This book represents the first volume in Boydell and Brewer's new Garden and Landscape History series and concerns a subject that for many decades would not have been considered possible, medieval ‘designed’ landscapes. Oliver Creighton's work on castle landscapes is well known to scholars and here he turns his attention to the setting not just of medieval fortifications, but also of palaces and monastic houses. The great buildings of the medieval period have often been studied in the past without reference to their settings but this volume brings together a mass of material demonstrating beyond question the considerable level of thought, intent and sophistication that went into integrating residence and landscape prior to the Renaissance. The book takes a thematic approach, with the heart of the discussion dealing successively with the evidence of the ‘Inner Core’ of principal buildings, gardens, moated enclosures and water features; the wider context of ‘Animals and Estates’ such bird enclosures, dovecotes, warrens and fishponds; and ‘Parkscapes’, that is deer parks. The sum of the evidence is discussed in ‘Seeing and Believing’, which examines the meaning of design in a medieval context. This is followed by a particularly important chapter, ‘Legacies’, which looks forward to the sixteenth century and the crossover with the much more familiar territory for garden historians of the Tudor period. The concluding chapter succinctly pulls together the argument and suggests signposts to the future.

The subject of medieval elite landscapes sorely needed a study of this nature. As the author points out, until this juncture many examples of medieval designed landscapes have either been well studied and oft quoted, or anecdotal and lacking depth. This book remedies this situation and builds its case on the back of a substantial number of sites drawn from across the British Isles. What comes through very strongly is a more detailed and nuanced picture of the landscape evidence for medieval attitudes to residential surroundings which allows a platform for the discussion of the aesthetic elements to landscape ‘design’ in this period, the very idea of which is contested in some quarters. Any straightforward back-projection of ideas from post-medieval designed landscapes is resisted. Rather, this is a book that puts the ‘medieval’ firmly into medieval ‘designed’ landscapes. Thus the courts, gardens, ponds and parks that surrounded the medieval mansion were a reflection of distinctly medieval sensibilities: hierarchy, social order and man's control over the natural world. It is in this context, rather than in the more abstract aesthetic sensibilities of the post-medieval period, that medieval viewers took pleasure from their surroundings. And as is made plain here, the evidence that they did so is unambiguous. The archaeological manifestation of the management of, for example, the visual experience from the residence to the surrounding landscape, in the form of galleries, windows and seating in grand apartments that overlooked parks and gardens, cannot be any clearer. Firmly rejected, however, is the idea of a kind of medieval Brownian ‘template’ that was endlessly replicated. Instead, the meaning of the landscapes under discussion is sought in a myriad of local and regional contexts where builders responded to and in turn influenced the peculiarities of their own, distinctly medieval, environments.

As a book that begins a new series, this is a work of which the author and publishers can justifiably be proud. The corollary is that those who wish to contribute further volumes will find that the bar has been set high.