Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 355

Christopher Dyer’s latest book is partly biography and partly regional history. It charts the life and fortunes of John Heritage, a prosperous yeoman farmer who became a small-scale wool merchant in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While rehearsing the key moments in Heritage’s life, it also narrates the history of a number of small towns and villages in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire where Heritage lived and traded. The book’s primary concern is to establish whether or not Heritage and his contemporaries lived through an era of dramatic change and therefore exemplified the kind of new social and economic order that has often been postulated in the secondary literature.

Dyer’s answer to the question is somewhat equivocal. As he notes, it is certainly possible to see in John Heritage some of the transformative forces that have led generations of historians to differentiate the medieval from the early modern world. Heritage was an innovative famer who embraced enclosure, actively engrossed the holdings of neighbours and fellow villages, farmed on an ambitious scale and rejected traditional methods of open-field agriculture. He sold his familial holding without apparent compunction, left his native village to start a career in trade, and interacted with a network of entrepreneurs that extended to several counties as well as London. Perhaps most significantly, he kept track of many of his business transactions in a personal account book-cum-notebook, which provides the principal source for a reconstruction of his life. He seems to embody the emergent forces of individualism, capitalism, and social mobility that were transforming the social and economic traditions of previous centuries and ushering in a dynamic new world.

While documenting some of the contours of this new world, Dyer also suggests that the legacy of the past was much more substantial than a straightforward biographical approach might suggest. The world around Heritage was unquestionably changing, but the change was neither particularly fast nor inordinately extensive. The urban and rural communities of the period look very much like their precursors in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Likewise, although enclosure and a heightened emphasis on pastoral agriculture can be found in some villages, in many others agrarian practices were still largely based on traditional open-field husbandry. Heritage’s suppliers and customers were largely peasant farmers with value systems deeply rooted in traditional forms of piety and communal engagement. Nor had the social tensions of the medieval world faded from the scene. Lordly power still circumscribed many features of peasant life and communities were still dominated by elite groups of local landholders, much as they had been for centuries. Very often, Dyer contends, the change that can be observed in the early sixteenth century was a by-product of the severe depopulation that followed the Black Death, not the result of new mindsets or cultural ruptures that took hold during Heritage’s lifetime.

In addition to addressing grand historical narratives of change and continuity, the book also functions effectively in conveying new empirical facts about the early sixteenth century. Particularly valuable material can be found in the description in Chapter 4 of how Heritage ran his wool-trading business. Heritage produced wool on his own lands and had dealings with some members of the gentry, but his main suppliers came from the ranks of the peasantry. Entries relating to purchases and subsequent payments make up the bulk of the account book. Dyer is able to use these entries to recreate a peripatetic country merchant’s business techniques in considerable detail, including such matters as how Heritage handled wool of varying quality, how he dealt with liquidity problems caused by the period’s shortage of coin, where he found suppliers, and how he turned an assortment of small acquisitions into the sacks that made their way into international commerce. Historians are not afforded many opportunities to reconstruct rural commerce in such depth and Dyer has made the most of his archival discovery.

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Dyer’s work has been characterized by clear presentation of arguments and accessible prose, and this book is no exception. The publisher has sought to broaden the book’s appeal to a general readership by including a large number of photographs of places discussed in the text and providing other useful ancillary material. Biography and agrarian history have traditionally not been closely associated with each other, but in the right hands their juxtaposition can produce something that is both informative and elegant, as Dyer’s book clearly demonstrates.