A Country Merchant, 1495–1520

Christopher Dyer’s exploration of the life and business activity of John Heritage, a Cotswold wool merchant and quasi-capitalist farmer in the decades either side of 1500, is a delightful exposition of the ways in which the great and persistent themes of medieval social and economic history can be set within (for this area of the discipline at least) relatively novel historiographical approaches. In what has become a mild trend in recent years in English medieval economic history (recollecting Judith Bennett’s account of Cecilia Penifader at Brigstock or Anne Dewindt’s work on the Berengers on the Ramsey Abbey estates and Dyer’s own article on a later fifteenth-century Chevington (Suffolk) farmer, Robert Parman), Dyer seeks to represent, in so far as the limits of the material allow, the available detail of one life in order to improve our understanding of the changing nature of medieval society and economy at the end of the Middle Ages. In the case of his subject, John Heritage, there survives an account book which offers considerable information regarding Heritage’s world of work, his business dealings, the extent and fluctuation of his trade and the identities of many of his business contacts. The account book, as well as offering detailed insight into Heritage’s activities, also provides us with a sense of the limited extent of what might be deemed to be systematic operation and suggests a potentially haphazard and piecemeal quality to some of Heritage’s dealings

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