Landscapes of Monastic Foundation:The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c. 650-1200 (review)

This volume presents a revised version of a Ph.D. thesis begun under the supervision of the archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and completed in 1999 under the direction of the landscape historian Tom Williamson. The author is known to archaeologists and historians from a number of articles and in particular for the excellent volume on productive sites which he co-edited with Katharina Ulmschneider (2003). The study under review shows the influence of both advisers in its conception, both the theoretical and spatial interests of Gilchrist and the strongly regional approach of Williamson, but the author treads very much his own path, aiming "to combine both documentary and material evidence without giving either primacy" (p. 17). We should think of this volume, perhaps, as a regional study along the lines of John Blair's investigations of early Surrey and Oxfordshire and Peter Sawyer's of Lincolnshire, in which the authors attempt to review the totality of extant evidence. Pestell's goal is at once more limited and more wide-ranging: not simply the region but its ecclesiastical structures, not simply the church, but monastic foundations, a focus which leads him beyond the Norman Conquest into the much better charted territory of the twelfth century.

Pestell begins with a chapter on approaches to what he calls "Monastic Studies," identifying as its prevailing trends architectural reconstruction, which he brands "antiquarian," and center-by-center studies. Even within these few brief pages one would expect to see much greater account taken of previous work on the location of monasteries in their agrarian contexts, in both institutional studies, notably that of Christopher Dyer, and regional surveys like D. H. Williams' work on the Welsh Cistercians (neither referenced in the bibliography). Such work relies on relatively rich deposits of documentary evidence, and Pestell properly draws attention to the volume of literature about the Cistercians, no doubt a reflection of just this phenomenon. Pestell's aim, and in part his achievement, is very different: to attempt to work against the grain of the evidence and to look at the East Anglian landmass as a geological and topographical whole, investigating the place of monasteries within it. He looks in turn at the siting of monasteries before the first Viking age (chapter 2), evidence for monastic survival during it (chapter 3), new foundations in the tenth-century reform (chapter 4), before a lengthy consideration of post-Conquest foundations (chapter 5), ending with reflections on the general trends observed.

The approach brings its own problems. As the author notes, few monastic sites have been excavated in East Anglia; documentary resources are poor and even more poorly distributed, and generalization is hazardous. Nevertheless, consideration of the location of monasteries, discussion of artifactual remains, and reports on the author's own metal-detecting and field-walking lead to interesting observations about the siting of monasteries in old and new locations, their accessibility by boat, the use of island locations, and the identification of monastic sites archaeologically. The most conservative and least satisfactory chapter concerns the monastic reform movement where Pestell is deprived of artifactual and archaeological data, and regional historical evidence simply does not respond to his frame of reference. His synthesis would have been the stronger had he paid fuller attention to the diversity of ecclesiastical structures in and historical evidence from pre-Conquest England, and had he devoted more space to a discussion of his own method and how it relates to the work of others. Traditionalists might have appreciated an appendix in the form of a brief gazeteer of sites. This is a book brimming with ideas, many of which deserve to be followed up, and its unevenness is in part the inevitable consequence of its ambition.