With Medieval Lowestoft: The Origins and Growth of a Suffolk Coastal Community, David Butcher, a retired schoolteacher and lecturer in the Department of Continuing Studies at the University of East Anglia, has produced a solid contribution to English local history. Unlike his previous publications on early modern Lowestoft, however, for this book he had far less material to draw upon: no local records survive for Lowestoft before the mid- and late sixteenth century. To compensate, he offers very detailed analyses of the 1086 Domesday Book survey for Lowestoft and its neighbors in the half-hundred of Lothingland (much of it taken from another study previously published by Butcher) and the 1274 Hundred Roll for Lothingland, supplemented by data from the 1327 lay subsidy. He also employs, for example, the late medieval manorial records of nearby Akethorpe to get some idea of Lowestoft's agricultural history; a 1618 manorial survey of Lowestoft to outline the settlement's topography; bequests to the parish church in late medieval wills to comment on the church fabric and piety of its religious gilds; and the 1524–25 lay subsidy to explore the demography, occupational structure, and distribution of wealth in the late medieval town. He makes extensive use, moreover, of references in the printed calendars of the Close Rolls and Patent Rolls to discuss Lowestoft's maritime trade and conflicts with its powerful neighboring port, Great Yarmouth. But he does not do much with the medieval archival material in The National Archives, much of it available online in abstracts or digital form, including certificates of Statute Merchant and Statute Staple, petitions, early Chancery proceedings, and ministers' accounts.

Butcher's book is especially valuable for its focus on a type of town rarely treated in the scholarly literature: a smaller town without official borough status, with an absentee lay lord, that prospered and grew in the later Middle Ages, when many other English towns were in decline. Much of Butcher's argument revolves around showing Lowestoft's increasing urban identity. In the Anglo-Saxon period, Lowestoft was a settlement of little distinction but possessed of an advantageous location on well-drained soils with access to an inlet connecting to the sea. Domesday Book recorded it as an outlier of the royal hub manor of Gorleston in 1086, but by the early thirteenth century, it had risen to become a manor and parish in its own right. Around this time, the manor was transferred from the crown to a nonresident lay lord represented by a bailiff, which gave residents an opportunity to exercise some autonomy. The Hundred Roll of 1274 names sixty-eight tenants representing at most 260 people, a mix of villein and free farming folk, with few artisans, although the settlement was only one of two in the half-hundred with a gaol and stocks.

Hints of urbanization become more prevalent in the fourteenth century. In 1308, Lowestoft was granted its own market and fair, and sometime in the first half of the fourteenth century, the settlement relocated to coastal heathland at the top of a cliff overlooking the sea and a long flat beach. No documentation records the move or who was behind what must have required considerable communal decision making, but Butcher speculates that increasing involvement in maritime trade and fishing made the new location more desirable. He also suggests that the new site provided opportunities for expansion unavailable in the first settlement, which was inland, hemmed in by the common fields, and in an area increasingly likely to flood. He thinks that wealthier residents purchased the new site and arranged, with the consent of the manorial lord, for the construction of new buildings. They may also have been the first to move and could have been behind the engineering and financial arrangements required to terrace almost one thousand yards of cliff in order to link the settlement with the beach below. It may be telling that the wealthier residents largely situated themselves along the High Street, making for a distinct differentiation by wealth that may not have been so evident in the earlier settlement.

The paucity of local sources means that the chapter on fishing contains mainly general descriptions of medieval fishing operations that rely heavily on early modern evidence. Like its neighbor, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft specialized in herring, especially a smoke-cured variety called red herring. Medieval curing was probably done in the same type of fish-houses depicted at the foot of the cliff on a 1580 map of the town. Lowestoft also participated in the northern fisheries for cod, which were expanding in the fifteenth century. Its long-standing jurisdictional disputes with Great Yarmouth, which ships could only reach via a long, narrow channel whose entrance was only a bit north of Lowestoft itself, became more marked in the later Middle Ages as Lowestoft rose to prominence and Yarmouth had to cope with increased silting in its channel and harbor. Since Lowestoft was officially under the customs head port of Great Yarmouth, its attempts to host maritime trade on its own was usually labeled smuggling by Yarmouth. Another sign of the late medieval town's growth and prosperity was the construction of a very large parish church in the new settlement. A community of some wealth and civic pride must have been behind the sheer size and the high quality of its Perpendicular architecture and fabric.

Although Butcher makes an effort to contextualize Lowestoft's history by pointing to developments elsewhere (especially in Suffolk), the historiographical framework is better in some sections than others, where description and local detail prevail. His careful explanations of technical terms (augmented by a glossary at the end of the book) and paragraphs devoted to background, along with his interest in listing every name and place in all the printed documents he could find, reflect in part the more general audience for which he is writing, an aim he successfully achieves. The details, however, also help to build the master narrative of the unusual late medieval growth of a small coastal settlement, which will be of particular interest to urban and maritime historians.