Reviews: Monastic Sites from the Air

REVIEWS Monastic Sites from the Air. By David Knowles and J. K. St. Joseph. 8£ X 10f. Pp. xxviii + 283 with 138 photographs. Cambridge : University Press, 1952. 55s. This is the first volume of a new series of books, the Cambridge Ah Surveys, which will illustrate the value of air photography not only in archaeology but also in geography, social history and ecology. Air photography is no longer a novel phenomenon, as Dr. St. Joseph emphasized in his lecture to the Society at its General Meeting in 1952, and the time has now come when its aid can be enlisted in such a matter as the general study of Roman roads or, as here, of monastic sites. The rehgious historian, the architect, the antiquary, and in fact all students of the Middle Ages are familiar enough with monastic remains, and certam of the sites are indeed deservedly part of our popular heritage of tourism. But any appreciation of these remains is given new dhection with the aid of this excellent book. It is not only that important features hitherto unknown are shown on ah photographs —as at Tilty in Essex where nothing at all is left in the way of masonry —but the whole site of a religious house gains new importance and indeed precision when seen from the ah. Ground plans and photographs are no longer, by themselves, sufficient. Professor David Knowles, an acknowledged authority, provides in his Introduction a succinct and most welcome account of the normal monastic plan and its adaptation to the needs of the various Orders. He has also written most of the descriptive notes which accompany each photograph. Dr. St. Joseph, Curator in Aerial Photography in the University, is responsible for the photographs and he has also taken his share in the production of the text. It proves to be a most happy collaboration. The houses are described in relation to the Orders which built them—Benedictine, Cluniac, Cistercian, Premonstratensian and Augustinian in the main—and then according to theh geographical distribution. There is no overburden of technical detaU, and if one should sometimes wish for further information, it has to be remembered that the descriptions are designed to explain the plates and not as general accounts of the sites. In this they succeed admirably. The Kentish sites described are St. Radegund's and Aylesford (Mr. Hugh Braun gave an account of the latter in our volume LXIII for 1950), but there are also air photographs of Canterbury, Boxley, West Langdon, Bilsington, Leeds and Reculver in the University Collection. To many readers the most interesting sites in the whole book will be Milfield and Yeavering in Northumberland, where crop 175 REVIEWS marks show the outlines of what seem to be timber buildings—either haUs of the Dark Ages or early Christian churches. The book is a model of production though, even by present day standards for such work, it is certainly expensive. It may prove to be particularly acceptable to those who are not primarily medievalists. R. F. JESSUP. Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851. By Rupert Gunnis. 9f X 7. Pp.514. Plates 32. London, Odhams Press Ltd., 1953. 3 guineas. The Kent Archseological Society should be very proud that one of its members has produced such a distinguished work as this. There is little doubt that it will soon be deemed as necessary on the reference shelves as Bryan's Dictionary of Painters and Engravers. It is to be hoped that Gunnis like Bryan will be re-issued from time to time as new material is found. Obviously the scope of the work, which has occupied at least fourteen years of the author's time, is bound to attract carping criticism from the meaner sort. The author anticipates such criticism by confessing that the book is but an " attempted dictionary " and hopes that readers will send him " further information or correct the inevitable mistakes which must have crept into a work of this nature." The present reviewer, who several times has had cause to be indebted to Mr. Gunnis's knowledge, hopes that he wUl not be regarded as detracting from a remarkable achievement if, accepting the sphit of the author's own words, he offers as his mite for the second edition the information that Nollekens' bust of John Carr is in York Castle Museum, that the Queen Anne statue by Carpenter in Leeds Art GaUery was given to that City by Alderman MUner (not MUler) in 1712 and is inscribed " fecit 1712 " and that John Thomas was responsible for the Queen Victoria statue in Maidstone's High Street. L. R. A. GROVE. Hogarth's Peregrination. Edited with an Introduction by Charles Mitchell. 9 X 6£. Pp. xxxi and 54. 11 Plates. 3 Figures. Oxford at the Clarendon Press (Geoffrey Cumberlege), 1952. 15s. On Saturday, 27th May, 1732, seemingly through a whim, five friends set out from the Bedford Arms Tavern in Covent Garden. They were the great Hogarth, his brother-in-law John ThornhUl, son of the decorator of the dome of St. Paul's and Greenwich Painted Hall, Samuel Scott, the landscape painter, WUliam Tothall, merchant, and Ebenezer Forrest, attorney and antiquary. They were apparently an august and distinguished bunch of pilgrims—but the account of theh travels into Kent reads like a hotch-potch of Till Eulenspiegel, Leland and The Rake's Progress. They went by boat to Gravesend, looked at Sloane's 176 REVIEWS new church, then walked to Rochester where Hogarth and Scott played hopscotch in the colonnade under the Town Hall (0 patres conscripti /). The next few days were devoted to visiting Chatham, Frindsbury, Upnor, Hoo St. Werburgh (where Hogarth desecrated the churchyard), Stoke, Grain, Queenborough, Minster and Sheerness. At the latter town they hhed a boat and sailed to Gravesend where they stayed the night. Next day, the fifth of the journey, they went merrily up the River Thames and arrived at the Bedford Arms " in the same Good Humour wee left it to Set out on this Very Pleasant Expedition." The total expense had been but six guineas. Previously antiquaries have had to depend on Richard Livesay's edition of the text, printed in 1782, for details of this adventure. I have this before me as I write and I find that it compares very unfavourably with the 1952 edition upon which Charles MitcheU has devoted much care and scholarship. The original manuscript is preserved hi the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and from photographs of this the plates are directly reproduced. Therefore in place of Livesay's print copies the student can now see the freshness of Hogarth's pen and water-colour work. He has as well a scholarly essay on the historical background to the Five Days' Peregrination, notes on Forrest's text and, for good measure, the Hudibrastic version of the journey by William Gostling, the Canterbury antiquary. A new edition was much needed and this one has been well done. L. R. A. GROVE. Kentish Village: Hastingleigh. By Mary W. Hat-wood. 5£ x 8£. Pp. 59. Published by the Parochial Church Council, 1952. No price indicated. This exceUent little book is one of an increasing number of such pubhcations, the outcome of the enthusiasm for local history and topography which has become so widespread since the war. They have shown, as this work shows, that many a hitherto unknown vUlage, which played little part in great affairs, may yet hold much of interest to the genealogist, ecclesiologist, and economic and social historian. In a work of this kind it is always difficult to decide how to arrange the material. Miss Harwood's method is to give first a detailed account of the church and its monuments, then a list of rectors with notes on some of the patrons of the living, foUowed by extracts from visitation and other records to show the relationship between priest and people. A chapter of extracts from the churchwardens' accounts and registers is foUowed by a special section on the relations between the parish and St. Thomas's Hospital, London, which for nearly 400 years was the principal landowner. We then have extracts from Domesday 177 REVIEWS and from records designed to show something of the economics of farming in the parish in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries ; and the work concludes with an account of field and estate names from the tithe map of 1839. The book has a number of excellent half-tone iUustrations, which besides bringing out the principal features of the church show two nice old barns and reproduce (on rather a small scale) an estate map of Aldelose manor dated 1818. The only criticisms I have to make of the work are, fhst, that it tells us nothing about the always interesting subject of Poor Law administration in the parish in old times—though this may be because the records are missing: no overseers' accounts are mentioned in Woodruff's hst. Secondly, the medieval history might have been further developed. A little research among easUy accessible materials would show, I think, that the statement on p . 58 (" Our local manors have an unrecorded personal history ") is unduly pessimistic. To give one example, the Priory of Horton makes a momentary appearance on p. 22. What connexion had this monastery with Hastingleigh ? The answer is in Vol. X of Arch. Cant., at p. 134, which, moreover, gives us a whole list of prominent local inhabitants in 1347-8, including John de Combe, who must be associated with Combe Grove or Little Combe. In the List of Fees (Arch. Cant., XII, p. 220) we find the Earl of Leicester as the feudal overlord of Hastingleigh manor. And who was the Earl of Leicester in 38 Hen. I l l , the date of this list ? No less a person than the great Simon de Montfort, worth a word here, one would say, though his personal acquaintance with the manor was probably of the slightest. One or two slips require correction in a subsequent edition, e.g. for " Harris " (p. 10, 1. 6) read " Hasted " ; on p. 5 there is an apparent contradiction when the south aisle and chancel of the church are described as fourteenth century, though a moment before the chancel is (correctly) assigned to the Early English period. C. R. COUNCER. The Kentish Stour. By Robert H. Goodsall. 8£ X 5£. Pp. xii. + 229, illustrated. London, Cassell, 1953. 15s. A few sections of the Stour are familiar to everyone who uses the roads of East Kent—from Shalmsford Bridge alongside the Ashfordto- Canterbury road, the two arms of the river flowing through Canterbury, the riverside at Fordwich, the wharves and bridge at Sandwioh. But much of the river is inaccessible, except on foot, and remains little known. Our member, Mr. Goodsall, decided to explore the river, from its source at Tanyard Farm in the parish of Lenham to its mouth at Pegwell Bay. Being an architect by profession, an artist by bent, 178 REVIEWS and having a strong sense of history, Mr. Goodsall does more, hi this record of his explorations, than give a merely topographical account of the Stour. He talks interestingly about the viUages and towns through which it flows, about the great houses and many mills that stand near or on its banks, about the bridges which cross it, and their architectural qualities—or lack of them. The Kentish Stour is an eminently readable and pleasantly informative guide-book which will make some readers want to set out, hot-foot, to follow the route which Mr. GoodsaU took, whilst others wUl feel that he has described it so weU that they will be content to do theh exploring, vicariously, from an arm-chair in front of the fire. A feature of the book is its wealth of exceUent photographs, more than fifty of them, nearly all the work of the author himself, and showing an artist's sense of composition. Mention must also be made of the map of the Stour, and the plan of Canterbury, which are both informative and at the same time a pleasure to the eye. Some readers will regret that Mr. Goodsall gives so Uttle space to the East Stour, and even less to the Little Stour ; some will wish that he had dealt more fully with stretches of the river that have for them a special attraction ; a few may occasionally cavil a little pedantically at what they regard as doubtful statements of fact. But The Kentish Stour amply achieves what it sets out to do, and will be enjoyed alike by those who know the river already and by those for whom that is a pleasure yet to come. „. The Ministry of Works has recently published two Guides to castles under its care in Kent. Deal Castle, by our Vice-President, the Chief Inspector of Ancient Monuments, price 6d., is an eleven page booklet which follows the usual style of guides issued by the Ministry. There is an Historical Introduction, with sections on Coastal Defences, the Building of the Castle, and its later history. Then follows a detailed description of the building itself which is accompanied by two plans. It must be considered an eminently satisfactory guide to this the largest of the " Three Castles which keep the Downs." Dover Castle, by C. A. Ralegh Radford, F.S.A., price Is. 6d., is a booklet of twenty-six pages of larger size, with several half-tone illustrations. The guide has sections on the History of the Castle, the Periods of its Construction, and a detahed description of the buildings now remaining. There are also useful travel particulars, and particulars of the times of opening. Many visitors will, of course, welcome this kind of guide which forms a well illustrated souvenir, and makes some concessions towards popularizing its subject. R. E. J, 179