Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 216

As the authors outline in their introduction (‘The Context’), the wool trade of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, with its abundant source material in the form of customs accounts and contracts for the purchase of wool, has already attracted much attention from historians. However, they contend that the full potential of the documentation has yet to be realized as a source for financial dealings and trading networks on a local and national stage. This book is not a history of the English wool trade – indeed, the authors explicitly reject such a claim. Rather, at the heart of the book is the study of advance contracts for the sale of wool, drawn up between English wool producers and largely foreign merchants. The authors show that these survive in greater numbers than had previously been thought and the contracts are here examined exhaustively for the light they shed on the buyers and sellers, advance payments, the reasons for advance contracts and problems associated with them, as well as the stages of the preparation and delivery of the wool. Both lay and monastic producers were involved in the process but it will come as no surprise to read that the latter were dominant, accounting for 84 per cent of surviving advance sales.

The authors move from the general (chapter two) to the particular, with a detailed look at the evidence from one Cistercian abbey, Pipewell in Northamptonshire (chapter three). The monks of Pipewell entered into contracts, negotiated and renegotiated, with merchants from Cahors. This is case study of great interest and highlights the centrality of these contracts to monastic finance and credit; indeed the earliest surviving indenture for an advance sale of wool comes from Pipewell (1242). Pipewell itself is revealed as ‘belonging to a group of specialist smaller-scale producers who marketed an “intrinsically better product” than their competitors’ (p.77). This chapter reveals a community moving from using the cash raised from advance sales for building activities and paying taxes to using it to service unpaid loans. Four instances of sheep disease in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries threatened to undermine the whole basis of the abbey’s trading and credit operation and brought it to near disaster. At the outset of the book the authors state that their approach is to combine ‘empirical historical and modern financial research methods’. The final chapter therefore looks at the structure of forward agreements for sale, calculating interest rates and assessing the efficiency of the wool market. The conclusions are that the market economy was a dynamic one, and those operating in it were capable of financial sophistication.