Steve Rigby has done medieval historians a great favor by calendaring the customs records associated with the port of Boston in the reign of Richard II. Before its precipitous decline in the fifteenth century, Boston was one of the biggest and most active English ports on the east coast, one of the dominant players in the wool and cloth trades of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Rigby's calendar shows, its commercial activity was still in full swing in the later fourteenth century, when it facilitated traffic with continental ports scattered around the North Sea. The customs accounts document not only the ongoing vigor of the port itself but also shed considerable light on the conduct of overseas trade in the period by both English and foreign nationals.
Economic historians have long recognized the importance of the English customs accounts as a source for international trade in the later Middle Ages. Statistical summaries of their contents by E. M. Carus-Wilson and Olive Coleman have done yeoman's service in the field for several generations, and several local record societies have published accounts related to individual ports. (The interested reader can find relevant citations in the introduction to Rigby's calendar). But only when a good cross-section of accounts for multiple ports in different periods has been printed will it be possible to make close and careful comparisons about the customs administration as a whole and the trade it so meticulously documents. While Rigby's book cannot be said to open up new terrain or draw attention to an unknown or unappreciated body of source material, it does make a major contribution to the ongoing effort to publish the records of individual ports in order to facilitate research into medieval commercial development.
The bulk of Rigby's calendar is made up of itemized accounts of the collectors and supervisors responsible for administering the several types of national customs duties imposed in the later fourteenth century. These records provide itemized statements of imports and exports by both denizens and aliens. In addition to these itemized accounts, Rigby calendars an assortment of ancillary documents that shed light on the administration of the customs system in the port, including writs appointing collectors, correspondence and acquittances related to diversions of customs revenue to third parties, and an interesting example of a cocket certificate given to an exporter to document that he had paid the required custom (214). Also included in the volume are some sample transcriptions of the original documents, a glossary of weights and measures, a glossary and index of commodities recorded in the accounts, and a useful appendix comprising biographical sketches of the collectors.
In the introduction to the calendar, Rigby provides a general survey of the customs system in the second half of the fourteenth century, focusing mainly on the reliability of the statistics recorded in the accounts. Some historians have questioned their veracity, arguing that smuggling and/or fraudulent collection practices undermine their credibility. Rigby rehearses the arguments for and against statistical reliability and ultimately supports the general view first put forward by Carus-Wilson and Coleman that the accounts present a relatively accurate portrayal of the goods passing through the ports. The author's extensive knowledge of the personnel of the appointed collectors and supervisors, derived in part from his earlier research into the history of Boston, gives his arguments in this regard a great deal of authority.
A relatively short introduction obviously cannot do justice to all topics, but there are some surprising omissions in the material treated there. Rigby's account of the types and forms of customs duties (p. xviii) gives a summary overview but lacks the clarity of other parts of his introduction and fails to give adequate context to allow the reader to understand the salient differences between the various accounts calendared in the text. A fuller discussion would have been helpful. The author compensates for this deficiency by giving informative introductions to the individual documents calendared in the text, but they are not an entirely satisfactory substitute for a clear and well presented account of the different forms of duty collected in the port.
A more surprising omission from the work is the negligible treatment accorded to the port's economic activity or the broader fortunes of overseas trade in the period as revealed by the calendared documents. A general account of the main currents of trade passing through the port would seem to be a natural topic for consideration in a work of this nature. A simple summary of annual totals recorded in the particular accounts, for example, would have been helpful. Similarly, a discussion of the relationship between imports and exports would also have been worthwhile. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Rigby chose to consider the accounts primarily in the context of politics rather than economics, and although his approach yields important insights into how the records were generated, it also leaves some unfinished business for those who want guidance on the broader significance of the material.
While it is possible here only to hint at some of the economic matters documented in the accounts, a few items merit comment. One of the interesting patterns shown in the accounts is a relatively diversified import trade, offset by a remarkably narrow export trade. Fish loomed large among the imports, but furs, wood, and dyestuffs were also prominent. More surprising is the evidence for a wholesale trade in commodities that are not generally thought of as major commercial concerns in the period, including metal cookware and soap. Exports, by contrast, were completely dominated by cloth. Boston appears also to have exported considerable quantities of wool in the reign of Richard II, but the customs records reveal that cloth was the main English good passing through the town en route to the continent. This is not entirely surprising given what is known about the great advances made by the English textile industry in the second half of the fourteenth century, but it does furnish a particularly good illustration of the transformation: a century earlier Boston's port activity was dominated by wool exports, the commodity that transformed Boston from a sleepy backwater into one of the country's leading ports.
The accounts also raise some interesting questions about the organization of trade in the period. Variations in the amount of cargo carried by different ships, for example, would be worth studying. Some cargoes were surprisingly small, so small, in fact, that one wonders about the economic feasibility of the voyage. The timing of arrivals and departures is another interesting subject that would reward further study. One is not surprised to find a pronounced seasonal cycle in the herring trade, but temporal fluctuations in the trade of some of the other commodities passing through the port are not so easily explicable. Similarly, patterns of arrivals and departures raise some interesting questions about the organization of shipping in the period. Why, for example, did arrivals so often cluster on a single day? Why did many days, sometimes even weeks, go by with no business at all?
The fact that so many questions emerge from Boston's custom accounts is testament to the value and intrinsic interest of the material Rigby has calendared. While there are certainly areas that he could have developed more fully, he is to be commended for providing a scholarly and informative account of Boston's customs administration and a reliable calendar of the records it produced. The Lincoln Record Society is also to be commended for including the volume in its main record series. Lincoln has long had a distinguished county record society, and Rigby's calendar is a worthy addition to its stellar list of publications.