In his Lordship and Faith, Nigel Saul, emeritus professor at Royal Holloway, surveys and analyzes the parochial lives of the medieval English gentry, with a special focus on the building and extending of parish churches. An accomplished historian of landed society, Saul has produced a map of the parish landscape, from pre-Conquest to the Reformation, focused upon the interactions between landed families and their parish churches. Its great success owes to Saul's unique combination of scholarly interests, ranging from the social and political lives of elites to their increasing role in producing more elaborate visual and physical culture. Early on, Saul admits to the problems inherent in such an ambitious undertaking, that seeks to cover (literally) enormous ground, compounded by the regional variation attendant in such a broad survey. To combat them, he focuses more narrowly on the role of the gentry as ecclesiastical patrons and especially church builders in the parishes. The result is an exceptionally well-judged, balanced picture of the country's landed families “at home,” as neighbors, as patrons, and as parishioners.

Along the way, he discusses many of the issues that have vexed historians of the regions, as when he stresses the overwhelming evidence for collaboration among the gentry, or their generally cordial and productive relations with church authorities—both controversial. Saul argues that the evidence shows overwhelmingly that, far from bitter rivals, landed families were more often congenial neighbors, political allies, and potential targets for marriage alliances. This congenial and practical approach characterized their relations with church officials and, on the whole, provided both parties what they required: patronage of church buildings and the provision of prayer within them.

Mechanically, the work is organized into three main chronological sections (Anglo-Saxon, high medieval and late medieval), each housing two to four topically unique chapters. Throughout, Saul remains obligingly true to his focus, restricting his investigation to church design, support, and construction, along with the necessary context for understanding churches in light of contemporary factors. Indeed, he concludes that in every sense local context was the most important single factor in determining the character of gentry patronage and church building more generally. In general, where disparities in landed wealth were relatively minor, differences in the relative quality of “gentry” parish churches (those patronized strongly by one or another landed family) tended also to be relatively minor, resources being relatively similar. Equally, where differences between landed and non-landed wealth were very great, so, too, tended to be the differences in quality between the churches they patronized and those they did not.

The precise historiographical implications of the work fall into two main camps. The first might be termed “parish studies,” where the present work fills a significant historiographical void, and rebuts speculation by some that the late medieval gentry simply absented themselves from the parish space altogether, mimicking their social betters by shifting their patronage and attention to private (sometimes collegiate) chapels. For some students of the gentry, this suggestion always rang hollow; Saul's work will henceforth serve as a corrective to this suggestion of gentry absenteeism in the parishes.

Beyond those of the parish, this book will also be of great interest to students of the English “county studies” that have chronicled the ascent of the gentry from the thirteenth century onward. Saul even weighs in (indirectly) on the “county community” debate about the makeup and behavior of gentry society. Are they collective stewards of their corner of the kingdom or grasping practitioners of realpolitik jostling for position in the retinues of the regions’ great lords? Though he does not say so directly, Saul's picture of elites not only collaborating with each other but also cooperating with local ecclesiastical figures for the improvement and building of churches seems greatly at odds with the competitive landscape that some have imagined in the localities. Saul's commonsense suggestion that we reestablish religious devotion (and its many outward manifestations) at the center of gentry life is especially welcome if we are to imagine the secular and the sacred as experienced by contemporaries rather than as understood by moderns. In a world dominated by landed elites and in which distinctions between sacred and secular could be illusory, Saul shows us a reimagined space in which real devotion was already a long-established part of “secular” lordship and where piety and landed authority were mutually reinforcing in their nature and application. Here, for the gentry, the outward brilliance of “their” parish churches could serve as working, living endorsements familial status and authority. In this way, the church buildings themselves serve as critical “documents” in their own right, which by virtue of their visual character might even tolerate some (judicial) speculation as to the interior lives of their patrons.

As one might expect, the part of Saul's book that deals with the later Middle Ages provides its longest and most satisfying treatment. Already having made the case for local and regional difference in available materials, to the documentary evidence Saul adds the full measure of evidence drawn from physical remains, the most important of which are, of course, the extant parish church buildings themselves. In this sense, the large tranche of surviving buildings, mirrored by the period's documentary wealth, provides Saul a large range of source material to judge survey and consider the interplay between these two pillars of provincial life, parish churches and the gentry elite.

In this final sense, then, the reader might correctly return to the question of concision: How does Saul succeed here with such relative brevity? The buildings themselves are Saul's primary focus here, as the book's many original images might suggest. Though at times one might have wished, as a reader and specialist in the field, for more elaboration on this issue or that, it is Saul's disciplined omission of such material that makes such a book possible, let alone successful, given the existing range of potential subtopics and side narratives. In this very clever way, Saul achieves what to some historians may seem unlikely: an analytical and learned survey of England's gentry at work in the parish that also points toward a vast range of potential pathways for future research in the subject.