DOCUMENTING MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE is an exercise in analysing written evidence and architectural detail. Both approaches have been used in the compilation of this chapter. The extant primary textual documentation relating to East Anglian parish church porches provides scant evidence for establishing a generalised understanding of the circumstances of patronage, design or construction. Case studies are, however, possible and some key examples are looked at in detail in the next chapter. The potential of the written evidence is enhanced when correlated with the fabric of the buildings themselves and, as will be seen, important lessons are learnt about the reliability of testamentary evidence. For example, the total absence of a porch indicates that an individual's testamentary instruction to build, or bequeath money to the fabric of, a porch was overlooked by their fellow parishioners after their death. This chapter progresses along a path of various ways to document church porches, presenting the paper trail of their former lives and their enduring architectural attributes.

As has been established in previous chapters, the form of buildings termed porch/porticus has historically been diverse. One possible implication is that late medieval porch architecture will also show considerable variety. Investigation of that proposition is based on a survey of the 119 medieval parish church porches in Norfolk and Suffolk for which primary or antiquarian textual information is available.

Late medieval East Anglia benefitted from extensive areas of fertile agricultural land which, when combined with a large population and well-ordered social structures, was astutely exploited.2 With such economic advantage came international trade, political involvement at the highest levels and an equivalent investment in cultural sophistication, including architecture. An index of the region's medieval wealth is the number and quality of its parish churches; it has been estimated that more than 920 were built between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. They demonstrate a wide range of possibilities and approaches in terms of architectural patronage, design ambition and materiality. Taken as a distinct corpus for current purposes, they provide a detailed inventory of medieval porch architecture in the eastern region.

In terms of available building materials East Anglia lacks major deposits of indigenous building stone, other than flint.