The Tudor Cistercians is the culmination of 50 years work by its author. It covers England and Wales, and is particularly strong on the Welsh houses, which might be expected of a Welshman who has previously published extensively on the Welsh Cistercians, but does not address the Irish houses of the order, from the advent of Henry VII to the dissolution, and in some respects, beyond.

Unlike the Benedictine David Knowles, author of The Religious Orders in Medieval England, he writes not from within the order that he documents, but from a position of profound sympathy, as a former guest-master of Caldey Abbey, off the south Welsh coast, and as an Anglican priest. In many ways this book has been shaped by that context. Like Knowles, his book explores various aspects of the male monastic experience: monastic fabric and worship, communities, claustral officers, lay servants, uprisings, economy and the suppression, before a separate chapter on Cistercian nuns. Unlike Knowles, Williams manages to say more about the nuns than about monastic economies, but it is a view still very much shaped by medieval male attitudes to female religious. Abbot Huby may have thought that Cistercian nuns had ‘slipped away from the obedience of our religion unto the jurisdiction of the ordinaries (bishops)’ because of their unwillingness to accept the strictness of the order but it is more likely that the reluctance of the male houses to be bothered and the inability of the nuns to withstand the power of the bishop was the cause. The book concludes with substantial appendices containing biographical entries on all the known Cistercians, monks and nuns, who were under vows 1485-1540, and what is known of them after 1540.

It is deeply rooted in the primary sources, and Williams appears to have searched every bishop’s register in the period, delved into the holdings of the National Archive, and explored all the obvious and some of the less obvious, printed primary sources for the period, but with more limited engagement with any kind of historiography. It tells the reader what the sources say, but is less concerned with what they might mean. He shows that in the early sixteenth century some houses were said to be in a ruinous state while others were apparently well-populated and could afford to build fine new lodgings for abbots, towers for the church, or rebuild the cloister. But how are we to read this evidence? If we may have doubts about the suppression commissioners’ accounts of houses ‘in great ruin and decay’ should we also be cautious about the 1528 indulgence which claimed that ‘the greater part’ of the house of Strata Marcella was ‘broken down’? Does rebuilding imply confidence and economic security as recent work (James G. Clark, ed., The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England (2002); Martin Heale ed., The Prelate in England and Europe, 1300-1560 (2014)) suggests (neither of which are referenced)? Or the need to assert monastic power and authority in a world where these were being challenged by lay authority; or simply the greater gap that was developing between both lay and ecclesiastical elites and their subordinates? And if we are to take this evidence of both decay and revival at face value, what is its significance? Why were some houses apparently ripe for suppression, while others might have survived and thrived in more politically propitious circumstances?

In his discussion of the Lincolnshire Rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace Williams argues that in all but one case the abbots and monks subsequently executed had had no choice but to comply with the demands of rebels and thus suffered ‘needlessly and unjustly’ but the evidence that he himself adduces suggests that in a number of cases monks and abbots were actively if sometimes ambivalently involved—William Moreland, for example, who protected the bishop of Lincoln’s registrar from a violent mob, but also led rebels from Louth to Caistor while wearing armour. To see this as just a question of whether or not they should be seen as martyrs, or whether the monasteries ‘needed’ to be reformed is to see these events through a very narrow window. Moreland had already seen his house closed down, and the rebels were seeking to re-establish religious houses: joining them may have seemed his best hope of returning to the monastic life.

As these comments suggest this is a rather old-fashioned book, but it has many virtues: it is deeply rooted in the sources and quotes them extensively, often leaving interpretation to the reader. The appendices alone will be worth the price of the book to anyone interested in the prosopography of the Cistercians in this period.