Notley Abbey, west of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, is not a well-known medieval monastery but turns out to have had connections with more important people and to have had more scattered lands and influence than is often the case. It was founded in 1162 by Walter Giffard, earl of Buckingham, and his wife Ermengard, as an Augustinian house within the Arrouaisian family, established with the help of canons from Missenden Abbey. Thomas Becket is said to have laid the foundation stone. Some of the early abbots attended general chapters at Arrouaise but the linkage weakened later on. The abbey had a distinguished line of patrons, the Giffards being followed by William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, Simon de Montfort, Gilbert de Clare, the Bohun earls of Hereford, the earls of Stafford, the dukes of Buckingham and finally Henry viii, who stayed there twice. It was middling in size and wealth with twenty-two canons in 1357 and an income of £437 in 1535.

Like some other churches and chapels (notably Louth Park), Notley was founded in a seigneurial park which gave it a rather remote situation, well away from a town. The original endowments consisted of lands and churches in Buckinghamshire, but later donations extended these to properties in Lincolnshire, north Norfolk and even to some tenements and two parish churches in the city of London. In 1461 the house was permitted to annex the small neighbouring Augustinian priory of Chetwode which it subsequently ran as a cell of two canons. Another important possession was the chapel of St Mary by Caversham Bridge near Reading. This contained not only a venerated image of the Virgin but a notable collection of relics, including part of the spear that wounded Christ and the knife alleged to have murdered Henry vi in 1471. The chapel became a popular place of pilgrimage and was still so when worship at shrines and images was forbidden in 1538. The abbey church, rebuilt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, eventually possessed a choir and nave, each with aisles, separated by a crossing with transepts, a cloister and domestic buildings. Little survives on the site today except for a large house chiefly formed from the abbot’s lodging, once lived in by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

The author and the society are to be congratulated on producing a very full and detailed account of the abbey’s history and possessions. All that can be recovered from documents is given due attention. Generous maps and photographs add to the reader’s pleasure and understanding. The plan of the book is primarily chronological rather than being divided into topics. This means that aspects such as the patrons, abbots, buildings, finances and events come up throughout the book in several subsections, and their stories have to be followed in instalments. Another valuable aspect of the book is its concern with the parish churches owned by the abbey, and investigators of these churches will find helpful material here. As usual it is difficult to sum up the abbey’s history as being a creditable one or not, because so little is known of its internal life, and its main activity, the liturgy, has left no traces. A visitation by Bishop Alnwick of Lincoln in 1447 found an elderly abbot and a good deal of strife within the community, which the bishop did his best to sort out. The abbey was doing better by the 1530s when it employed at least two schoolmasters in succession to teach grammar and in one case divinity as well. One of these, Robert Pebworth, has escaped the author’s otherwise thorough researches. He was a former Fellow of New College, Oxford.