Amid the spate of local studies on late medieval England which have appeared since the 1980s, there has mostly been an embarrassed silence about the Church in local politics and society: we just do not know how to deal with it. All historians of the period should therefore be grateful for Christian Liddy's book. It covers the period from the 1340s to the 1430s and is very much within the tradition of late medieval local studies, except that this one has an ecclesiastical institution at its heart. The objects of his enquiry are what one would expect: the geography of landownership, the structure of landowning society, ‘bastard feudalism’, office-holding, the vexed question of the ‘county community’. The difference is that the greatest landowner between the Tyne and the Tees, the area of the ‘bishopric’, the core of the palatinate, was a churchman. Furthermore, this lord had a combination of landed agglomeration and ‘public’ authority of which the only equivalents are the other two palatinates, Chester and Lancaster, and the Welsh Marcher lordships. Liddy's analysis, as he works his way through the various questions thrown up by the corpus of local studies, is thorough, careful and judicious, if slightly marred by the underlying assumption that landed society and how it operated were essentially the same in 1400 as in 1340. Mostly he reveal variants on well-known themes, such as the development of a political connection around an important noble family (the Neville affinity) or the existence of a close-knit group of lesser gentry in an area of secondary settlement (the Team valley). The one striking novelty is his convincing argument for the existence of a communal identity between the Tyne and the Tees, associated with the bishopric, but related also to a strong sense of local history, and of local particularity as the ‘Haliwerfolc’, the people of St Cuthbert. This identity might be used against the bishop himself if, in the pursuit of his own power, he was prepared to over-ride the perceived liberties associated with the bishopric and its patron saint. In this, Durham was certainly different from other localities but one would have liked more extrapolation from Durham to other ecclesiastical lords. The bishop, with his more or less kingly powers, was clearly unusual; how much of his position was due to these powers and did he exercise them differently from his lay counterparts? Did the fact that the bishop's political connection, as it developed in the early fifteenth century, was largely outside the bishopric reflect his quasi-royal position, which obviated the need for a personal following, or was it because he was a cleric? Durham Priory seems to have been more typical of ecclesiastical lords, insofar as they have been studied, in piggy-backing on the Neville following. These questions are not really addressed. Indeed, Liddy never asks the question which is crucial for every aspect of the role of the Church as landowner: in what ways did the needs of the great lay and clerical lords differ?