As Philip Slavin intimates on more than one occasion in this book there is a wealth of information yet to be examined in the surviving monastic and ecclesiastical archives of medieval England. What has been published to date serves to draw attention to the wealth of material that awaits the persevering scholar. For the most part these records deal with the practical aspects of daily life in a monastic setting, and the topics most frequently pursued by researchers deal with such items as the acquisition of everyday needs and the ways in which these were used or allocated; in other words, the economic side of monastic life. Slavin's choice of Norwich cathedral priory for this study was influenced by the survival of some 1,200 account rolls of the monk officials or obedientiaries who kept year-by-year records of their income and expenditure, and he has also made use of the accounts of the cathedral priory's manorial estates. The chapters follow one another in logical progression; they begin with a detailed description of the cathedral community and its food requirements followed by an account of the grain markets and their fluctuations over the period 1260 to 1538, a study of the changing policy with regard to grain production on the priory demesnes, a discussion of the means of transportation of the harvested crops to the cathedral priory and of the storage facilities on the demesnes and in the cathedral precinct and, finally, the bread-baking and ale-brewing in the precinct and their consumption by the monks, their guests, their servants and by the poor in the form of alms. The text is furnished with numerous and somewhat daunting tables to provide the reader with almost yearly evidence of the seasonal changes in the grain markets, the fluctuations in crop receipts and in the duration of harvesting periods, transportation expenses from demesne to monastic precinct and so on. This study is based on a thorough research of the extant records, but some of the concluding remarks, with regard to the monastic diet for example, could be challenged by the evidence available from other cathedral priories such as Winchester where the monk refectorer supplied fruit for his brethren. It is always necessary to recognise that we are dependent on the documents, and when relying on evidence obtained from account rolls we need to remember that they omit details that are not directly dependent on money transactions. Slavin would have benefitted from a similar study of the monastic economy at Durham cathedral priory, namely Monks and markets by Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (Oxford 2005).