The most important development in Reformation studies in the past twenty years has been the material turn. From the publication of David Gaimster and Roberta Gilchrist's collection, Archaeology of Reformation (Oxford 2003), the call to read more closely the record of sites and standing buildings has amplified, inspiring new investigations not only of landscapes and developed environments but also of fabric fragments fashioned from, or in response to the sixteenth-century changes in religion. This book provides an overview of what this approach might bring to an understanding of the central drama of the early Reformation in England and Wales, the dissolution of some eight hundred monastic and mendicant communities in the four years from the spring of 1536. Hugh Willmott grounds his survey in the archaeology and architectural history generated since the 1990s but he adds value with case studies of his own, such as the parish church of St Matthew, Morley (Derbyshire), where fabric from the Premonstratensian abbey of Dale was reborn, and Thornton (Lincolnshire), among the front rank of Augustinian foundations in England which still marks the landscape with its late fourteenth-century gatehouse. His evidence gives further encouragement to the view that the dissolution was not what the king or Thomas Cromwell determined it should be – when at last they arrived at a decided position – but rather was shaped and re-shaped by those it touched directly in the years that followed. It also urges that the physical environment of the later Tudor period be considered in the same way as the confessional climate, as a scene where profound change wrestled with a powerful undertow of continuity.

Willmott's general title is a misnomer because his book is not an account of the course of the dissolution but of the collateral of the monasteries in the century after the last of them was closed. His first two chapters sketch the critical background to the subject and signal the principal coordinates of Henry's Reformation but do not retouch the familiar picture either of the process or its purpose. Willmott's contribution begins with a close study of the stripping of the sites of their material assets, both the raw resources of stone, timber and lead and the dressed and decorated components whose artistry, if not their original purpose, was transferable. In fact, Willmott emphasises, this was no asset-strip. More often than not the treatment of the fabric was ordered and organised, an enterprise of extraction that was painstaking, especially, as might be expected, in respect of lead, much of which was cast into ingots in situ by means of purpose-built hearths, examples of which he has unearthed at Thornton. Wilmott's chosen examples conjure the contractors’ work clearly; it is pity they are not framed by any archival records which add the important insight that this activity was a slow-burn, ongoing at the time of the old king's death, and beyond.

Of course, the appropriation of the monastic estate was about place and property and Willmott departs from fabric to explore the dispersal of estates, again taking his test case from Lincolnshire. It seems his aim is to unsettle the ‘general consensus’ (p. 54) that the well-established magnates were the first main beneficiaries of monastic land and that ‘new men’ and ‘fortune hunters’ were in fact few and far between. As it happens, his review of the county fails to shift this interpretation very far: what he finds are parallel patterns of property acquisition largely predetermined by the status of the beneficiary, their position under local horizons and within wider (royal and seigniorial) affinities.

There are fresher insights when Willmott returns to the reuse of sites and their buildings. He rebalances an account so often weighted towards the raising of fine Tudor mansions by drawing attention to the more widespread communal spaces cut from old monastic fabric. He casts a welcome spotlight on the places of parish worship reanimated from religious houses as early as 1547, although his estimate of nearly 300 former monastic buildings given over to this purpose (p. 72) seems high. His discussion of the development of domestic homes in monastic courts is inevitably drawn from the wealth of previously published studies but his comparisons usefully underline the diversity of treatments and allows some less familiar instances – Kington St Michael (Wiltshire) and Watton (South Yorkshire) – into the foreground. Willmott's own knowledge of Thornton, a ‘palimpsest’ (p. 148) of a site, whose phases of redevelopment he has pared back through the evidence of survey and excavation, focuses on a feature of domestic conversion which is less well-known: the exploitation of the large, level and well-drained precincts of monasteries for pleasure gardens. In the tenure of three families between 1547 and 1616 – the first of which was that of the former prior of Worcester, Henry Holbeach, whom Edward vi appointed as bishop of Lincoln – the site of Thornton's abbey church and conventual complex was remoulded with ornamental gardens of terraces, pathways and that Jacobean must-have, a mound. The landscape was reimagined for leisure but still within the frame of the original monastic court and precinct, another example of the pattern of ‘saving and curating’ the pre-Reformation past which Willmott offers up as his conclusion.

Overall, this is a thoughtful contribution to the continuing conversation about the material reformation. A chain of case studies, it is inherently selective: conventual churches and precincts are the main interest not the churches, granges and related infrastructure of the monastic hinterland. The friars are held at the margin. But the limits of Willmott's study are also a prompt, as he remarks at the close: ‘the archaeological wealth’ of monastic England presents also ‘a wealth of opportunities’ for new research (p. 164).