This is the fourth and final catalogue of medieval objects to be published by Salisbury Museum. It completes the series instigated by Hugh Shortt in the 1970s and first published in 1990. Earlier volumes covered everything from bone objects to pilgrim souvenirs and from medieval rings to enamels and, as in this case, drew on the scholarship of some of the country's most able medieval finds specialists (Cherry, Egan, Spencer and many more). The format is familiar, with a set of nine major contributions on alabasters, architectural and sculptured stonework (Brodie and Algar), church bells and cast copper-alloy vessels (Algar and Saunders), shoes (Friendship-Taylor), copper alloy (Goodall), iron (Schuster, Saunders and Algar), wood (McNeill with Saunders and Algar), porphyry (Tatton-Brown) and window glass (Eavis). Material and sites are first introduced and followed by a find-by-find catalogue with references and illustrations. For this volume there are also some important addenda to the categories already covered in earlier catalogues, and these are finds that have recently come to light or entered the museum's collections over the past twenty years. Ideally the four catalogues should be seen as a whole.

With the exception of the odd stone capital from the cloister of Glastonbury Abbey, most of the finds described here come from locations close to Salisbury; some are chance recoveries from demolition work or allotments in the city or, more recently, metal-detected finds, while others come from excavation. Many of the archaeological sites will be well known to the general reader and include Salisbury Cathedral, Ivychurch Priory, Clarendon Palace, the deserted medieval village at Gomeldon, Old Sarum and the Laverstock pottery kiln excavations; there are even several finds here from Pitt-Rivers's excavations at King John's House at Tollard Royal, published in 1890. Among the many highlights is some of the earliest domestic painted glazing from the reign of Henry iii, from Clarendon Palace, recovered in the 1930s by Tancred Borenius and John Charlton and their eighty workmen organised by the Universities Council for Unemployed Camps. There are also unusual survivals, such as the leather shoes from waterlogged graves at the site of the Dominican friary in Salisbury, and some shackles excavated from an apparently decapitated skeleton interred in the cathedral at Old Sarum. At the heart of this assemblage of finds, however, is the so-called ‘drainage collection’ recovered from mid-nineteenth-century works across the city. It was these discoveries that originally led to the establishment of the Salisbury Museum, a story told in greater detail in Saunders's 2009 booklet Channels to the Past (available from the museum bookshop and online). As might be expected, there is an inevitable bias towards higher-quality objects or at least those that are more intact, and it is hard to make general conclusions about the assemblage as a whole. In her section on objects of copper alloy, Alison Goodall points out that the number of brooches is particularly notable but only wider research on the basis of the Portable Antiquities Scheme and other data would show for certain whether Salisbury was especially wealthy in the later Middle Ages. There is considerable scope for research to place these finds into a wider social and religious context in the manner illustrated, for example, by Roberta Gilchrist's Medieval Life (Reference Gilchrist2012).

For a series of volumes to be sustained and driven forward for more than two decades, it must have its champions. Here the role of Peter Saunders, the Curator Emeritus, who retired in 2007 after thirty years as director of the museum, is evident both as editor and as three-times contributor. His most valuable allies have been David Algar, a volunteer at the museum for the past forty years and here a four-times contributor, and Nick Griffiths, whose eighty-four pages of line drawings are of such marvellous quality and make these catalogues so useful. The four volumes stand together as lasting testimony to their personal commitment to a project whose depth of scholarship can be matched in England only by London, Winchester and York.