Medieval Bishops' Houses in England and Wales by Michael Thompson (review)

106BOOK REVIIWS conversi. In this respect, Salvestrini finds that the monks followed the same economic strategies as lay landlords. Both tended in the late fourteenth and fifteenth century to let more and more of their farms by sharecropping contracts. In the past, scholars have spent almost too much time on the nature and extension of such contracts. Salvestrini, however, follows a more recent trend among Italian historians and looks at the entire environment of the monks and their farmers. Thus he notes the significant role that grazing, timber farming, and the sale of chestnuts played in the economic life of the monks and their tenants. Perhaps 43% of the lands surrounding the monastery were wooded. Tenants gathered firewood, burned charcoal, and gathered chestnuts from some portion of this land while the monks harvested lumber of varying grades from much of the rest of the area. The picture that emerges from this careful study is of a complex economic system very much connected to the social and economic life of the upper Arno Valley. In spite of the fruitful observations that: fill this book, the reader is left a bit flat. The monks themselves and their connections to this complex world are largely absent. The author suggests that many were Florentine,but we never get numbers. We learn little about when or where they would have been seen. This seems to be an economic administratiori without administrators. There is a short chapter on the servants and lay brothers and sisters of the monastery, but it is perhaps the least satisfactory of his chapters. He notes several times that some of the monks were popularly venerated in the district, but he never helps us to understand why. It is, as his title suggests, a study of a patrimony and not a monastery. DUANE OSHEIM University ofVirginia Medieval Bishops' Houses in England and Wales. By Michael Thompson. (Brookfield,Vermont: Ashgate. 1998. Pp. xvi,207. $59.95.) Michael Thompson, who has produced many studies of medieval casües, here offers a useful inquiry into the architecture of English and Welsh bishops' palaces. The term "palace" includes not only the bishops' main domiciles near their cathedrals, but also their London residences, that is, the "inns" or town houses where they served as ministers of the Crown, lived after the thirteenth century while attending parliament,and the places from which they carried out legal and social business in the capital. For the medieval scribe, a palace differed from a castle in that the former was intended for domestic purposes, a castle for defensive ones. Twenty bishops and twenty-two abbots maintained London town houses; most were situated west of the city walls along the Thames, for the convenience of travel. Rents and revenues from the bishops' manors,which at the Reformation numbered 640, supported the London residences. One hundred sixty-eight manor houses contained chapels, suggesting that the bishops occasionally lived there. Probably, the most famous surviving manor house is BOOK REVIEWS107 the vast and magnificent Knole near Sevenoaks in Kent which was bought and expanded by Archbishop Bourchier in 1456 and further extended by the Sackville family over four centuries.1 The 108 illustrations provide sketches of ground plans, photographs of architectural ruins, and aerial views. Appendix 1 surveys the palace at Canterbury shortly after Archbishop Laud's death;Appendix 2 gives a list of the palaces whose bishops were licensed to crenellate between 1200 and 1523; and Appendix 3 lists bishops' manor houses. After the Norman conquest, designs for bishops' palaces predictably derived from the continent, especially France. "Without exception they are two-storied blocks vaulted at the ground level and subdivided for a smaller room at each level" (p. 31). As the number of a bishop's officials and household servants increased in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a main hall was superseded by a larger one. The site of the palace vis-à-vis the cathedral varied from place to place. Some palaces, Durham being the best example, were castles, and most palaces in design and layout were indistinguishable from those of the laity of the same social level. In the later fourteenth century, as bishops pressed seigneurial rights on the peasantry, they...