Medieval documents – both books and individual documents, such as charters – survive in remarkable quantities. Neil Ker’s Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, which gives details about holdings of manuscript books in institutional collections, does not even list every manuscript book or deal with individual charters and other documents from the Middle Ages, but still runs to five substantial volumes. The two biggest institutional holders of manuscripts in Britain, the British Library and the Bodleian Library, have around twenty-five thousand books and substantial fragments between them. 

Rather than marvelling at the riches that have survived down the centuries, Robert Bartlett provides a powerful lament for the books and documents from the Middle Ages that have been lost. He is a distinguished historian who has spent much of his scholarly life researching medieval documents and books in institutions across Britain and Europe. His important and respected television documentaries about the medieval period regularly show him consulting medieval sources, and have given the general public a glimpse into the critical role such documents play in illuminating the past. His focus, despite the title of the book, is not so much on the acts of destruction as on what was destroyed.

This book is particularly strong at highlighting the way that medieval historians use books and documents. Bartlett also analyses the production of documents, such as eyre rolls, for medieval administrative purposes in England. He looks at the amount of wax used by the royal chancery in England to give an