The Cluniac priory of St Pancras played an important role in the development of the town of Lewes and continues to influence life in the area of Southover, which, typically for such settlements, grew up outside the north gate of the monastery, literally a suburb below the precipitous slopes of the site of the Anglo-Saxon burh, which forms the core of the modern town. Its fame consists not only of its status as the most senior of a relatively small number of Cluniac houses in Britain but of the notorious thoroughness of its demolition at the Dissolution by Giovanni Portinari, who left an account of his proceedings, and of the further despoliation of the site in 1845 by the construction of the Brighton to Lewes line of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway. Recording at the time yielded a plan of the priory and its church, but little in the way of detailed archaeological information. The surviving masonry is scarcely more than heaps of flint rubble, with only the reredorter preserving anything of its former architectural finish. Over the years the Lewes Priory Trust has striven to investigate and record such information as can still be recovered, but the priory church itself remains elusive, covered by an active plant nursery which precludes access; the Trust’s plans to purchase it for conservation were unfortunately thwarted.

This archaeologically unpromising site is the subject of Dr Mayhew’s substantial monograph. A useful brief introduction outlines the documentary and archaeological sources of evidence. The succeeding chapters include accounts of the foundation, rise and decline of the monastery (Chapters 1 and 4), of its dissolution and destruction (Chapter 7), of the personnel and economy (Chapter 5) and of the wider Cluniac community in the country as a whole (Chapter 6). Chapter 5’s attempt to describe ‘monastic administration, estate management, food production and consumption’ is based on the partial survival of estate and office-holders’ accounts, but is necessarily limited by comparison with Slavin’s analysis in Bread and Ale for the Brethren (Slavin Reference Slavin2012), for which more documentary evidence was available. As for the monks of the title and the lay staff of the monastery, they come to life – ironically – in the concluding chapter of the book, in which the author, building on earlier work by L F Salzman and others, looks at the careers of the inmates of St Pancras after the Dissolution. He also touches on the fate of dependent institutions and individuals, for example, the two Lewes almshouses, whose funding came to an abrupt end; a reference here to Duffy’s Voices of Morebath (Duffy Reference Duffy2001) would not have been out of place.

Other chapters are devoted to liturgy and art. The author’s broad-brush approach leads him into serious difficulty as he attempts in Chapter 3 to discuss ‘art and iconography’. In the case of carved stonework, although the surviving archive of Romanesque sculpture from the priory (stored in Anne of Cleves Museum and elsewhere, with some built into the walls of local buildings) is far less extensive and mainly of poorer quality than that of its daughter house at Reading, there is at least a context in which to consider the little that is available. However, an assessment of the so-called Lewes Group of early Romanesque mural painting is bedevilled by the lack of any surviving wall paintings from the priory itself or indeed from the mother house at Cluny. There is thus no point of reference for the relatively extensive survival of murals in Sussex parish churches (at Hardham, Clayton and elsewhere). The existence of a ‘Lewes Group’ (now largely discredited) is predicated on the fact that some if not all of the churches concerned came into the possession of the priory of St Pancras, though monastic houses were endowed with these and other properties as a source of income rather than as opportunities for expensive artistic embellishment. Dr Mayhew rejects the caveats put forward by David Park and Richard Gem, whose combined experience and scholarship are not lightly to be set aside, in favour of the traditional interpretation; in so doing he comes close to circular argument. The interpretation of the iconography of these paintings as representing a Cluniac theology takes little account of the fact that much of the world view of the Cluniacs was shared with the Benedictine order as a whole and indeed with the wider monastic community. So much is admitted at several points in the text but appears to be ignored in pursuit of a Cluniac-centred thesis.

The book concludes with suggestions for the direction of future research, curiously mixed with an account of recent investigations. One of these was commissioned by the author himself, a ground-penetrating radar survey of the accessible parts of the site in 2007. The (somewhat inconclusive) results are mentioned briefly, but should have been reported fully, given that their original publication was privately issued, and thus potentially ephemeral. Since that account ran to no more than five A4 pages, it would have been possible to include it in toto with a selection of the radar plots. Another feature of the earlier publication was a series of reconstruction perspective drawings by Andy Gammon, which are helpfully reproduced here between pages 63 and 70.