Journal of British Studies | 2021
Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler, eds. Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 228. $150.00 (cloth).
Abstract
of the urban sector. They were replaced by more “informal and ephemeral networks between individual merchants” (74). Chapter 3, examining the years from 1435 to 1450, shows the effects of this change. Where the crown had previously sought tax from town corporations that were relatively accountable to their inhabitants, now it raised money through loans from rich merchants, leading to confused, clientelist policy making. Interestingly, this tendency towards the “privatization of power” also had countervailing effects as these merchants, many of whom occupied high civic office, leveraged their influence with the crown to gain corporate privileges for their home towns. It was very easy, in such circumstances, for some of them to confuse their own interests with those of the “common weal,” emerging in this same period as the modish keyword of English politics. Chapter 4, tracing the period between 1450 and 1461, shows that after a decade of stagnating institutional ties, town governments saw little reason to involve themselves in the incipient struggles of elite politics. They stayed neutral in the turmoil of the early 1450s, fearing the loss of their liberties if they backed an unsuccessful challenge. Yet towns would soon become involved in the wars, so what changed? Hartrich argues that the sack of Sandwich by the French navy in 1457 demonstrated the real risks of a king unable to defend his subjects; this, along with the changing allegiance of Calais Staple merchants and the fear of Margaret of Anjou’s northern army in 1461, drove shy urban Yorkists into the open. In their manifestoes of 1459 and 1460, York andWarwick began to use the language of commonweal and common profit and found an attentive urban audience. The final chapter takes us through the first decade of Edward IV’s reign, a period of dramatic change driven by exogenous economic forces. The slump in international trade and the devaluation of the currency in 1464–65 hit elite merchants hard but left artisanal workers serving local markets to profit from the expanding population. This change in fortunes soon made its effects felt in urban politics as the common citizenry sought to hold elite officeholders to account. The growth of tensions in urban political life through this decade made towns fertile grounds for the renewed warring of 1469–1471, as internal rivalries began to align themselves with the national factions. Hartrich makes a compelling case for integrating the “urban sector” into the new constitutional history of fifteenth-century England. Consistently maintaining a careful balance between linear and structural explanation, she concludes that “the role of the urban sector in English politics thus continually fluctuated, but not in a way that was uncoordinated or haphazard” (227). While I would have been interested to see Hartrich explore the implications of this idea of political change—was it characteristic of this period in particular, or can it tell us something more general about the temporality of late-medieval urban politics?—such arguments would have taken us beyond her remit. In presenting us with a novel account of this critical period of English political history, Hartrich has made a lasting contribution to scholarship.