This important and engaging book explores the experiences of the almost 3,000 clergymen ejected from their livings in England during the 1640s and 1650s. Fiona McCall's is the first modern study to make substantial use of the Bodleian library's Walker manuscripts, material collected by the Exeter cleric John Walker in the early eighteenth century highlighting the sufferings of royalist and Anglican clergy as a counterweight to Edmund Calamy's adroit publications on the ‘great ejections' of 1662. Whereas previous work has concentrated on establishing the statistical patterns of ejections (varying from 96 per cent of London livings to 13 per cent in Lincolnshire) and on evaluating parliament's charges against the clergy, McCall's focus is on the impact of war and ejection on the clergy and their families. She is less interested in complex theological and political divisions than in how Walker's material illuminates the ways in which the traumas of the 1640s and 1650s were both remembered and forgotten. Walker received some 1,000 letters in response to his enquiries, representing oral traditions and female as well as male testimony, and a particular strength of the book is the effective use of memory studies and of family history to give children and women a prominent role, with women featuring as informants and defiant protectors of their families, as well as victims. McCall discusses how narratives of ejection were constructed as ‘beguiling and emotive stories' in which ministers, their wives and children (the mother characteristically with a baby at her breast) were thrust out of their homes by parliamentarian authorities at dead of night. Such dramatic set-piece confrontations and public humiliation featured largely whereas the more humdrum, compromising ways in which clergy survived the interregnum were more commonly underplayed. McCall does use a range of biographical material and parliament's administrative records to evaluate the testimony collected by Walker, and while she recognises the ways in which ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ might diverge, her account, like Walker's own, is generally sympathetic, perhaps, like his, redressing a perceived bias towards dissenters' sufferings. Both Walker and McCall give less attention than some modern historians to the ways in which ejected clergy compromised with parliamentarian regimes, or to the ways in which those regimes made provision for their families. McCall highlights the paradox that while there was no Anglican cult of suffering at the Restoration, a legacy of bitter personal resentment as much as theological or ecclesiological division sabotaged attempts at comprehension or Presbyterian/Anglican rapprochement after 1660. McCall's committed and thoroughly researched book is particularly valuable for its stress on the social, familial and emotional aspects of ejection. Baal's priests is now the standard authority on the ejection of royalist parish clergy during the interregnum.