This is a long book from which a smaller one is struggling to get out. But how joyfully it is written, and how extensive and scholarly is Hugh Thomas's background knowledge. Chapters xi and xii, on the significance of book ownership amongst the clergy, are particularly good. Anecdote follows anecdote in this valiant and much-needed attempt to shine a light on the lives of the secular, as opposed to the regular, clergy between the Norman Conquest and the death of John. This is a painstaking task, and not an easy one unless those seculars also happened to be eminent or aristocratic ecclesiastics who appeared in written records. The author has scoured the primary sources thoroughly, both lay and ecclesiastical. Letters and chronicles have been devoured wholesale and with relish, particularly those written by Peter of Blois and Giraldus Cambrensis. The picture is even-handed in that, alongside plentiful and sometimes shocking tales of, for instance, the drunkenness and sexual incontinence of often poorly-paid lower clergy whose main duty was to serve God and say mass, comes similarly sharp criticism of the simony, nepotism and greed which afflicted some pluralistic higher clergy who should have known better. Indeed, so many seem to have fallen short of the ideal that the picture seems almost biased. It would have been good to have had more examples of those who did not. And the over-use of some phrases simply grates. ‘The long twelfth century’ – what on earth does this mean? – is used no fewer than eight times, for instance, in the eight-page conclusion. There is quite a bit of repetition. Also, it should perhaps be remembered that the vocation of the priesthood can be fulfilled in innumerable ways. (One wonders what the reformers would have made of those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French clergy who reckoned – probably rightly – that it was a positive pastoral service to found brass bands or football teams to keep their young flocks out of mischief.) But these are exceedingly small quibbles. Overall, Thomas's book is a treasury of knowledge and a delight to read.