The inclusion of Serge Ter Braake's short study of several sixteenth-century Dutch towns serves as a stimulating contrast to the predominantly English focus of the collection. As he notes, over 50 per cent of Holland's population lived in urban centres at this time, thus a good relationship between the prince and the civic elite was critical in effective governance. Personal ties, efficient intermediaries, and the successful legitimation of the elite's actions determined the rapport between town and court. In Holland, Ter Braake argues, the gradual estrangement of ties between the Habsburg prince and his citizens over the course of the sixteenth century was a contributing factor to the 1568 Dutch Revolt.Political relations between Crown and town are also explored by Peter Fleming and Felskau. Thinking about fifteenth-century Bristol, which Fleming argues has been neglected, he reveals that although contemporary socio-political circumstances were markedly different from those of the sixteenth-century English studies in this collection, the same practices of negotiation between complex competing interests are clearly evident. This suggests that the tensions pervading early modern towns were not unique to that time period, nor unprecedented.In all the towns and cities considered in this collection, political, socio-economic and religious challenges necessitated continued compromise and conciliation. This process of negotiation epitomized civic life and relations between state and city. The collection's strengths lie in highlighting continuities and similarities in the urban experience whilst not downplaying the complexity of competing personal, political and religious allegiances and agendas set within contemporary frameworks of hierarchy, status and expectation. The collection is hindered in a full explication of these themes, however, by its attention to towns from southern England which, arguably, shared structural and cultural similarities, and comparable top-down political constraints. The inclusion of a wider geographical range of essays, such as those on Osnabru¨ck, Holland and Prague, would have enabled a richer analysis. Governance in the Low Countries, for example, was more structurally diverse and dispersed than that of England. Likewise, as Barron points out in her concluding remarks, the political voices of ordinary urban people and the poor are not heard in this collection.
