In exploring the relationship between Anglican clergy and rural parishioners in nineteenth-century Norfolk, Robert Lee seeks to understand the clergy's role in creating, exacerbating or soothing social, cultural and political tensions in communities. Using autobiographies, pamphlets, sermons, local newspapers and evidence to parliamentary commissions for direct evidence of their thoughts and opinions, and poll books, petty and quarter sessions records, poor law guardians' and school governors' minute books and church and chapel buildings he appraises the impact of clergy, as landowners, magistrates, poor law guardians, school governors and charity administrators, on the lives of the rural labouring poor. The book is divided into two conceptual halves: the first ‘Encountering the poor’, and the second ‘Managing the poor’, based on a presumption that clergy stood in an authoritarian relationship to parishioners, interacting with them across a gulf of social experience and cultural understanding. Lee identifies two clashing cultures: one unwritten and popular, taking its cues from the ‘traditional dialogue of the moral economy’; the other ‘alien, legalistic, elite and authoritarian’. The clash, he believes, is shaped by ‘secularisation’, a declining Anglican influence, the rise of rural Methodism and trade unionism, a rural exodus and its social implications, and the maintenance of public order. He suggests that the clergy were identified with squires and farmers, who were thought to have robbed the poor of traditional lands and rights at enclosure, and who enforced the new poor law, and stigmatised their supporters as ‘strangers’, ‘foreigners’ and ‘social agitators’. Although individual clergymen laboured for the good of the poor, and made efforts to bridge the cultural chasm dividing them from their parishioners, entrenched perceptions were not changed. He illustrates this hypothesis in discussing tithe disputes, the suppression of ‘popular culture’, the ‘restoration’ of churches, without reference to the interests of the poor, the rise of Primitive Methodism and the clergy's passive acceptance of the new poor law, their involvement as magistrates in enforcing unpopular game laws, their role in an educational system which allegedly oppressed the poor, and as agents of landowners. Lee concludes that the clergy lost contact with rural society, and the respect of the rural poor. He suggests that they withdrew from village centres to ‘stately’ new parsonage houses, and showed little industry in taking part in renewing local government in parish and rural district councils. The conclusions may be right, but the picture is more complex and nuanced than is allowed. Some early nineteenth-century social disturbances focused on the clergy, but they were not necessarily anti-clerical. How deep was the penetration of Primitive Methodism in rural Norfolk? What was the impact of ‘high’ farming from 1840 until 1870, and the effect of the long agricultural decline after 1870, especially on the administration of the poor law and criminal law? He quotes little evidence of the involvement of clerical magistrates in cases of poaching and ‘social crime’, and forgets that most poaching cases involved professional poachers. Church schools may have kept children down, but no one else bothered about them.