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Maryanne Kowalewski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 442 pp. £50. ISBN 0 521 33371 7.

This study stands at the intersection of three important recent developments in late medieval economic history. The first of these is a renewed emphasis on relations between towns and their hinterland, and between towns themselves within an evolving regional hierarchy. The second theme of this book is the considerable regional diversity of reactions to the Black Death, and the fact that demographic and economic patterns in the late Middle Ages tended to accentuate regional diversity. Both lines of argument, which Kowalewski pursues forcefully throughout, thankfully put paid to the tired debate on late medieval urban 'decline' or 'growth', which both viewed towns in splendid isolation and assumed a similarity of trends across the country. The third theme, which binds them all together, concerns the ubiquity and significance of small and medium scale markets in a seamless web of trade connecting the local sheep fair with the great international emporia. Her chapter on transaction costs is particularly effective in this respect; and while not new, her suggestion that developments in the service sector can be taken as indirect indices of changing patterns of growth is one that is all too often ignored. In keeping with current re-evaluations of the role of trade in the medieval and more broadly 'pre-capitalist' economy, however, Kowalewski's approach is very much from the bottom up. Of course, Exeter did not produce many glitzy merchant adventurers, and the author's choice of subject was probably guided more by the unusually good range of surviving trade sources than by anything more specific; yet the relative poverty of the region, at least up to the mid-fourteenth century its relative standing improved thereafter makes her case about the vivacity and ubiquity of small commodity trade all the more forceful. Her evidence reinforces the view put forward for other English and Continental areas, that the late medieval demographic crisis benefited 'marginal' regions more than cereal-growing areas, because of the greater inelasticity of demand for grain compared to non-staple goods like woollen cloth. Although her sources tend inevitably to cast most light on the export of cloth abroad, her findings (taken together with evidence culled many years ago by Hatcher for Cornwall, for example) point to the need for a fundamental reappraisal of the role played by the domestic market in the development of late medieval manufacture. English rural historians should take note: urban historians are at last 'turning more attention to regional developments . . . rather than focusing so much on internal urban' ones (95). One can only hope that the latter's challenge will be taken up. S. R. Epstein London School of Economics and Political Science