This massive book contains an account of what the author claims to be ‘the largest total excavation of a medieval manorial site in Northern Europe’. ‘La Grava’, now known as Grove, is on the Bedfordshire–Buckinghamshire border three miles south of Leighton Buzzard. It was threatened with sand extraction and the digging took place between 1972 and 1986. Since resources were unavailable at the time for post-excavation work, twenty-eight years have passed between the inevitably piecemeal dig and publication. There were advantages, however, in that Baker has spent much of the time thinking about it and the result is a skilful fusion of the ample structural remains, minimal artefactual finds and exiguous documentary evidence.

The hamlet of Grove, known as ‘La Grava’ from the thirteenth century, originated in an Anglo-Saxon manor called Leighton. The Norman kings kept it in their own hands, but Henry ii gave it in 1164 to his favourite French monastic house, Fontevrault, in the heart of Anjou. With the collapse of the Angevin Empire this English cell changed from being a monastic grange to a non-claustral priory. For a time it was the seat of the Procurator General of the order of Fontevrault. He was in control of the monastery’s considerable English estates and sent regular subventions to bolster the tottering finances of the impoverished mother house. The monarchy, however, never entirely cut its ties with this estate in England. It served as a staging post in frequent royal itineraries. In this, La Grava was not ‘a minor royal palace’ as Baker suggests; instead, it was regarded as a domus regis, a king’s house. In this, it was similar to another royal foundation, the Hospital, or Maison Dieu, at Ospringe, Kent, which kings used as a convenient stopping-off place on the direct route from London to Canterbury and the shortest sea crossing to France (Smith Reference Smith1979). Such royal foundations had served a similar purpose in Ottonian Germany, where, by visiting royal monastic foundations around their lands, the sacral monarchs maintained their authority over an otherwise ungovernable kingdom (Bernhardt Reference Bernhardt1996).

Royal visits at Grove left a disappointing paucity of finds. Specific objects amounted to two: a fine Limoges triple-legged candlestick dropped into a garderobe pit and a single heraldic pendant fallen from a royal horse. Baker justly remarks that the higher the status of the visitors the less likely it is that they left anything valuable behind them. The artefacts found on the whole site are recorded in electronic form, which certainly shortens an already sizeable book, but this reviewer finds it inconvenient to switch from book to screen and back again.

What is bound to be controversial is Baker’s contention that the medieval settlement pattern was based on a series of surveyed plans, parallelogram in shape. This planning, she thinks, occurred from Roman times onwards and points to a number of man-made ditches at right angles to one another. The Romans were certainly fixated on mensuration but how do you date a ditch, and in any case do they not fill up over a period of, say, 700 years? In his Ford lectures in Oxford during 2013, John Blair recognised planning employing mensuration in a number of late Anglo-Saxon settlements. He proposed a standard module of four 15 ft perches. There does seem a possible use of such grids at Grove; but the module is 8.5 yards different (a single pole) and Baker has to admit that, if there was forward planning of the layout of buildings, then it was not done very well. Three grids seem to have been used at different times on slightly different axes and the royal surveyors at times made mistakes in laying out buildings within them. A more likely case is made for the rectilinear planning she notices in a revision of Rahtz’s excavation at King’s House, Writtle, but here the rectangular moat seems to have determined the building layout. ‘La Grava’, like nearly all the ‘kings’ houses’, was undefended, a tribute to the success of the late Anglo-Saxon and Norman monarchies in imposing their will over the land.

Baker also flirts with the fashionable idea of access analysis, but at ‘La Grava’ the tangle of multiple re-buildings over three centuries are not really suitable candidates since it is impossible to be certain at any one time which buildings were high status, agricultural, ecclesiastical or service, or which were accessible and by whom.

Turning to the problem of identifying area and room function, this is made difficult by the sparsity of finds, many of which are residual, and the fact that the documents, comparatively rich in the fourteenth century, list the buildings but do not say where they were in relation to one another. The grange buildings, not grouped round a cloister, look like a series of domestic residences arranged eventually within three courtyards, not unlike the much less thoroughly excavated manorial site at Harding’s Field (or Barentin’s Manor) at Chalgrove, Oxfordshire (Page et al Reference Page2005). Particularly interesting at ‘La Grava’ is the care taken to study the farm buildings, something we know far less about than residential accommodation. The latter display building techniques remarkably similar to those used by the forest-edge peasant potters at Lyveden, Northamptonshire. Timber frames on dwarf walls or post and truss on padstones predominate. The higher status of some buildings is marked by the presence of plaster, either whitened or covered in red masonry patterns, seen in many medieval churches. The only one I would think twice about is identified as a granary. Usually, such repositories of cereal wealth were sited near an occupied building for the sake of security. Incidentally, I found only one factual error: King John died in 1216. He could not be seen, as the text says, in 1230!

Among unusual features is the presence of distillation vessels, suggesting an increasing use of chemistry to make home-brewed remedies. Also, how often in medieval archaeology do we have ‘hard rush’ in the garderobe, claimed by Baker to be anal wipes, the medieval equivalent of lavatory paper? Human excreta were valued, as in modern China, as fertiliser. The floors of the buildings were mostly swept, the yard surfaces scraped clear, and this may well account for the lack of finds. They were perhaps shot out in middens and subsequently spread over the fields. The discovery of a horse’s skull with an articulated stretch of neck bones, interpreted by Baker as punishment inflicted on a horse for biting a groom, is not credible. Far more likely, as Merrifield points out, is that such burials were ritual foundation deposits common throughout Roman and subsequent times, even in nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire (Merrifield Reference Merrifield1987). A final point: one of the current problems of the National Health Service are the huge sums spent on enlarging beds and doors in hospitals to host the obese. ‘La Grava’ also had that problem; a stone coffin had to be enlarged to take a corpulent corpse, probably indicating that such items came ‘ready-made’ and this one required enlarging for a fat brother (p 122).

The book is illustrated throughout, with numerous reconstructions of the excavated buildings, as well as timelines showing national and continental events parallel with the author’s proposed dating of the various phases of the buildings. Altogether, this book is well up to the standard the author has claimed for ‘the largest total excavation … in Northern Europe’.