Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 159

It is a commonplace to state that monasteries and nunneries were a familiar part of the medieval landscape. Yet visitors to sites such as the Cistercian abbeys of Fountains in Yorkshire and Tintern in south Wales, or Benedictine Glastonbury, or the former Augustinian church at Osney in Oxford may not immediately consider the impact that religious houses had on the wider environment in which they were constructed. It may be easy to envisage medieval monks following the timetable laid down by the Rule of St Benedict, worship-ping in the church that lay at the heart of the monastic complex, reading in the cloister walk, or working in the day room. More recently, however, monastic archaeologists have encouraged us to think beyond the church, cloister, infirmary and abbot’s lodgings, and place them at the centre of a much larger complex. In this book, James Bond looks more broadly still at monasteries in the landscape, and his study of the impact of medieval religious houses is wide-ranging and comprehensive. Taking account of documentary, landscape and archaeological evidence, he has produced a book aimed at ‘the interested general reader rather than the academic’ that is informative and immensely readable.

The book begins with an examination of the acquisition and exploitation of monastic estates, and the reconstruction of the estates of abbeys such as Pershore, Evesham and Shaftesbury, are accompanied by helpful maps. The author is careful to distinguish between the characteristics of the estates of different orders, and to emphasize regional variation and chronological change. Bond then moves on to discuss the evidence for different methods of land exploitation: arable farming and the production of cereal crops; the rearing of livestock, and the management of sheep flocks and the export of wool. It is the Cistercians who are most often associated with the clearance of land, but Bond shows, with case studies of reclamation in the Somerset Moors, Romney Marsh and the Sussex coast, Essex and Kent, and Yorkshire, how monasteries of all orders contributed to the opening up of the landscape. Bond also considers the buildings that were key to the agricultural estates of monasteries, the domestic buildings of monastic manors and granges, through the evidence of their surviving earthworks, documentary evidence, and extant buildings (as at Minster Court, Kent (St Augustine’s Abbey) and Meare (Glastonbury Abbey)). His discussion demonstrates the diversity of the setting of granges, from a simple layout of two ranges, to more complex arrangements suggested at Neath Abbey’s granges at Marcross, Gelligarn, and Monknash. Monastic gardens, orchards and vineyards also receive attention, and Bond draws on sources such as the gardeners’ rolls from Benedictine Norwich, Abingdon, Glastonbury, and Augustinian Maxstoke. Other sources of food – sea and estuarine fisheries, lakes and marshland, river fisheries and fishponds – are discussed in detail, as are monastic deer parks and rabbit warrens.

Churches might also feature prominently in the economic assets of religious houses, and could be both a source of revenue and a pastoral responsibility. The chapels and churches on monastic estates can provide evidence for their relationship with a monastic patron or rector, and for expenditure by monks on their churches. Physical reminders of the connections with monasteries and their abbot can be found, for instance, in the initials of Abbot John Selwood of Glastonbury which appear in the churches of Meare, Ashcott and East Brent which he rebuilt. More broadly, Bond investigates the impact of monastic houses on rural settlement in both planning new villages and relocating others, and on urban centres and boroughs, where religious houses were major landlords (a quarter of the tenements of Oxford in 1300 being in the hands of monastic or religion orders). Finally we see the importance of medieval monasteries in the construction of roads and bridges, mills, and in industrial workings, quarrying, mining, and the production of pottery and tiles.

Bond does exactly what he aims to do. He has produced a wide ranging book, which sets out the evidence clearly. Whereas the Benedictine houses that had their origins in Anglo-Saxon England are among the best documented monasteries, he also focuses attention on smaller and less well-known houses, and on Wales as well as England. The conclusion raises some important questions. As Bond reminds us, the rich documentary legacy bequeathed by medieval religious houses may lead us to overestimate their importance relative to secular landlords, and this, he argues, is why it is important to combine documentary with archaeological evidence and the evidence of the landscape. It may well be that the traditional picture of pioneer monks bringing land into cultivation and introducing innovation in farming techniques and management may have to be modified. However Bond leaves his readers in no doubt as to the importance of medieval monasteries in the shaping of the landscape.