The Foreword to this book acknowledges that modern visitors to Sandwich, Kent, would be surprised to learn that this small market town was once a commercial seaport of international significance. This perception will surely change amongst both scholars and the wider public as a result of this publication. Behind its deceptively straightforward narrative, a chronologically structured account of the origins and development of the town and its standing buildings from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries, lies a wealth of scholarly research – the product of nearly two decades of study and one that synthesizes historical and archaeological data from several different disciplines and scholars. It thus provides one of the best examples of a truly multidisciplinary study of a medieval town: important not only because it manages to construct a narrative from what must have been very different sources of data, but also because it is not afraid to explore the tensions and differences between interpretations of different kinds of data.

The volume is structured into five ‘parts’. Part I presents the background and methods of the project. Part II considers the impact of geological and environmental factors and of prehistoric and Roman networks and waterways on the development of the early town. A new hypothesis about the location of the earliest settlement and its relationship to sites such as the Roman port of Richborough and the ecclesiastical centre at Eastry is proposed. Chapters 3 and 4 interweave archaeological and topographical evidence with early documentary sources to reconstruct the parochial structure and streetscape of eleventh-century Sandwich and set the context for a consideration of the growth of the town in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Part III.

It is in Part III that the detailed integration of different sources of data on Sandwich really begins to bring colour and life to the medieval town. Chapter 5 considers the historical development of the town as one of the Cinque Ports: the growth of civic governance, the establishment of a royal liberty and the urban infrastructure of waterfronts, marketplaces and civic defences. The people of Sandwich, both elite and artisan, also emerge from the records in this chapter. Chapters 6 and 7 then consider the surviving evidence, first of the religious, and then of the secular, buildings of the town. They integrate detailed archaeological surveys with documentary research on the buildings and their inhabitants. These chapters set the model for Parts IV and V of the volume, which provide increasingly detailed analyses of the waterfront and urban landscape and of individual streets, ecclesiastical foundations, houses and public buildings within the context of the commercial and political role of Sandwich and the Cinque Ports in late medieval England.

There is not space here to do justice to the level of detailed analysis provided by these chapters, but once again they are models of multidisciplinary study which consistently set the evidence of Sandwich in the context of wider scholarly debates in urban studies. Throughout, the chapters are illustrated by high-quality colour photographs, phased plans and sections and coloured maps. The endnote referencing system and bibliography are unobtrusive but thorough, allowing the reader to follow up key references without disrupting the flow of the volume's clear and succinct prose.

It is hard to be critical of this volume. It emerges from the meticulous research of some of the leading scholars in the fields of medieval urban archaeology and history who have sacrificed individual scholarly kudos to produce an engaging story, accessible to both an academic audience and an interested general public and rightly supported by English Heritage funding. In the Foreword, the authors note that its aim was both to demonstrate that medieval Sandwich was an internationally important town and to inform modern understanding of the significance of Sandwich's archaeological heritage. However, in its highly original and engaging approach, this volume also demonstrates the international significance of this kind of integrated, multidisciplinary research on England's smaller provincial towns.