What issues gripped the countryside in the mid nineteenth century? We know from this volume that at Searby cum Owmby, a hamlet close to Caistor in north Lincolnshire, the central question dividing the parish in the 1840s was not the claims of the Chartists or even the repeal of the Corn Laws, but the allocation of the seating in the parish church. A new building had been erected in 1830, and John Ferraby, a land agent and former churchwarden, wanted to sit where his family had worshipped in the previous church. That would have given him the pew behind the one used by the manor house. But T. J. Dixon, the largest proprietor and later High Sheriff of the county, thought that the church should be split down the middle, with all his tenants on one side, and the remaining inhabitants on the other, thus frustrating Ferraby's ambitions. This was no trivial matter. The most deeply felt conflicts over status and identity were fought out in the amphitheatre of the parish church. Five out of seven farmers stayed away from church because they were dissatisfied with the arrangement prevailing in December 1847, and then one of the remaining pair absented himself in high dudgeon because of a proposed way of resolving the issue. The local community, numbering fewer than three hundred souls, was riven by the controversy for at least a decade.

This is a typical episode chronicled in the correspondence of the Bishop of Lincoln. John Kaye was an energetic High Church bishop in the age of reform, one of the first Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and heard about these matters, often from opposing parties. R. W. Ambler shows in an extensive introduction how the collection of 532 letters printed here throws light on Kaye's efforts to put down pluralism, non-residence and Dissent, while promoting church schools, public baptism and better clergy houses. There are rich pickings for many of the parishes of Lincolnshire, but also some valuable illustrations of themes in rural history extending far beyond that county. There is, for example, a classic contemporary account of the relationship between open and close villages: Tealby, with a large and floating population, was surrounded in 1848 by three smaller communities, ‘each the property of single proprietors who will not allow sufficient laborers to dwell on their estates’ (p. 346). There is much about the rise of Methodism in the county, John Wesley's original home, with Primitives taking delight in disturbing quiet funerals by boisterous hymn singing. The advance of Evangelicalism within the established church is also illustrated by several sets of correspondence, particularly the longest (pp. 117–90) on the building of a second church in Louth. Non-Lincolnshire people may regret that no maps were provided for their guidance, but they will relish the description of the county by a Nottinghamshire man as ‘unhealthy, flat, low, damp, agueish, unpopulated’ (p. 15). The editor has taken great pains to identify the persons involved, and has added to the value of the book by including a list of the places covered in the whole of the Lincolnshire correspondence. This is a model record society volume that deserves to be widely used outside its county.