When the consumer was king

Books as glossy as this are seldom as good as this. It is a sort of economic miracle in itself: fat, quarto-size, packed with illustrations, maps and plans, wide-margined, legibly typeset, efficiently proof-read, Hong Kong printed and priced under £25 hardback. It would almost be worth buying if it were a politician’s memoirs or a cookery book. The difficulty is to explain that late mediaeval commercial history can be worth reading about at any price, even with the assurance that this is the distillation of a life’s work by a much-admired master of the subject.

Professor Spufford is the currency pundit. Should you ever wish to know how many stivers you got for your groat, or morabitins for your dobla, or weisspfennige for your rheingulden at Michaelmas 1373 you would turn to his Handbook of Mediaeval Exchange unflinchingly. Fluctuation in the relative values even of the rarest coinages sounds like, and is, a dry and technical matter; but Spufford’s enthusiasm goes far beyond it, deep into the feel, smell and location of trade, transport, production and shopping. Rivers, roads and markets run through his head, and he rolls out the glories of taffeta, velvet and white samite and their cleverly imitated substitutes as if he were in the business. He has driven what remains of the old routes, even in central Europe, in a van, hunting down the few boom-town relics of the Middle Ages. Not much is left of such places, unless they went into steep economic decline, like Avignon, which fell asleep after the popes stopped living there; or Aigues Mortes, the French king’s gateway to the Mediterranean, from which the tide ebbed and never returned. Away from the towns there is more to see, especially in this country: wool-churches, market-halls, clothiers’ houses survived from the diffused and small-scale enterprises by which some Englishmen did well out of gaps in the continental market.