A Country Merchant, 1495-1520: Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer (review)

Christopher Dyer's most recent book shows his characteristic impeccable scholarship and ability to illuminate the lives of otherwise obscure people. Since his Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1989), Dyer has been known for his creative use of financial records to illuminate the detail of the daily lives of medieval people, making his statistical analyses accessible. A Country Merchant also follows this pattern, focusing on the economic transactions and social networks surrounding the central figure of John Heritage, a Gloucestershire merchant, a study made possible by the remarkable survival of Heritage's account book, which covers the years 1500 to 1520. The book relies on an exhaustive trawl through extant sources, from rental and taxation material, through court records, to archaeological evidence. A Country Merchant is a late-career book pulling together themes and material from many years of historical scholarship in the Midlands that Dyer knows so well, addressing big questions around the transition from an agrarian society to the modern world, the impact of population change and alterations to family structures, trade and commercial mentality, enclosures of land, and changes in cultivation practice.

Dyer begins by setting the scene of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He reminds us of concurrent events in the European world and the way news was disseminated, alongside the role of travelling merchants like Heritage in linking local to international markets. Population remained fairly stable at a low level compared to the high of the early fourteenth century, wages were on the high side but beginning to decline, and entrepreneurial landowners (of whom Heritage was one) were starting to disrupt long-standing land-holding arrangements. Dyer also outlines the complex interrelationship between town and country, commerce and manufacturing, and the growth of the merchant group.

Dyer divides his book into six sections, examining Heritage's family and household; the countryside in the late fifteenth century with its landscape, long-established villages, towns, and parishes; Heritage's wool business with its complex credit arrangements, laid out in his accounts; changes in land use across the period 1495-1520 from arable to pasture and the associated alterations in population distribution, work, and sheep and wool management; the way rural society changed over several centuries, comparing the roles of the aristocratic and church elites with those of innovative peasant farmers; and finally Heritage and his contemporaries in their social, economic, religious, and cultural environment.

Heritage's father was a well-off farmer selling grain, wool, livestock, and dairy produce with a household of about sixteen, and was able to send his sons away to school. He organised the marriage of his son John into a similarly positioned family with whom there had been earlier business connections. At his father's death in 1495, John, at twenty-five, became head of household with three brothers and four sisters to provide for. Dyer describes how, rather than following his father's farming and trading patterns, John made significant changes over the next few years. He appears to have collaborated with the new lord of the manor, a man of his own age, to improve the manor's profitability. To this end, John sold the family holding in the open fields (including probably the family house) to facilitate leasing a larger consolidated land area that was then enclosed for pasture, a break with traditional practice. In the process, sixty former workers were turned off the land, the lord increased his rent and Heritage had the opportunity for high cash returns for the sale of wool and livestock. Soon afterwards, John and his wife Joan moved to Joan's hometown, eighteen miles distant, when she inherited a burgage. This was a further unusual undertaking, leading John to move into trade and supervise his farming interests from a distance with a reversal of the common pattern...