Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 2 (2016), p. 262

This volume serves as a technical introduction to the rich potential of the brokage books, which contain enormous detail relating to the goods transported overland out of Southampton between 1430 and 1540. The brokage books are famous without necessarily being well-known, a contradiction that arises from their possible uses and the problems presented in interpreting their contents. Many of these problems would be greatly reduced if all the extant books had been transcribed so that we could know if the 27 years which are available are also typical. Sadly, despite the best efforts of those involved in working on the brokage books, it has so far proved impossible to get the necessary funding, though it might be assumed that amongst the aims behind this publication is another attempt to get that funding.

The bulk of the 17 chapters are the work of Michael Hicks and Winifred Harwood closely followed by John Hare, with Helen Bradley and Tom Beaumont James each contributing one paper. Between them, the five authors shed light on the riches offered with discussions of the brokage system, Southampton’s foreign trade, the books’ economic context, the trading calendar and the freight transport of Southampton. The chapters that follow contain detailed descriptions of Southampton’s trading partners starting with Salisbury, London and Winchester, which each get a chapter. The small towns of Hampshire and Wiltshire are taken together and are followed by a discussion of the more distant locations. Chapter 11 discusses the brokage books as sources for local and family history – the books are, after all, lists of people and places as well as goods. Chapters 12 to 15 cover specific commodities: wine, luxury goods (spices and wax), fish and cloth. Chapter 16 considers a wide range of goods: grain, hops, wool, hides, salt, tin, lead, coal, iron, building materials and finishing with bowstaves.

At the end of the volume are a number of intriguing distribution maps. For instance, Map 18 shows the distribution of materials for the cloth industry for all years. On the facing page are nine small maps showing the same data broken down into pairs of years: 1439–40, 1447–48, 1461–62, 1462–63, 1477–78, 1491–92, 1492–93, 1527–28 and 1539–40. Even in those two cases where the maps represent successive pairs of years, the destinations are noticeably different. Where there are wider time gaps, the differences can be very marked and extremely thought-provoking.

The project’s website, www.overlandtrade.org, gives a brief introduction (which pre-dates the publication of this book) together with some fairly simple notes. However, it is well worth exploring the interactive map option, which allows you to search by commodity as well as the carter, recipient and destination of the goods. Selecting one or more of these options brings up an appropriate section of the map and allows you to refine your search. Even far-distant Manchester, for instance, is known to have received both wine (via four carts) and oil (via three carts). Further exploration of the options leads to the creation of a .csv file which can be downloaded via Excel, although note that by no means all the transcribed data is accessible via this search function.

This reviewer has attempted to give a flavour of the volume and the potential of the resources it describes knowing she must fail – you will have to read the book and explore the website yourself.