The Augustinian priory of Saints Peter and Paul in Ipswich, once considered the most senior of the town's religious houses, was dissolved by Cardinal Wolsey in 1528 to make room for his "College of St Mary". However, its surviving thirteenth-century cartulary is a treasure-trove of documentation about the lower-level nobility active in central medieval Suffolk, and David Allen's edition of it is a good and useful book which sheds much light on family, property, and religion.
The cartulary itself was only relatively recently returned to Suffolk, and its history before that time is intriguing. Allen attempts to trace its provenance, which sadly cannot be put much before the nineteenth century. By that time, the manuscript had ended up in the public library of Lexington, Kentucky, donated by one Mr. John Bobb, a local brickmaker, in 1806. The staff at the Lexington library are evidently unable to trace it back a great deal further, and Allen cites a communication from them quoting a late nineteenth-century work hypothesising that the cartulary was confiscated during the Early Modern period by a family who fled the Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War and settled in Virginia and thence Kentucky. This theory is complicated, however, by the fact that John Bobb's family appears to have Pennsylvanian (and perhaps German) background. Allen's judgement that the manuscript's providence is essentially mysterious is a wise one; but this case would perhaps make an interesting part of a dissertation on the acquisition of medieval cartularies by American libraries.
This volume, the first of two dealing with the priory, is essentially a transcription of the cartulary, although per the series' usual practice, the text of some thirty-six original charters have been substituted for their cartulary copies (Allen, naturally, is careful to mark textual variation between the originals and the cartulary copies). The book contains 338 documents, dating from the early twelfth to the late thirteenth centuries. The vast majority of these texts are transcribed rather than simply calendared. Allen has slightly adapted the usual practice of the Suffolk Charters series in order to provide the full texts of every document before 1270 rather than before 1250; this was surely the right decision. One might wish that all the documents in the cartulary could have been printed in full, but the demands of both print space and editorial consistency are weighty and consequently the post-1270 documents' abbreviation is understandable. The attention to detail and the quality of the transcriptions is very good and meticulous--there is nothing to complain about here. The texts are also thoroughly annotated with introductions, with notes on dating (which sometimes also flag useful prosopographical linls), and with notes of marginal texts.
The volume also includes a fairly sizeable introduction, weighing in at around seventy pages, dealing with the house's origins, religious life, assets, benefactors, and suppression; and a detailed description of the cartulary manuscript itself. Allen's comprehensive knowledge of the sources is clearly visible here. He makes a useful reassessment of the question of SS Peter and Paul's foundation or re-foundation, rightly questioning how far the status of the house at the time King Henry I issued his writ of protection in 1133 can be fit into our formal categories. Of particular interest to scholars will be Allen's examination of some donor families to the house. As he notes, the priory attracted little interest from the greatest nobility (although a few comital charters are present), and so the charters mostly shine a light onto the B- and C-list nobility active in the Suffolk region. Allen's brief but dense outline of these families is a useful aid to sorting out these people, and getting a good sense of their activities. The other topics covered in the introduction are also helpful, especially the outline of the priory's properties--the potted histories of individual estates contained therein add up into an interesting picture of the problems and practices of the church's asset management.
Physically, the book is handsomely produced. The maps and genealogical tables are good quality, although it would have been nice if the map of the priory's possessions had given a sense of the region's physical geography as well. It is something of a shame that this book does not contain an index, particularly a chronological index. Indexes for both this volume and the follow-up volume on the priory's original charters are slated to come out in volume two, and it does seem reasonable to suppose that most researchers interested in the topic will try and get their hands on both; nonetheless, splitting the indexes up might have facilitated easier use of the volume, even if it occasioned some repetition.
This tiny gripe aside, this new edition of the SS Peter and Paul cartulary is a well-executed and very valuable addition to the Suffolk Charters series, carried out with care and great learning. It suggests several lines of interesting inquiry, and its thorough and erudite apparatus will be a beneficial guide to researchers. It will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of scholars of central medieval English history and of medieval documentary practice.