Malmesbury Abbey was one of a cluster of major Benedictine monasteries in south-western England with origins stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon era. On a site initially settled in the mid-seventh century by an Irish hermit, Máeldub, around whom disciples gathered, a flourishing monastic community developed at Malmesbury under the aegis of the great scholar-abbot, Aldhelm. Deeply learned and exceptionally well connected, Aldhelm - who ruled over the monastery from c.675-c.709 - attracted a stream of admirers, pupils and benefactions. Himself a member of the Wessex ruling dynasty, Aldhelm established the abbey's enduring royal connections, which reached their apex with the burial of King Aethelstan at Malmesbury in 939.

Following the Norman Conquest, the high reputation of St Aldhelm helped the abbey to secure the support of the new regime and ecclesiastical establishment. The Anglo-Norman abbey was a notable centre of learning, home to the physician and hagiographer Faricius of Arezzo, and (of course) the celebrated historian William of Malmesbury. Never in the first rank of English monasteries in terms of wealth, Malmesbury Abbey was nonetheless a richly endowed house and a major landowner. Its later medieval abbots, moreover, played a notable role in the business of the Benedictine provincial chapter.

Tony McAleavy's new study charts the abbey's long and eventful history from its foundation to dissolution. Drawing principally on existing scholarship and printed primary sources, he presents an engaging and judicious narrative of the monastery's fortunes and affairs, with a particular focus on its abbots, estates and intellectual life. Alongside a detailed account of the monastery's internal history, McAleavy highlights those occasions where wider national events encroached on the abbey's affairs. Indeed, Malmesbury Abbey was caught up in wider political storms on a number of occasions. For instance, it endured Viking raids in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries; faced serious disruption during the war between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda; suffered from its close connections to the highly unpopular Despensers in the reign of Edward II; and experienced popular disorder at the time of Jack Cade's uprising in 1450.

While acknowledging the spiritual and intellectual heights attained by the abbey in the time of Aldhelm and William of Malmesbury - vividly depicted in surviving letters, chronicles and hagiography - McAleavy is careful to deal with each phase of the monastery's history on its own terms. For the late Anglo-Saxon period and for the later middle ages, our knowledge of the abbey's affairs must be drawn principally from charters and legal records. These materials tell us little about the spiritual and communal life of the monastery, but shed light on the energetic abbacies of Walter Loring (1208-22), William of Colerne (1260-96) and Walter of Camme (1361-96), in the enlargement of the monastery's endowment and development of its estates. The abbots of Malmesbury were also zealous upholders of their rights, labouring to preserve the house's oft-threatened independence from the bishops of Salisbury, and making regular recourse to the law courts in disputes with local landholders and tenants.

The abbey's pursuit of its institutional interests did not always remain within the boundaries of the law. One of the book's major additions to our knowledge of the abbey is McAleavy's account of the remarkable criminal career of John of Tintern in the 1330s, drawn from unpublished records of the King's Bench. The central figure in the monastery's administration under Abbot Adam de la Hok (1324-40), Tintern allegedly employed hired killers to intimidate, defraud and murder a number of the abbey's tenants. He was also said to have helped conceal from the Crown 10,000 pounds which had been secretly deposited in the abbey by the Despensers, and to have lived openly with his (married) mistress. On Hok's death in 1340, Tintern was elected as abbot of the house and secured a pardon for his crimes. McAleavy also outlines the troubled final years of the monastery, with the serious mismanagement and internal disputes in the 1520s and 1530s, as well as the abbey's dissolution and its aftermath.

This is a well-researched and readable survey volume, which brings together the key evidence and scholarship for the history of Malmesbury Abbey, and will serve as a useful starting point for those interested in the monastery. Sources such as William of Malmesbury's chronicles are handled critically, but McAleavy's general approach is to provide a connected narrative of the monastery's affairs rather than present an argument or engage in historiographical debate. As a result, themes such as the abbey's relations with its lay neighbours, its role in local and national government, and its place within the wider religious and monastic scene do not receive full development. It remains to be seen what new insights into the abbey's history might emerge from an in-depth study of the house's surviving material evidence, and of unpublished records such as bishop's registers, late medieval rentals, and dissolution-era surveys.

Martin Heale