Having benefited from the results and outcomes of the Barlings project at recent conferences, it is a pleasure to see the full results published. Custodians of Continuity? involves the immensely detailed unpicking of the historical and archaeological record for the lands of the Premonstratensian abbey at Barlings in Lincolnshire. The authors, well known for their work on Lincolnshire churches, the early medieval sculpture of east and north-east England and the late Anglo-Saxon to medieval rural landscape more generally, have once again presented a detailed and challenging narrative – an exploration of the ancient ritual landscape of the abbey's home estate – some 200 sq km lying east and north of Lincoln.
This is an archaeological study that takes a primarily landscape approach. The aim is to deconstruct how this monastic landscape came into being and changed over time, and to explore the broader theme of power and place, examining how preceding activity may have influenced and shaped this post-Conquest monastic house. The authors set out the rationale, theoretical agenda and approach in Part 1, exposing their debt to Bradley (Reference Bradley2000), Johnson (Reference Johnson2006) and others. They adopt the long view, seeking to explore the ‘enduring structures’ that across time shaped the inhabited and populated terrain of the monastic lands. The result is full of new archaeological detail and is constantly thought-provoking in terms of the relationship between phases of human activity in this landscape and the effects of tangible and intangible legacies over time.
Investigation first closely considers Oxney island and its abbey, founded in 1154. In Chapters 3, 4 and 5 the abbey's development, its aftermath and the formation of the parishes that compose its lands are discussed. The authors reconstruct the lands and buildings, drawing on the standing remains, antiquarian and eighteenth-century engravings of the ruins, surveys of the earthworks and close examination of reused stone fragments from Barlings, recycled in local churches such as Scothern. Entirely new propositions are raised. A total reconstruction of the church is argued for c 1335–55. The authors cogently argue for the construction of a major mansion in the 1530s, in the immediate aftermath of the Dissolution, almost certainly by the Duke of Suffolk, demonstrating ‘the king placing the symbolic seats of sedition and religious sensitivity in the county into the trusted hands of Brandon’.
The tracing of ex situ material is fascinating, revealing in detail a vigorous trade in and reuse of decorated and moulded stonework in medieval ecclesiastical and secular buildings. It is here that some key issues of place are first explored. The island, floating in its marshy basin (the topographic location elucidated and exemplified by superb LiDAR data), lay within an embayment, which, it is argued, was an important communal shared resource zone – for fish, fowl, peat and reeds. Using Pestell's observations on ‘productive sites’ (Reference Pestell2004) and arguing that this kind of place might be envisaged as a location where people gathered to exploit, manage and share resources, the authors posit this as a place of congregation over the longue durée, from prehistory until at least the fourteenth century. These ideas draw upon work published in 2003 that put forward evidence for the long-term deposition of metalwork and other objects along the Witham river and valley, recognising remarkable continuity from late prehistory to the High Middle Ages.
The authors have often asserted that ritual cannot be separated from the everyday, something which works very well here, with the monastery taking control over this ancient resource zone, managing its resources but also exploiting the ancient potency of the place. Oxney fits within this watery monastic landscape, but no votive finds have yet been located along its northern causeway, weakening the authors’ arguments for long-term activity in the embayment. Nonetheless, the island is rich in prehistoric monuments, including barrows situated close to the crossing points. In all other respects the situation of the Premonstratensian abbey fits the wider trend of monasteries situated at key exploitation zones and crossing places. Their arguments underline how the intangible – popular rites, gatherings, regular events, superstitions and beliefs – for which scarce archaeological or written evidence exists, may have exerted a strong agency over the placement of early monasteries and churches in the landscape.
It is impossible to summarise all the main contributions here, but the assessment of archaeological resource on the lower limestone, the high limestone and the clay vale yields valuable insights into the principal components of the landscapes and the developing settlement patterns, the landscape resources and their exploitation. Chapters 9, 10 and 11 use these findings to demonstrate how the abbey used and governed its territory. Barlings emerges as a place-name survival that may once have referenced a large Middle Saxon reeve's estate. The Barlings landscape emerges as another striking example of an expansive, pre-Conquest, multifocal Christian landscape, developing in response to a pre-existing potent terrain, reminiscent of Ripon or perhaps Lastingham, both in Yorkshire. The abbey estate was a long-term and careful construction, delivering necessary resources for this monastery to manage its territory. The estate developed through the powerful patronage of Lincoln aristocrats, retaining its links with the city and becoming the resting place for the earls of Lincoln. Post-Dissolution, the place attracted a major statement of Tudor power: Charles Brandon's new mansion.
The writing is fluent and the volume copiously illustrated. The findings are wide-ranging and important, and will provoke new debates on monasteries in the long view. This is English landscape archaeology at its best, but it is salutary to consider that this project of nearly thirty years’ duration originated from, and drew extensively upon, the great expertise of the authors and their respective organisations: the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) and English Heritage. Would this excellent project and its outcomes now be achieved in the same way, given the current scaling back of our major heritage organisations, their funding and resources for field research, and the far shorter time-frames imposed on grant-funded field projects?
