No-one is better qualified to present an edition of the acta of the bishops of Norwich than Christopher Harper-Bill, and, as is to be expected from his earlier edition of the eleventh and twelfth-century bishops published nearly twenty years ago, this edition establishes a benchmark of excellence. The volume is concerned with the acta of two contrasting bishops, Walter Suffield (1244–57) and Simon Walton (1257–66). The former was an Oxford and Paris-educated canon lawyer. He moved in the circle of reforming and saintly bishops, including St Edmund Rich of Canterbury and St Richard Wich of Chichester, was himself of holy life, and for a short time was venerated as a saint locally following his death. He was a conscientious diocesan bishop and a supporter of his clergy's interests against those of the pope, and his role as senior figure in the assessment of church revenues for the taxation demands of both pope and king, the so-called Valuation of Norwich, cannot have been a happy one. But Suffield was a loyal supporter of King Henry iii and this loyalty was one thing, at least, that he had in common with his successor. Also a trained lawyer, Walton on the other hand had been a royal justice and royal favour gave him the opportunity to substantially increase his own estates. Throughout his career Walton played a major part in promoting royalist policy at home and abroad: he acted as an ambassador in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Paris. That, as Harper-Bill writes, ‘there is no calendar year in which he was totally absent from his diocese’, is hardly a ringing endorsement of care for clergy or people. That there are many more acta surviving for Suffield (142) than for Walton (57) is perhaps in part a consequence of the former's lengthier episcopate, but also indicates Suffield's greater concern for his episcopal responsibilities. It is also telling that 40 per cent of the latter's acta are significations of excommunications, and with few exceptions his acta tell of the bureaucrat not the pastor. In providing us with this collection Harper-Bill has provided us with a picture of the administration of one of the most important English dioceses and the preoccupations and personalities of two of its bishops.