With the publication of this excellent volume, Gwilym Dodd and Alison McHardy have done a great service to scholars and students of later medieval English monasticism. There are 214 petitions reproduced here in their original language, predominantly Anglo-Norman French, with a brief summary of their content in modern English. The documents are accompanied by a substantial introduction which not only provides the historical framework to the petitions, but which also explains their selection for the present purpose from among the vast number of individual documents collected, and thrown together artificially and thereby mostly deprived of their contexts, notably date and provenance, by eager nineteenth-century archivists with priorities that modern-day historians would tend to frown upon, in the SC8 series of the National Archives. The petitions are here organised in such a way as to demonstrate particularly well their range and scope and the wealth of information that they contain about late medieval lay-monastic relations. They are subdivided thematically into sections dealing with different types of interactions between religious communities and the crown, and they include not only petitions from individual abbeys or priories, but also those from representatives of different religious orders. The issues raised in these documents vary widely, ranging from requests for licences of absence to complaints about aggressors, often reflecting, as the editors put it, the ‘disparity between the monastic ideal … and the reality of monastic dealings with the outside world’. They illuminate occasions and incidents of internal and external strife, including those either perpetrated or suffered by heads of religious houses, they allow a glimpse at their financial difficulties (actual and exaggerated), and they tell us a great deal about the often complex relationships which existed between members of religious houses and wider society in late medieval England.