The History of England’s Cathedrals. By Nicholas Orme. 240mm. Pp xii + 304, 76 col ills, 15 maps and plans. Impress Books, Exeter, 2017. isbn 9781907605925. £20.00 (pbk).

Abstract

original discussion of this type of staircase in Zeitschrift für Archäologie des Mittelalters made it clear that it and its variants continued in use inmajor Romanesque buildings throughout the twelfth century, with examples in the cathedrals at Oxford and St David’s dated as late as × and × respectively. A viable unvaulted alternative does not appear to have been developed until the thirteenth century. The technique of the vaulted staircase may well have developed in the course of the twelfth century, but it was certainly not abandoned c , as the author implies. At the end of the final chapter Dr Shapland hopes ‘that this chapter has succeeded in rescuing Anglo-Saxon tower-nave churches from the status of an architectural curiosity to an influential part of the mainstream of early medieval built culture’. The section ‘Anglo-Saxon tower-naves and Norman castles’ certainly achieves that, introducing the concept of the ‘enmotted tower’ to show how the lordly tower formed the basis for the development of the Norman motte surmounted by a keep. It is worthy of remark that Towers of Lordship was published just over forty years after the appearance in volume  of the Archaeological Journal (coincidentally under my editorship) of ‘Five castle excavations’, the rather inconclusive report on the Royal Archaeological Institute’s project into the origins of the castle in England (Saunders et al ). So the towernave has secured a niche not only as a ‘coherent building type’ of Anglo-Saxon origin but as a major strand in the development of the castle as a symbol of status and military power. To that extent one might beg to question whether the book’s title underplays the full significance of its contribution to medieval building studies.