This volume is the third and last of a most impressive series: the first, on northern England, was published in 1996; the second, on East Anglia, central England, and Wales, was published in 2000 (now out of print); and, finally, this volume, on southern England, was published in 2006 and includes an index to all three volumes. Priced at $325, this book will probably only find its way into the best-endowed architectural libraries, yet it will prove invaluable to medieval architectural historians, as well as to scholars of later periods.

In the introduction to all the volumes, Anthony Emery inveighs against architectural historians for being too concerned with architectural details and not enough with how buildings functioned as homes. He argues that the Middle Ages was the “first great age” of domestic architecture, not the Tudor period, whose architecture owed much more to medieval prototypes than previously acknowledged. Emery also criticizes scholars of the period for overemphasizing the defensive functions of castles and fortified houses. As a result, he eliminates some (but not all) castles from this study, as well as secular cathedral closes, town houses, and vernacular buildings. Also excluded are houses made from monastic properties (e.g., Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, which is, however, mentioned in other contexts). What remain are royal palaces, high-status noble and ecclesiastic dwellings, fine gentry houses, and relatively modest manor houses and farmhouses. He also includes some collegiate foundations (Eton, Winchester, and early Oxford and Cambridge colleges) because their communal lodging patterns appear to have been an important inspiration to later builders.

Like the previous volumes, the book is divided into geographic parts: the Thames Valley (Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire); London and the Southeast (Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex, and Kent); and southwest England (Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall). Each part includes an introduction, a bibliography, essays on the historical background and peculiar architectural features of the region, a more general thematic essay, and, finally, a lengthy “survey” (or gazetteer) of buildings, arranged alphabetically, rather than by county. The entries vary considerably in length, with the most important houses usually being the longest: Windsor Castle runs to fifteen and a half pages, and Thornbury Castle (“of outstanding national importance” [186]) is given over five pages. Oddly, his discussion of Bodiam Castle, one of the most aesthetically pleasing and thoroughly studied of all medieval houses, is limited to the many changing academic and archaeological interpretations of the building and its site, presented as rather simplistic bullet points in only a little more than one page. In contrast is the remarkable amount of new information Emery has gathered for what appear to be very minor houses, a tribute to his determination to see and experience all of these buildings and to his thorough examination of sources, both primary and secondary. In addition to consulting the early antiquarian county histories, the more recent Victoria County Histories and “Pevsners” (Buildings of England), Emery spread his net wide, and it is not unusual for him to cite an unpublished BA “dissertation” from some obscure university. His bibliographies and notes provide an inspiring wealth of information, and scholars will be deeply grateful for his thoroughness and generosity in listing these in the footnotes and bibliographies of each house.

Emery's writing style can be choppy and his choice of words sometimes very odd. How a window can be “voluptuous” is hard to imagine (184). One has a certain amount of sympathy, though, for someone who has filled over seven hundred pages with words describing the buildings, the families who occupied them, and the significance of each. Yet, one wonders if he shouldn’t have been advised to cut back a bit, for some of the last essays are the weakest. Chapter 16 (“Secular Art, Decoration and Furnishing, 1300–1500”), for example, is repetitive and inconclusive. How can anyone discuss interior decoration without mentioning fireplaces? Although writing that a “quintet of ownership, setting, architectural form, purpose and content should be the bedrock of medieval house studies” (472), he includes only a short section on gardens (barely a quarter of a page). He could have drawn some very interesting conclusions from the houses he described in this and the earlier volumes and even more from one important house he omitted: Everswell or Woodstock Palace, which is mentioned only tangentially but had one of the best-recorded and most complex gardens of the medieval period.

In fact, the point about the setting could easily have been made without adding more words, but by including aerial views (I counted only one), as many of these houses are still dramatically sited with walls and earthwork remains still visible. Although generously illustrated, one might have expected a dash of color from a book costing as much as this one. Certainly the quality of printing should have been better. These are, however, relatively minor complaints, and the numerous plans and diagrams (the “figures”) are extremely helpful, as are the photographs, engravings, and drawings (the “plates”). Captions are almost too brief, though, and the lists of the plates and figures, given at the end of the book, supply no further information. One wonders why he bothered with the lists at all, and I, for one, would have liked to have had more information about the sources of the illustrations, particularly for the plans. Photographic credits for some of these acknowledge the National Monuments Record, but that does not provide any real clue as to who actually drew them or when.

“Greater medieval houses” were built, Emery tells us many times, to reflect the status, wealth, and ambitions of the owner, almost always a man. A house was not just “architecture,” but an “envelope to contain a household” (28). This household consisted of the owner, his immediate and extended family, and his servants. While the size of the household depended on the wealth and position of the owner, it was “almost entirely a male society” (29), or so the story goes. Surely some of the powerful widows, who held peerages jointly with their sons (30), had some say in the running and ordering of the household. But evidence is scarce in the Middle Ages and would remain so until Bess of Hardwick appeared in the late sixteenth century as the single female architectural patron of the Tudor period, followed by Anne of Denmark and Lady Anne Clifford in the early years of the Stuart monarchy.

If female architectural patronage was not a medieval phenomenon, Emery finds numerous other developments that would emerge as essential features of Tudor domestic style: the double courtyard house; the importance of a “low” and “high” end of the hall (and house); and, perhaps most important, the variety and complexity of lodgings and living accommodation that were the result of a growing emphasis on hospitality, as well as on privacy. It is through his detailed analysis of hundreds and hundreds of houses, great and not so great, provincial and metropolitan, that Emery builds the compelling evidence for his argument. It will be a long time before a book, or even another series of books, comes close to this monumental achievement.