Royal palaces were major features of England’s medieval landscape. On the one hand, they could be the venues for opulent displays of monarchical power and splendour. On the other, they could provide much prized places of refuge for an often-beleaguered king, his family and his retinue. Location – especially for the rural palaces – would be chosen through a combination of convenience for journeys around the kingdom and availability of leisure facilities (particularly hunting). The best-known surviving palace sites, such as the Tower of London, Westminster, Clarendon and Woodstock, can survive as substantially intact and still-used buildings through to piecemeal ruins or largely buried archaeological sites. All of them – where anything survives at all – can be substantial and even exciting targets for research; this could be archaeological, historical, scientific, landscape-based or any combination of these. Above all, however, the researcher must beware any temptation to think (even for a moment) that we know all there is to know about any given site, let alone the subject of medieval palace archaeology as a whole.

That might seem like a basic truism and, of course, to some extent it is. Nevertheless, the point needs to be made, and this book was the trigger for doing so. The reason is simple: as an archaeologist who has researched and published quite extensively on the subject of medieval palaces, I was surprised to find how little I knew of Clipstone – the ‘Palace for our Kings’ of this book’s title. Yet, James Wright makes clear throughout his text that this was an important site in Nottinghamshire for English kings for much of the medieval period (certainly from the 1160s through to c 1400). The palace buildings appear to have been extensive and complex, both numerically and in terms of their constructional sequence (Chapters Three to Five), with all the buildings to be expected from such a site. Private royal apartments of some quality for the king and queen, a great hall, a chapel (and private oratories), a great stable block and accommodation for ministers and household – all these were present. The author seems to be justified in categorising Clipstone as a full-scale palace rather than a smaller, lower-status hunting lodge as has often been claimed in the past. Indeed, Clipstone was often known as ‘King John’s Hunting Lodge’, a common nominative association. Hunting was, undoubtedly, a major reason for the site’s choice as a palace. Sherwood Forest generally provided good facilities, but the park at Clipstone itself was impressively sized at just under 1,500 acres; its circuit ran to almost seven miles in circumference (Chapter Six). Maintaining the park pale would always be a burdensome task. The site fell from royal favour from the fifteenth century, however, and was sold into private hands early in the reign of James i. Its buildings had already begun to fall into disrepair and ruin; that decline was never halted, and little of the old splendour survives in the surviving fabric.

The site is clearly of exceptional archaeological significance and potential. The author makes this clear in references scattered throughout the text, though I would have preferred to see a chapter early in the book devoted to the archaeological resource and studies of it (past and recent). It seems strange, for instance, to wait until page 51 to find that Channel 4’s Time Team filmed one of its television programmes here. Rather more seriously, the fact that the site is a scheduled monument is not mentioned until the epilogue, on page 191. There are several reasons why this is important. In a prosaic sense, the designation explicitly recognises the national importance of the site in purely archaeological terms (its historical significance is certainly of the same level), and also offers it strong legal protection. At a deeper level, however, it would have been interesting to know whether (as I suspect) Clipstone was among the early sites to be scheduled. It was not among the select list of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882, but it has one of the old County Number references (NT 101 — described as ‘King John’s Palace’) and the online National Heritage List does not give a date for when the site was first scheduled. This at least implies that it was a very early example. This is not merely of academic interest: as Wright points out in the epilogue, the extent of the scheduled area is probably inadequate.

The book is generally well written, though some parts are a little florid and the authorial style can be variable. The text is on its firmest ground when dealing specifically with the palace, its occupants (Chapter Seven is good here) and its later history (Chapters Eight and Nine are rewarding reading) rather than wider national history. If I have a few gripes on the structure and style of the book, however, these are nothing compared to the pleasure of being introduced to a palace that I should certainly get to know much better.