Holder places the nine medieval precincts used by the seven orders of friars that were active in the City of London during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries more clearly on the map of medieval London, and surveys their physical presence within the city. His work is divided into two halves: a first half which looks at the friaries’ physical layout and position within the urban environment, and a second half on aspects of the friaries’ collective existence which includes contributions from Ian Betts, Mark Samuel, Jens Röhrkasten and Christian Steer. It is very much a book about the places occupied by the friars within London and succeeds in much more firmly locating them in the spaces of urban life through drawing together the archival sources with the many and varied excavations that have been carried out in the city, often in small rescue archaeology operations. It is worth noting here that this book does not include the friars active in London's wider suburbs at this time, such as the Trinitarian Friars at Hounslow, but does include the first Blackfriars site in Holborn, just outside the walls. As such, it provides the urban historian with much new material for the study of medieval London's appearance as well as an extremely useful guide to the extensive array of archaeological reports. The historical regression maps combining the excavations, the medieval buildings as reconstructed and the modern road plans are major achievements in their own right. This book grounds the life of the friars in their precincts and offers valuable suggestions as to how Londoners, particularly the nobility and the royal family, interacted with the institutions.

The book first works through the nine sites in turn, drawing together the evidence for their development throughout the period that they were in use by the friars to provide a novel and comprehensive survey of what can be known about the buildings and precincts. As the Dominicans, the Black Friars, successively occupied and developed three sites, they dominate the first half of the book, which also covers the Grey Friars (Franciscans), the White Friars (Carmelites), the Austin Friars (Augustinian) and the Crossed Friars. This section also includes the two mendicant orders which were active briefly from the late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, the Sack Friars and the Pied Friars, about which much less is known. The second half feels more disjointed because it comprises a series of comparative thematic studies analysing the material set out in the first half of the book. ‘Churches’ and ‘Precincts and the use of space’ very usefully compare the various buildings placed on the plans in the first half and shows how the space was used by the friars, visitors and urban institutions such as the guilds. Mark Samuels’ ‘Architecture and architectural fragments of the London friaries’ considers the stylistic choices, and the increasing elaboration of the architecture found on these sites and in friary stones reused elsewhere, while Ian Betts puts the tiling and building materials into their London context, including the importation of stone from France and elsewhere. Brief sections on water engineering and the friars’ contributions to the economy follow. Jens Röhrkasten and Christian Steer then contribute long discussions drawing on their work elsewhere, Röhrkasten on the spiritual life and educational facilities offered by the friars and Steer on burial and commemoration. Holder then finishes the volume with first a general discussion of the ‘London friars and Londoners’ and then an unfortunately brief discussion of the friars’ surprisingly positive reactions to the Reformation and the immediate impact of the dissolution of the friary sites in 1538.

Urban historians will find much that is suggestive and useful here in relation to the topography and appearance of the city. Its great strength is its archaeological thoroughness even as there are minor errors in dealing with the archives, particularly Westminster Abbey Muniments, which are identified in the text both as WAA and WAM, the more common form. In addition, the bibliography fails to identify fully the abbey documents used, which is a shame because the main finding aid there remains the on-site card catalogue. There are thoughtful comments about the impression the friars made on the urban landscape of London, including that the names of streets that record the presence of the friaries reflect the external appearance of the friars as Londoners would have known them rather than their choir habits. This reader, however, was left wanting more about how the urban communities made use of these buildings that Holder has so carefully reconstructed and how the relationships between the different friaries and the City authorities and inhabitants developed over the main centuries of friary activity. This book gives urban historians a very clear sense of the physical world occupied by the friars, and will open up new questions about how urban communities could interact with the mendicant orders and their precincts to add to the existing historiography on the friars’ religious impact.