Ecclesiastical historians will welcome yet another instalment in revising for the modern age John Le Neve's Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, dealing with a diocese of extraordinary stability over time. The editor/compiler points out that the diocese of Hereford scarcely changed its boundaries from the early Middle Ages to the 1830s. It contained almost the whole of Herefordshire, a significant portion of Shropshire, and some parishes and churches in Monmouthshire, Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Worcestershire, and the boundaries are not much reduced even now. In those well-endowed days, the cathedral chapter consisted of the dean, precentor, treasurer, chancellor, archdeacons of Hereford and Shropshire and twenty-eight prebendaries. Happy the man who held the Golden Prebend, or ‘Episcopi’, an ecclesiastical joker in the pack, without separate endowment, but commanding a share of capitular revenues despite not being subject to capitular election, unshackled by residence requirements and with first refusal on the office of praelector whenever it became invitingly vacant. No doubt the motto inscribed in letters of fire over that stall was ‘To him who hath shall be given’: the last holder in old style was sufficiently fortified by his emoluments to live until 1892. A pity that the austere conventions of the series cannot draw attention to the cathedral's remarkable double grave of Bishop Herbert Croft (d. 1691) with Dean George Benson (d. 1692), joined in death by incised clasped hands. Now revision of the Fasti marches in amicable partnership with that other modern triumph of dedicated systematic investigation, the Clergy of the Church of England Database. Campbell has provided an admirable discussion of the problems of source-material and identification of individuals incurred in this sort of intricate work in his ‘Using the Clergy Database and the Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1541–1857’, Clergy of the Church of England Database Online Journal iv (2013), http://theclergydatabase.org.uk/cce_a4/. Anyone reading his analysis will appreciate what a triumph of scholarship this apparently undramatic volume and its fellows represent.