The title of the book under review promises the readers insights into the architectural history of the Middle Ages, specifically on residential structures known as lodging ranges. However, the book may rather be seen as a work on social history as I explain in this review.
In the introduction, the author presents lodging ranges as a type of collective-living buildings, which, as she states, has not received much attention from researchers yet. She begins with an analysis of functioning medieval households, paying a lot of attention to retainers and their role in the running of the house. This group of people constituted the main inhabitants of lodging ranges. The author also expresses an interesting view that their accommodation not only ensured better service to the customers, but was also a method for controlling their daily lives.
The author defines lodging ranges both semantically and by analysing the views of other scholars. She explains that she uses the term ‘great house’ rather than ‘manor house’ or ‘castle’ because it is more suited to aristocratic houses in which lodging ranges were built. I do not quite understand the explanation for avoiding the term ‘castle’ that ‘is often taken to imply a defensive structure, which is wholly inaccurate for the time period discussed here’ (p. 4), as the vast majority of examples described later in the paper specifically concern castles.
On page 5 we learn that the author based her study on 65 examples of lodging ranges built approximately between 1300 and 1570 in Wales and England. Buildings of this type were constructed in the houses of the most prosperous members of late medieval society. Indeed, they would have been built at considerable cost, but, above all, it was also expensive to maintain the people who inhabited them. The introduction further states that lodging ranges appear quite suddenly and immediately in their final form, with no traces of evolution of this building type whatsoever. The author argues that the emergence of lodging ranges was linked to a change in the household functioning pattern from peripatetic to a more settled one. This was due to a change in farming methods, ultimately leading to owners choosing a single permanent residence and giving up living in several residences scattered across extensive landholdings. As a result, more servants and staff were needed to run the household.
According to the author, the fashion of lodging ranges was short-lived and they disappeared as suddenly as they appeared. However, it is difficult to agree that a period of about 270 years is ‘a relatively short period’ (p. 7). During this time, social and economic processes influenced changes in the types of buildings preferred by owners of landed estates.
The introduction also provides extensive descriptions of the emergence and evolution of vicarial ranges, collegiate ranges, and inns. While the former offered individual rooms, in the collegiate ranges, three to four students were accommodated in a single room. A discussion of inns follows. However, buildings of this type are not explored more extensively later in the book, and the author focuses on buildings used as lodgings within the households of the most prosperous families.
The work is well ordered, with four chapters between the Introduction and the Envoi. Unfortunately, further divisions distinguished by sub-headings are much less clear to me, both in substantive and editorial terms. In particular, descriptions of example structures incorporated into the discussion of theoretical issues interrupted my train of thought.
The author considers a number of social issues that have been repeatedly analysed in historical literature. These range from the need to climb up the social ladder or to demonstrate one's position through material things, from items of clothing to residences. These processes undoubtedly influenced the built form of the residences of the feudal elites. However, I am not convinced that such an extensive discussion of the principles of bastard feudalism initiated by William of Normandy, including a long passage on livery robes and badges, is necessary as it does not significantly contribute to the topic of the book.
The author's proposed definition of the study subject does not appear until p. 50. ‘Lodging ranges are identified in the archaeological record as long, two- or three-storey ranges with uniform elevations within courtyards of great houses. The ranges might be timber-framed or masonry, although the latter was far more common.’ She lists four features that indicated the individual character of the rooms in lodging ranges and determined their exceptionally high status. These were: wardrobes (understood as latrines), doors, windows, and fireplaces. Wardrobes, which are, in my opinion, the most interesting and unique elements of the buildings in question, were visible from the outside of the building as evidence of the high-ranking staff and high-status household members. In this context, there is an interesting observation that the construction of externally visible wardrobe towers, rather than locating latrines within the thick wall, may have served to display the lord's status. Wardrobes may have been accessible, for example, from the courtyard or only from individual rooms. Sometimes groups of wardrobes were not connected to individual accommodations, but were placed in areas accessible to more residents. However, the author explains they were not accessible to all, as indicated by the location of lodging ranges within the inner courtyards. The absence of a wardrobe on the ground floor suggested that the rooms placed there were of lower status.
An interesting part of the discussion is how lodging ranges were differentiated from communal accommodation for servants with the use of doors as well as wooden screens that divided the rooms further into separate spaces. The discussion highlights windows and fireplaces that heated each room as facilities that emphasized the high status of the people living here, who we can probably describe as elite court officials rather than servants or members of the owner's family.
The architecture of lodging ranges also offers a kind of uniformity: consistent-sized rooms. Their sizes varied from one building to another, but within a single household their floor area was uniform. The author argues that it was particularly important to unify the exterior façade, which featured symmetrically arranged and identical doors and windows, often including wardrobe towers. She considers this to be a progressive process, in line with trends in late medieval and early modern architecture, which does seem to undercut the claim concerning the invariability of lodging ranges over 270 years.
The author writes that she wants to offer a classification of lodging ranges and try to explain the reason for the different building types. In this context, she primarily analyses the general placement of lodging ranges among other mansion buildings. What is most lacking here is a link between the forms of these buildings and the development of mansion architecture in England and Wales.
I have summarized the main theses of the book under discussion. As the volume is not divided into an analytical part and conclusions, it is difficult to assess the factual part as a whole. What I missed most in the book was information on the research carried out at the sites in question. General descriptions of the history of individual residences did not include the dates of construction of individual buildings or the names of authors who reconstructed the various phases of the buildings. Similarly, on the plans published, there are lines described as ‘suggested or conjectural walls’, but it is unclear on what basis they were drawn, whether research was carried out (and by whom), or whether they are just the researcher's assumptions (examples: Wingfield Manor, p. 147, Caister Castle, p. 122).
The examples of lodging ranges discussed more extensively come almost exclusively from the fifteenth century. Table 1 includes fifteen sites with, as one might guess, the best-preserved lodging ranges, but only three date to the late fourteenth century. The rest were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Gazetteer B provides brief information on a further fifty-four sites. The vast majority of these are dated to the fifteenth century. A few structures are not dated and a further few dated to the fourteenth century are preserved in poor condition; there is no information on what basis such dating was proposed. Given this information, the reader is led to believe that lodging ranges may have emerged in the fourteenth century, but their heyday was in the fifteenth century. It is also difficult to point to evidence of the invariability of the form of this building type over 270 years.
The author devotes most of her attention to analysing the public perception of lodging ranges by using retrospection and attempting to derive what feelings people had when they saw buildings of this type. Projecting our views and attributing them to people living several centuries earlier always entails the risk of error. I was puzzled by the fact that although the author mentions Occam's razor, she still argues that bridges that shortened the distance between buildings were built to emphasise social distance rather than for convenience (p. 207).
However, it must be acknowledged that the author looks at the issue of the emergence and functioning of lodging ranges from different angles. This is an interesting contribution to research, but does result in the same arguments cited several times. Space is also given to the symbolism of the residences of social elites. As the author does not limit herself to lodging ranges, but discusses entire complexes of buildings, it is not very clear to me why she completely omits issues relating to the defences of the residences, which, illusory or not, were essential elements of mansion architecture throughout the Middle Ages. The only reference to this issue is made when the author negates the reason for building lodging ranges with separate doors to the rooms as facilitating military drills or the quick gathering of an army. Perhaps, however, one should wonder whether the differences in window sizes between the ground floor and the first floor were linked to security requirements and not just to the status of people living there (p. 106). One other reason comes to mind as to why the lodging ranges acquired the form in question. The symmetry of the façade, the unification of the levels, and the use of corridors should be considered as elements of development planning, which was modern for the time. Such modernity was easier to implement in the servants’ buildings instead of the lord's house, where more attention was paid to tradition referencing pedigree.
When discussing at length social and symbolic issues, the author goes significantly beyond the timeframe of the work. For example, she analyses the symbolic meaning of Wingfield Manor's architecture, which is rather modern (p. 141). When exploring social relations, she draws lengthy analogies with the present day, which adds little to the subject at hand. What is missing is more information on the written sources concerning the households in question and on architectural research. The emphasis is on hypothetical social meaning of lodging ranges, rather than on the analysis of historic buildings. However, the book has plenty to interest both a specialized and more general audience. A section of the work that is likely to be of great use to non-English-speaking researchers is the Glossary on p. 223, providing summary definitions of architectural elements.
Lodging ranges undoubtedly constitute a phenomenon unparalleled anywhere else in medieval Europe, and typical for England and Wales. It is a good thing that a separate work has been devoted to them. In this way, their existence will probably be made known to many more people interested in the Middle Ages. As many of the phenomena described in the book fit into the history of the transformation of fortified residences that took place in almost all European countries, involving the conversion of ‘castle into palace-fortress’, the author might have drawn comparisons with research outside England (e.g. Albrecht, Reference Albrecht1995). In addition, there are numerous open access works that can enrich the perspective on the residences of medieval social elites (e.g. Coulson, Reference Coulson2004). Of the most recently published books, attention should be drawn to the collection of papers from the Castrum Bene conference (Boguszewicz & Radziszewska, Reference Boguszewicz and Radziszewska2020).
