What’s new on the landscape and townscape of Kent before 1600? As ever it is good to see more results of recent archaeological and historical investigations in Kent reach prompt publication. The chronological range of the four, somewhat disparate, books considered here, is huge, with the first two books attempting coverage from the Palaeolithic to the early modern, a challenge to any reviewer. The origins and funding of each piece of research and the resulting book have strongly influenced their final forms. Altogether they provide a broad range of insights from townscapes and landscapes scattered across the county.

Folkestone to 1500 brings together for a wide readership the results of work which began with the excavation of East Cliff Roman villa. This work was carried out with the help of grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Roger de Haan Trust, and the fruitful co-operation of professional archaeologists, academics and local volunteers. University involvement helped ensure that ‘community engagement’ underpinned the project’s aims of understanding both the past in a locality and the processes by which residents relate to it. The charitable grant ensured that the work on this internationally important and endangered historic landscape was closely linked to an arts-led regeneration of parts of Folkestone. The project moved outwards and onwards from the excavation of the Roman period, and the book presents a deeply knowledgeable summary of relevant and recent work in surrounding east Kent, with the prehistoric and Roman periods covered by Keith Parfitt, FSA, and ‘Late Roman and Anglo-Saxon Folkestone’ by Andrew Richardson, FSA. Richardson rightly points readers to his more detailed ‘The Third Way: thoughts on non-Saxon identity south of the Thames’, a welcome discussion of the oversimplified Jutish origin myth which has dogged Kentish history and archaeology for too long (Brookes et al Reference Brookes, Harrington and Reynolds2011, 72–81). In this and numerous similar ways, these chapters and the rest of the book cater for the general reader using attractive illustrations and even timelines, while specialists can turn to the endnotes and bibliography. At first blush, Folkestone now appears as a largely Edwardian resort, although its narrow winding central lanes and the name Bayle are among clues to its medieval antecedents. Developments in the high Middle Ages are set out by Paul Dalton, FSA, covering ‘lords, churches, burgesses and castles’. This includes Folkestone’s role among the small and early Kentish towns that formed the entry points to England, and subsequently its significance as a member of the Cinque Ports. This chapter, and the one covering the later Middle Ages by Ian Coulson, FSA, make a major contribution to Folkestone’s history as well as the recent new histories of these ports. Lesley Hardy, the Project Director, brings the book to a close with an exemplary overview of interest in the Folkestone area by the early antiquaries, archaeologists, scholars and collectors of Kent (whom the Society of Antiquaries largely dismissed!).This book, together with a website and a pamphlet, help fulfil the project’s aim of involving local people and presenting an overview of its significant findings. It is extremely good value, and my only wish is for a good location map showing places such as East Cliff Farm in relation to Folkestone, since its readership will and should extend beyond those living nearby.

The Brisley Farm, Ashford volume is a much more substantial book than Folkestone, with different objectives and intended readership. It is traditional archaeological reporting, hence more academic in form and content with numerous expert contributors. There are ten chronological chapters from earlier prehistoric to post-medieval, followed by twenty-nine specialist reports and conclusions. Nevertheless, its starting point, Roman finds, was similar to that of Folkestone. These finds were two ‘warrior burials’ with swords and spears; of national or international significance given their late dates, around ad 10 and ad 50. They were located at Brisley Farm, south of what was once the small medieval town of Ashford. Ten archaeological investigations at Brisley Farm and one c 400m to the north east, all carried out between 1998 and 2009, allowed the authors to assemble a study covering a long chronological period. Ashford’s expansion permitted a string of excavations over a swathe of land that stretches across an area of Wealden clay in the valley of the River Stour. To the south east of Brisley, 900m away, lies Westhawk Farm, where a small Roman town was discovered unexpectedly (Booth et al Reference Booth, Bingham and Lawrence2008). The report on documentary sources describes there being ‘originally four and later five manors’ in the parish (presumably) but there is information on only two of them. Of these, Brisley (Farm) can be traced back earlier than suggested (1825) to 1631 in an account book of a Kentish estate, and the custumal of Battle Abbey (1283–1312) may hold more information about Kingsnorth manor than is provided. It is suggested as probable, but not proven, that Brisley land, the focus of the archaeology, did belong to (East) Kingsnorth manor. The so-called Southern and Northern Farms identified from medieval building remains, yard surfaces, pottery, ditches and so on, are not closely linked to the farms described in the documentary sources. However, from both archaeology and history, an interesting point is made that – in the absence of parliamentary enclosure in the county – some prehistoric boundaries may be fossilised in the typical Wealden system of small irregular pasture fields. The location of the late Norman parish church is not discussed in relation to Brisley Farm, nor ecclesiastical sources such as wills and churchwardens’ accounts, which might have added to the focus on ritual and the sacred that is prominent in discussion of earlier periods. These are, however, minor points; one of the great values of this book is setting out both the overview and the detail from one significant locality for more than three millennia. In a sense, a problem with bringing together a number of archaeological investigations in this way is the definition of a locality. It may be too easy to choose the area presented because of work carried out rather than because it has any real coherence. Perhaps that is a consideration here, although the authors do appraise the Brisley Farm evidence as part of a ‘British Eastern Channel area’ or region.

The Ebbsfleet Elephant is another classic of archaeological reporting, the last in a series of six monographs produced after the archaeological investigations undertaken in advance of the construction of HS1 (the Channel Tunnel Rail link) and Ebbsfleet International station in north Kent. Again, the book is linked by title and content to one ‘highlight’, the identification of the carcass of an extinct straight-trunked elephant. Moreover, this was surrounded by a scatter of flint tools, which lay undisturbed and which had been made, used and then abandoned in situ. These were dated to early in the Palaeolithic period and linked to the Hoxnian interglacial between about 425,000 and 375,000 years ago. In this time of peak interglacial warmth, the Ebbsfleet Valley was a lush, densely wooded tributary of the Thames with an almost stagnant swamp within it. Around the skeleton of the elephant a rich environmental record was found in the fossil remains, pollen, snails and a wide range of vertebrates, not only rabbit, mice, voles, deer and beaver but also rhinoceros and rare specimens of Daubenton’s bat and Barbary macaque. Furthermore, as well as the eighty or so flint flakes around the skeleton, another 1,900 artefacts were recovered from the same horizon about 30m away. This is taken to have been a higher and drier area of hominin activity, with the manufacture of flakes from simple cores and the subsequent selection of those with sharp edges for immediate use or further flaked to produce basic notched edges. The contributors discuss the relation of these artefacts to those from a higher level, which were hand axes of various forms, and whether this reflects a second wave of hominin settlement or in situ technological development of one south-east hominin group. There are twenty-two specialist chapters and further appendices, none of them easy or intended for general readers, but both the Introduction and the Discussion and Conclusions try to identify the national and international importance of the Palaeolithic excavations at Ebbsfleet for them. The authors also relate them to the later excavations covering shorter periods from late Iron Age to Saxon, when, for example, an exceptionally early tide-mill (c 692) was found. Notably they mention ‘the evident physical connection between the deep Pleistocene landscape history’ and present-day occupation, use and development. This heavyweight volume is in hardback, and so likely to survive as a book in good condition, unlike the three other paperbacks reviewed here, all of which could have benefited at least from better-quality covers.

Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Canterbury comprises seventeen contributions, several by Fellows, deriving from the British Archaeological Association’s 2009 conference in Canterbury. It takes as its focus the cathedral, not only aspects of its buildings, windows, tombs and its Romanesque screen, but also embroidery, imagery, the iconographic programme of St Anselm’s Chapel and a comparative study of the shaping of the identity of Becket. Laura Cleaver discusses some of the books once housed in the monks’ library (libraria), a room off the cloister. She points out that the cathedral was one of the largest repositories of books in medieval England, with many given in a list compiled under Prior Eastry in the 1320s. They were mostly grouped under the names of individuals who owned them before giving them to the library. Cleaver analyses the production and the processes by which seven of the earliest, dating to 1150–1220, were donated. Toby Huitson demonstrates his area of expertise, the systematic investigation of ecclesiastical upper spaces, with an examination of the so-called Old Bakery, the chamber above St Anselm’s Chapel. This he identifies as probably a former Romanesque chapel converted to the use of the Canterbury Shrine Wardens in c 1400. Peter Fergusson reconstructs the Green court and aula nova, which were at the centre of a complex of legal and jurisdictional buildings that formed the entrance to the cathedral priory for nearly 500 years. Their erection began in the mid-twelfth century, a project masterminded by Prior Wibert, the inspiration being the revival of Roman law and the emergence of canon law in France and Italy. Fergusson also discusses the compressed representation of these buildings in the Eadwine Psalter. To the conference papers has also been added one by Helen Gittos on sources for the liturgy at the cathedral, together with their implications for its architectural history and processional feasts such as Candlemas and Palm Sunday (and now more fully published in Gittos Reference Gittos2013). There is a chapter by Julian Luxford not on the cathedral but on the Great Gate of St Augustine’s Abbey in the 1310s, constructed to assert its parity with Christ Church Priory and independence from the archbishopric. Luxford balances description of the building and source materials, notably chronicles and the abbey seal, with interpretation of the gate’s functions and religio-political significance. All papers are short, reflecting their origin at the conference, making them eminently readable as well as profoundly knowledgeable and enlightening. In a short review I have only been able to mention a few and in no way do justice to an excellent volume.