The blurb says that it has been 'designed for the general reader', but it is so densely packed with highly detailed scholarly information and so literally heavy that it will surely be used chiefly in the study and the library. Yet so much of it cries out to be taken into the cathedral itself, so that the book can illuminate the building and the building the book. To this end, if parts II and IV, which discuss respectively the evolution of the fabric, and the sculpture, painting, monuments and so on, were to be offprinted and bound separately, they would form handbooks to the understanding of the cathedral unlikely to be superseded in the foreseeable future. Another good reason for reading the book in the cathedral is that the illustrations do not, perhaps could not, convey the beauty and numinous quality of this great building. However, it is a remarkable achievement to have brought together and published such a symposium.
Future work can only add glosses to it.
But it was much more than that, as this book on the City's infamous south bank settlement shows. Martha Carlin looks principally at the documentary evidence, paying particular attention to the period from c 1200 to 1550. It was in fact a polyfocal settlement comprising five independent-minded but contiguous manorial estates owned by the Crown, the Bishop of Winchester, the Templars, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Bermondsey Abbey. Such a place defies all the rules set by those intent on the neat classification of urban settlements. Whatever its legal status, it certainly boasted a diverse economy, with occupations suggested by the 1381 poll tax returns that included goldsmith, innkeepers, hucksters, tailors, boatmen, brewers and prostitutes.