The Church in Durham was a power in the land. At one time the prince-bishops governed as viceroys; the bishop retained a temporal jurisdiction until 1836. The reforms of that period left the temporal assets of the diocese almost unaffected, however, and it seems safe to say that the church remained the largest single landowner in County Durham. When the size of its estates was finally revealed in the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, it emerged that the Durham church, in one form or another, owned over 60,000 acres, or about 11 percent of the entire county. As the owner of the surface, the church was also, under English law, the owner of the minerals that lay beneath. Of these, by far the most valuable was coal. Lying close to water, the coal had been mined since at least medieval times and shipped down the coast to London and abroad, where it found a ready market.

Until the coming of iron rails and steam power, the Church in Durham was little disturbed by coal mines and colliers. But with the growth in output came not only a pleasing growth in income from rents, royalties, and wayleaves but also a growth in employment, population, and the number of souls in need of succor and ministration. It was then that the Church of England in Durham lost its way. By 1860 it was evident that those pitmen and their families who professed any ardency in their love of God were largely Methodists or, in some cases, Catholics. For very many others, their Christianity had become “nominal” or, in the more hopeful term of some historians, “diffuse.” Whatever the terminology, the Church of England had become marginalized in one of its richest dioceses.

The year 1860 marked a turning point, or so it was hoped. In that year the church, recognizing that it had become an alien institution in its own land, launched a mission to convert the heathen and bring back the misguided to the path of the Church of England. The missionaries were to be new men in new parishes: new parishes carved out of the old to serve the burgeoning pit villages, served by vicars who were to be selected for their ability to connect with the collier and his family, not for their birth, their manners, or even their learning.

This book is, on one level, the history of that mission. It examines the characteristics of the diocesan clergy and how the attempts to bring in “new men” foundered. It examines the church's relations with those on whom it depended for its income and other material support, the coal owners. And finally it turns to the colliers themselves. In all this, the author endeavors to count, to add up, to rate, and to compare in a manner that is refreshing and admirable. Time and again (the book has over fifty tables), one is modestly introduced to statistics that any reader familiar with the sources knows must have taken Herculean labors to compile. Those sources are immense in scope. They include the periodical visitation returns from the parishes to the diocese throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parish papers from over eighty parishes, census returns from nearly a hundred parishes, the voluminous correspondence of the Londonderry and Strathmore estates, local newspapers over a very long period, and a wealth of contemporary ecclesiastical literature.

The author's conclusions will not surprise. To state them more bluntly than he himself is prepared to do, the 1860 mission failed, and it failed because of class divisions. Class conflict had become overt and forceful in the coalfield during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in 1921 the Durham Miners’ Association resolved “to seek the Abolition of Capitalism.” In such circumstances, it was impossible not to ask whether the church was “of the people” or a creature of the coal owners. The stained glass in the east window of the church at the colliery village of Hetton-le-Hole seemed to symbolize the answer. In a place in which one might have expected to see an episode from the life of Christ or a saint performing good deeds, the congregation saw a memorial to the local coal owner Nicholas Wood. In 1835 he had argued to the Select Committee on Accidents in Mines that if children were excluded from the pits, many could not be worked at a profit.

The richness of his sources has made it difficult for the author to keep strictly to his main theme. And a good thing too. The result is a social history of the Durham coalfield in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that focuses on its relations with established religious institutions. Such histories have been lacking. In all the research of the last fifty years into the “history from below,” the role of religion has been sidelined in favor of histories of work and of leisure, of gender and of “culture,” defined to include almost any activity apart from going to church or chapel, despite the fact that even where church attendance was slight, the nineteenth-century English Sunday was impossible to escape, and the language of Christianity suffused almost every public discourse.

I have only one criticism of this book, and it is of the publisher, not the author. While one has to be thankful that manuscripts such as this continue to be published and the book is at least printed on acid-free paper and stitched together, the quality of the production is otherwise disappointing. Margins are ungenerous, tables are ugly, and the printer's typesetting software seems unable to resolve an overcrowded or half-empty line by breaking a word and inserting a hyphen. The result is to give a temporary appearance to a work of permanent value.