THE PUBLICATION of this volume of essays presents an opportunity for a brief and necessarily selective survey of the progress of East Anglian medieval studies over the last quarter century, and to suggest avenues of profitable research for the future. The chronological limits of this conspectus are largely limited by the editor's own knowledge to the long period from the Conquest to the eve of the Reformation, and with a few notable exceptions, it deals only with books and excludes the voluminous, and often very valuable, periodical literature, much of it published in Norfolk Archaeology and Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History.

Crucial to the advance of historical knowledge is the publication of primary sources, in editions which combine the highest standards of scholarship with accessibility, which can be achieved by the provision of detailed abstracts of documents in Latin. For the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the most important source for almost every aspect of society is the huge corpus of charters, for the most part title deeds, but revealing far more than merely the transfer of properties. The pioneer in this field in East Anglia was Barbara Dodwell, who in 1985 published the second of two volumes of Norwich Cathedral Charters for the Pipe Roll Society (ns 40, 46). For Norfolk little has been done since, although an edition of the cartulary of Castle Acre priory is in progress. For Suffolk much has been accomplished in the last quarter century in the Suffolk Charters series of the Suffolk Record Society, established by the late Professor R. Allen Brown. Since 1979 the charters of ten religious houses and one lay estate have been published in seventeen volumes. Here the mountain of the Bury St Edmunds cartularies remains to be scaled (although all the twelfth-century charters are in print in various places). For Norfolk one of the most urgent tasks is the edition of the numerous cartularies and collections of original charters, which have been remarkably little exploited since the work of Blomefield.

The charters of the bishops of Norwich, a crucial source for the organisation of the church and religion, are in the course of publication as part of a series which has transformed our knowledge of the church in England in the two centuries after the Conquest.