourbridge Fair, which attracted sellers from London and overseas, and customers from the whole of eastern England. Lee gives a fascinating account of the event, and shows that unlike other great medieval fairs, Stourbridge continued until the railway age.

The town and its trade have been researched using a wide range of sources, and the results are illustrated in a series of maps. We learn about the urban social structure and occupations, the regulation of trade (which led to disputes between the town and the university), the building industry, and the flow of commodities. The ups and downs of the economy were partly influenced by the presence of the university, which was growing in size in the fifteenth century, and spending much on buildings soon after 1500. Agrarian history is not at the forefront of Lee’s agenda, but his analysis is helpful to agrarian historians in a number of ways. He shows how the town became a centre for the malt trade sup-plying London in the sixteenth century, and he explores the spread of saffron cultivation to the south of Cambridge. He also sheds light on the grain market, for example examining the effects of the bad harvest of 1556–7. He studies the mechanics of supply of agricultural produce, in which private treaties between farmers and large consumers tended to replace transaction in the open market.

This book began life as a thesis, and still bears some of the marks of that origin, but it is a very welcome addition to the literature which deserves to be well known and widely read. The publisher should be complimented on producing a book of this quality at such a reasonable price.