Their buildings long destroyed and their sites now occupied by towering offices, the mendicant houses that once hugged London's outer perimeter constitute an easily overlooked part of the city's medieval fabric. As Nick Holder points out in this rich and rewarding book, so thoroughly have the friaries’ footprints been obliterated that even archaeology is hard pressed to find much in the way of physical remains. Hardly anything is to be seen today above ground of their once extensive churches and conventual buildings, while even below ground, except at the site of the Carmelites’ house off Fleet St, the archaeological imprint is faint. Nor will the student of medieval mendicant history find much correspondence between documentary and physical survival. In the case of one major house, that of the London Greyfriars, a reasonable corpus of documentary evidence has come down to us, but the physical trace of the place is virtually non-existent. This survey of London's friaries is necessarily, therefore, an exercise in speculative recovery, the work principally of an archaeologist, whose aim, he says, is ‘to interpret the landscape of the friaries and the ways in which the friary spaces were used by friars and citizens’. Extensive use is made of the techniques of map reconstruction, otherwise known as ‘map regression’, a jargon term helpfully explained here, which involves combining the evidence of historic maps, documents such as charters and surveys, with archaeological evidence to create plans of the friary precincts in their late medieval heyday. Where appropriate, use is also made of the insights of wills and chronicles. An interesting point to emerge is just how quickly these once extensive sites were obliterated from the urban landscape. By the time that all the maps and surveys, both drawn and descriptive, were compiled in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, little trace of the sites was left to be picked up by the surveyors. Within a decade of the Dissolution in the 1530s the buildings had been either demolished or converted, and their precincts divided up into plots for lease and sale. The sheer speed of the houses’ disappearance, the exiguous nature of their physical remains and the relative poverty of their archives together make the task of reconstruction undertaken here all the more remarkable. Through the careful use of cartography, and by extrapolating from the extant physical remains and then setting the insights thus gained alongside the evidence of the documentary sources, Holder and his team are able to come up with vivid re-creations of the houses’ buildings and precincts that would do justice to the late Alan Sorrell or a Time Team Special. In a magnificent image, which graces the book's cover, the London Blackfriars is pictured as a big spreading complex incorporating a double cloister, outlying buildings and gardens and, on its northern side, as its focal point, the great church, over 200 feet long and a showpiece of the Decorated style. The sheer splendour of the larger London mendicant houses and the extensive rebuilding of them in the period between the late thirteenth century and the Black Death are two of the main themes to emerge from this book. Sometime in the 1270s, perhaps after the Council of Lyons, Holder suggests, there was a major shift in attitude on the part of the friars, with the austerity of the founding fathers being rejected and, in its place, a more opulent style adopted, which saw the friars’ houses losing their early distinctiveness and becoming more like those of the richer Benedictines or Augustinian canons. Why this shift occurred is a matter which Holder touches on at various points in the book, but never fully or adequately resolves. Holder invites us to consider such factors as the influence of wealthy patrons, the inspiration of such cathedral and abbey reconstructions as those at Westminster and Salisbury, the need to accommodate large audiences for sermons and, more generally, what he calls the friars ‘re-imagining themselves’. All these are perfectly valid points, but the matter can probably only be resolved satisfactorily in the context of a wider, perhaps a European, investigation.

This admirable book is divided into two parts, the first a case-by-case study of the nine London mendicant sites (the Blackfriars accounting for three of these because of the number of their moves) and the second a series of thematic studies taking in such matters as architecture, building materials, economy, spiritual life and education, and burial and commemoration. The division makes for a certain repetition but, on the whole, works successfully, overcoming the fragmentation inherent in a convent-by-convent approach. Jens Röhrkasten, in his discussion of education, emphasises the contribution which the friars made to London's cultural and literary life, while Holder himself, considering the communities’ economic resources, shows how by the sixteenth century they were boosting their income through the development of rental portfolios. Christian Steer, in a wide-ranging discussion of commemoration, and drawing on the evidence of tomb lists, highlights the popularity which the houses enjoyed as burial places, particularly with the aristocracy (although on p. 287 his ‘Nuneaton, Cheshire’ should read ‘Nantwich, Cheshire’). The steady accumulation of brass-bearing slabs and effigial monuments in the friars’ churches – in the larger ones, many hundreds by the Reformation – must have made them look very cluttered, even crowded, inside. As Holder himself points out, the picture which we have of the churches today as large, airy preaching halls is to some extent ill-founded. This is a fascinating book which makes a major contribution to the history of the London mendicant communities not only as sites in an historic landscape but also as functioning communities which lay at the heart of a busy and densely populated city.