I remember my schoolboy excitement at buying a blitz-damaged fragment of John Weever's Ancient funerall monuments (1631) and then later at being given the whole pioneering work in its 1767 reprint. I suspect that Phillip Lindley may have had some similar formative experience. Certainly this engaging if somewhat loosely-structured study breathes enthusiasm for its subject, and establishes its main point that contrary to some sanguine twentieth-century views, the English Reformation was intensely destructive of medieval tomb-monuments. This should never have been a surprise, but sprang partly from the comforting Anglican myth that the English Reformation had always been a more gentle and scholarly affair than nasty foreign Reformations. Destruction was particularly severe for monuments of clergy from the old Church, but those of the gentry and nobility also suffered badly unless they had some powerful protector; all of them were redolent of the abrogated system of soul-prayer, so particularly articulated on English tombs with their ‘orate pro anima’ formula. If a monastic church was utterly destroyed, as was Glastonbury, then it was rare even for the graves of kings and national heroes like King Arthur to be saved from the wreck. Lindley begins with three general chapters sketching out the trajectory of destruction – major peaks around the dissolutions of the 1530s and 1540s, then again in the British Civil Wars a century later – but he also describes the way in which these losses were a major stimulus to antiquarian studies and the practice of history in England. Weever is the (slightly flawed) hero in antiquarian practice, publishing the first extended discussion in English of medieval monument art and funerary practice, plus a remarkably disorganised but invaluable gazetteer of pre-Civil War south-eastern England, including pioneering illustrations of monuments mostly connected with his patrons, such as Sir Robert Cotton and the earl of Arundel. It is a pity that Lindley does not discuss one remarkable Star Chamber case of the early 1560s, which I introduced in my Suffolk and the Tudors (Cambridge 1986) at pp. 182–5, for it involved the destruction of tombs and accompanying medieval liturgical furnishings including an Easter Sepulchre. These acts of religiously-motivated vandalism were central to a major local power struggle between evangelicals and religious conservatives and came at a very sensitive political moment at the beginning of the Elizabethan Reformation. The dispute came to involve no less a referee than Sir William Cecil, called in from attending the queen on progress through Suffolk, and it probably inspired her proclamation of 1561 against the destruction of monuments. The remaining chapters are case studies: the first shows how much (or indeed how little) we can gain from early antiquaries about one important lost monument, the faked-up tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury Abbey; the second how antiquarian church notes may help to clarify the nature and occupant of a beautiful and well-preserved tomb plus Easter Sepulchre at Beverley Minster. The most original chapter is the last, which deals with an early scheme for the restoration of the spectacular Herbert monuments at Abergavenny Priory: an antiquarian member of the family reconstructed them in Charles ii's reign to remedy one of the last rounds of ideologically-motivated vandalism, perpetrated at the end of the first English and Welsh Civil War by Parliamentary soldiers, who were showing their malice towards a Roman Catholic royalist dynasty. This chapter also reveals with some tact the way in which the latest well-intentioned restoration scheme at Abergavenny in 1995–8 undid a good deal of the evidence for this early act of homage to the medieval past.