Until well into the twentieth century, cathedral closes did not receive the attention from architectural historians that they deserved. Perhaps would-be investigators were deterred by the forbiddingly private nature of cathedral precincts, many of which are still surrounded by high walls, some locked up at night. There were a few happy exceptions: Robert Willis investigated Canterbury Cathedral Close in the 1840s, when many of its buildings were being demolished, and later undertook a similar study at Worcester (published 1863); other studies include William St John Hope (Rochester, 1900) and T D Atkinson (Ely, 1933). Atkinson also prepared notes for a similar work on Winchester, never completed. More recently we have the RCHM 1993 volume on the close at Salisbury (non-monastic) and Roberta Gilchrist’s study of Norwich Cathedral Close (2005). More will no doubt follow soon, spurred on by the passing of the Cathedrals Measure (1990) and the statutory requirement for cathedrals to produce conservation management plans, and now (following further amendment of the measure) for cathedral archaeologists to undertake a written assessment of the archaeological features of their cathedrals and precincts.
Dr Sparks is, however, ahead of the game, having long made the study of Canterbury Cathedral Close a specialist interest, and, since 1995, holding the post of consultant historian to the Chapter of Canterbury. She also collaborated with the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, which, since 1977, has been involved in investigating the below-ground and standing archaeology of the precincts. Her publications on the close are numerous, and it is pleasing to have all her findings and those of her fellow-workers assembled in this volume, published by the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.
Naturally, given the area’s former monastic status, the book falls into two parts: monastic and post-Dissolution. For both periods, a topographical approach is adopted, starting with the buildings of the great cloister, then those further out, and tracing the chronological development of each edifice. Thus, the material is organized something along the lines of a virtual perambulation around the precincts: a double perambulation, in fact, for the same route is (where feasible) followed for the post-monastic buildings as for their monastic predecessors. The archbishop’s palace falls outside the scope of the book and is briefly treated in an appendix.
One thing emerges strongly from Part i: the richness of survival of monastic remains, so much more than, say, at Durham, Worcester, Norwich or Winchester, where the layout of the conventual buildings has to be teased out from archaeology and historical records. Willis realised this, but even he did not see all the remains, notably the astonishing survivals of medieval roofs discovered by Tim Tatton-Brown and staff of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust. There have been losses since Willis’s day: several houses were regarded as redundant when the number of prebendal stalls was reduced following the 1840 Dean and Chapter Act (and now only one of the post-Reformation prebend’s houses is occupied by a canon); much of the monastic almonry was demolished in 1865 to suit the needs of King’s School, Canterbury; and German bombing caused the loss of the south end of the monastic brewhouse, the dormitory, and (less regrettable from an architectural point of view) the 1868 library.
Part ii deals with the post-Reformation architectural development of the close, and is inevitably longer, given the way buildings have evolved to meet new requirements over the centuries. In this part the author has been able to provide some elements of biographical detail about the people who lived in them; in Part i the biographical element is mostly restricted to generalized, though useful, sections about the monastic officials connected with each of the conventual buildings studied.
There is indeed a huge amount of information in these pages, presented with admirable clarity. At first I feared that the lack of phased plans of the surviving fabric might hinder comprehension, but in fact the text suffices, assisted by some good graphical material. The plans are particularly useful, subject to some reservations expressed below. The other illustrations have been carefully chosen, with a judicious mixture of antiquarian drawings, historic photographs and more recent photographs. Biddles Ltd has done a good job with the printing both of illustrations (mostly very crisp) and text, the latter being fairly error-free, with only a handful of typos and inconsistencies. There are some editorial idiosyncracies. The use of superscript abbreviations for ordinals suggests that an annoying feature of Microsoft’s ‘AutoCorrect’ tool was not disabled. All bibliographical references are embedded within the text rather than appearing as footnotes, which rather interrupts the flow.
The only major concern I have is the lack of a ‘road-map’ in the form of an explanatory introduction to the way the author has assembled the information. Only when one has reached Part ii does it become apparent that, most helpfully, both the master plan of the monastery and the larger-scale plans of individual areas have exact counterparts in the annotated Ordnance Survey extracts in the second half of the book. Each pair of plans, monastic and modern, is printed to the same scale, covers the same area and has the same reference number. This is immensely helpful but needed to be signalled at the outset. Nor is navigation around the book particularly easy owing to the lack of a table of contents, and even the cross-referencing to the plans is haphazard (sometimes page numbers are given, sometimes not). Furthermore, had a table of contents been compiled, this would have led to the discovery that two of the Ordnance Survey plans (Plan 6 and one depicting the entire close) have inadvertently been printed twice!
But these concerns are entirely eclipsed by the splendid way in which Margaret Sparks, undoubted expert in her field, has presented what, at first sight, seems a dauntingly complex group of buildings and unravelled their development over more than nine centuries. This book must be regarded as essential reading for all those with a professional or amateur interest in the English cathedral close.
