Michael Burger introduces his study of the medieval English church's episcopal administration by warning his readers to prepare “for some unavoidably unpleasant piling up of detail” (7). Indeed, his volume does describe so many trees that it can be a challenge to keep the forest in mind. But this “piling,” if “unpleasant” for some readers, is a virtue of the book. Burger's twenty-six pages of “Sources Cited” document a valiant attempt to track down every shred of primary and secondary material bearing on his subject.

Burger's proposal is that England's bishops used “carrots” more than “sticks” to manage their clerks. The award of a benefice was a major “carrot” but (to mix metaphors) also a two-edged sword. Once given, its tenure was for the lifetime of its recipient. The secure income it guaranteed gave a clerk considerable independence of his bishop. In this a benefice was much like a fief, and Burger explores the extent to which ecclesiastical and secular administrators evolved similar strategies. Both benefices and fiefs were endowments intended to support servants, but the difficulty of revoking them lessened the threat of eviction that would have been useful for disciplining subordinates. Bishops had the added problem that too openly treating a benefice as a payment for service might lead to a charge of simony. As the medieval era evolved, secular administrators looked for other ways to support their servants without permanently endowing them with the resources that generated their incomes. This led to what some scholars have (somewhat crudely) termed “bastard feudalism.” Burger concludes his introduction by summarizing the topic of his book “as an examination of bastard feudalism . . . episcopal style” (11).

Burger analyzes episcopal administration from the sometimes symbiotic and sometimes confrontational perspectives of both bishops and their clerks. Benefices were the episcopal “carrots” most desired by clerks, but “carrots” were not all on one side and “sticks” on the other. Bishops needed to attract educated men equipped to offer the “carrot” of loyal service. Because service could be onerous and even physically dangerous, the temptation to disobey might be strong. As noted above, a clerk's secure tenure potentially weakened his superior's ability to wield the “stick” of a threat of dismissal, but Burger points out that the tradition protecting occupants' rights to their benefices was supported by ecclesiastical administrators at all levels. Holding benefices of their own, they were wary of challenges to tenure that might backfire. The Church's elaborate system of courts of appeal (rising ultimately to Rome) offered “sticks” with which a clerk could threaten a bishop who attempted to evict him. Both bishops and clerks also devised strategies to “game the system,” and each found ways to manipulate the other with rewards or punishments. Pensions, fees, gifts, favors, oaths, bonds, and outright bribes can be documented. But to the familiar list of financial and legal sanctions Burger adds, and stresses the importance of, psychological pressures—for example, public humiliation and “social exile” from the community of one's colleagues (158). When all else failed, the ultimate “sticks” of imprisonment, excommunication, and physical violence were sometimes employed.

The last section of Burger's book delves more deeply into the motives that influenced the partners in diocesan government. He notes that bishops never slacked in trying to increase their power through patronage (by acquiring and enhancing the wealth of benefices for gifting). He then considers whether this enabled them to build more stable staffs and concludes that the evidence on this point is mixed. He argues, however, that there is more to the story of diocesan government than simple struggles among individuals for power and wealth. He insists that serious attention be paid to emotional bonds in the relationships of bishops with their servants. The legal documents that are prominent in the archives can create the impression that the medieval church was nothing but a pit of litigiousness—a morass of wheeling and dealing and interminable judicial suits and countersuits, the parties to which were motivated solely by worldly self-interest. But Burger warns that a “simple account of rewards and punishments” provides too weak “a psychology” to explain how diocesan governments functioned. He suggests that historians take seriously the terms of affection often found in letters, episcopal registers, and other sources. These, he concludes, were not mere stylistic formulae, but honest expressions of bishops' feelings for their clerks and clerks' sincere devotion to their bishops. More difficult for us to grasp, perhaps, was the effect of what Burger calls the medieval “culture” that provided the context in which ecclesiastical administrators functioned. He argues that deep faith, pastoral concern, and a sense of spiritual obligation did much to grease the gears of church government.

Burger's thesis confronts a problem that plagues all medievalists. So much of the documentary evidence on which they rely yields little more than a barebones report. Burger's effort to cloak these “bones” in the “flesh” of psychological factors must of necessity rely on informed speculation. It is a sure bet that adequate explanations of the behaviors of medieval people (as of our own) require understanding the interior lives of individuals, but how much evidence for this inner life is to be found in the medieval sources? Burger is a careful historian and is at pains to emphasize the tentative nature of many of his suggestions. He lists alternative explanations, suggests probabilities, and hedges conclusions. The result is an arduous journey that makes progress toward an intriguing goal.