The publication of the present work marks the thirtieth volume in the English Episcopal Acta series. The editor of this volume had been intimately involved with the inception and execution of the series, editing the very first and fourth volumes, both editions of the acts of the bishops of Lincoln. Now he has turned his editorial skills to the acts of bishops of the far poorer and more neglected see of Carlisle. Carlisle was the last see to be created by an English king in the English kingdom before the Reformation. The first bishop was consecrated in 1133, with preparations possibly beginning, as the editor and others have proposed, as early as 1128 when Thurstan's agents were despatched to Rome. An equally important date for the initiation of these preparations, however, may have been the king's meeting with Pope Innocent ii at Rouen in May 1131; this would dovetail with the evidence, recently presented by Richard Sharpe, for the king's efforts to create a shire from the district centred on Carlisle in September 1130×August 1133. The king's nominee as bishop was Athelwold, prior of Nostell in Yorkshire; he served both as bishop and prior for the next twenty-three years, presumably retaining the office of prior to sustain his episcopal standing. The proper form of his name poses a number of problems, but the editor of the present volume has selected, without discussion, Athelwold; his origins remain equally elusive. The edition prints eight acts of Athelwold, plus two references to his profession of obedience and one reference to a lost act cited in an inquest of the 1230s. At least one of these acts (no. 7) for the priory of Wetheral, though accepted as genuine by the editor, possesses deeply suspicious features and has probably been inflated. These eight acts constitute the only known twelfth-century acts of a bishop of Carlisle, for the see remained vacant (despite the efforts of Henry ii in 1186) until 1204. By the early thirteenth century Gervase of Tilbury considered the see destined for oblivion. The period between 1204 and 1280 none the less witnessed the election of a further seven bishops, including a bishop of Ragusa, an abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Beaulieu, a sheriff of Cumberland, a royal clericulus, a rector of Greystoke, an archdeacon of Bath and a prior of the Augustinian priory of Guisborough. The present edition has noted the existence of 208 acts, but the archival poverty of many of the diocese's monastic houses (including the priory of Carlisle itself) is clear from the fact that this total includes thirty-eight references to lost acts and a further thirty-five warrants seeking the intervention of the secular arm with excommunicates, all surviving in the class of ‘significations of excommunication’ in the Public Record Office. The acts themselves are rich in detail on the diocese of Carlisle and beyond, offering valuable information on such details as a female recluse in the churchyard of St John's church, Newcastle-upon Tyne (pp. 126–7, no. 162); on the career of an illegitimate son of the king of Spain as rector of Rothbury, Northumberland (p. 159, no. 200); and on the relics, including the bed or camp-bed (lectus) of the eighth-century missionary Willibrord, preserved in the church of the Holy Apostles, Cologne (pp. 61–2, no. 76). The introduction offers the usual survey of the diocese, bishops, episcopal staff, diplomatic and seals, though is rather brief by comparison with the more detailed introductions to other volumes in the series. Only two minor points require correction. The editor has printed his texts for Wetheral priory from the early fourteenth-century cartulary, but he is incorrect in stating that this source was used in the edition of the Wetheral cartulary by J. E. Prescott, which was based only on transcripts made in the seventeenth century. One of these texts (pp. 43–4, no. 57) is an act of Hugh, bishop of Carlisle, in favour of the Benedictine priory of Wetheral. The final sentence of the text, as printed in this edition, reads ‘Act’ XIII kalendas Nouembris anno incarnationis domini M^o CC^o XXX^o'. Hugh died in July 1223, so the editor has dated the text ‘20 October 1230, recte 1220’ and adds in the note the brief comment that ‘the date 1230 is obviously an error for 1220’ (p. 44–5). The cartulary itself, however, does in fact read ‘Act’ XIII kalendas Nouembris anno incarnationis domini M^o CC^o XX^o'. Nevertheless, the volume constitutes a welcome addition to the series and a substantial contribution to the study of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century north-west of England.