The relationship between church and society in modern Britain has been the subject of a rising tide of historiographical interest in the last half-century, much of it inevitably focused on the effect of industrialization and urbanization. It has resulted in a growing series of monographs on particular localities, especially the new urban centers and suburbs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Robert Lee's new study is therefore a welcome addition, since its focus is on the countryside rather than the town, and in particular on the county of Norfolk, an area conventionally associated with rural conservatism and deference, but which in fact was one of the centers of militant rural trade unionism in the late nineteenth century and which also witnessed strong religious Dissent. It is an area rich in interpretative possibilities, then, and Lee's study is really the first of its kind since James Obelkevich's influential study, South Lincolnshire, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976).

Lee turns the spotlight particularly on the relationship between the rural poor and the clergy, structuring his study in two sections, as signaled in the subtitle. In part 1, “Encountering the Poor,” three chapters deal successively with rural grievances against the established church (including tithe), the belief systems of the poor and the clergy, and radical religious and political dissent from the established church. Given this agenda, it is perhaps no surprise that what emerges from Lee's careful work in the Norfolk archives is a picture of distance and lack of mutual comprehension between clergy and people, with the assumption of social hierarchy and deference shaping the clergy's attempts to mold and direct the lives of their parishioners, and provoking suspicion, hostility, and sometimes open resistance in turn. In the second part, “Managing the Poor,” the church's response to the unpredictability and intractability of rural society is examined. The people of the countryside never became the docile, harmonious, faithful Anglicans the clergy strived so hard to make them. Clerical attempts to shape rural society were comprehensive enough: they involved the reform of morals and manners, poor law administration and philanthropy, the provision of education, and the operation of networks of influence and power. But their context was changing rapidly in the second half of the century, with the rise of rural trade unionism and the labor movement, the consolidation of Dissent, and the supplanting of the older civil responsibilities of the ecclesiastical parish by reformed local government. As a consequence, the vision of the clergy never swallowed up the world of the poor, and the efforts of the Church were increasingly stranded by social and political change. The nuances of this shift are devastatingly captured in a single sentence: “In the space of perhaps 75 years, Anglican rectories passed from cultural impositions in the landscape to cultural relics” (188).

This is a well-crafted, detailed, and immensely suggestive study, which opens up numerous insights into the role of the Church of England in the countryside and touches on a variety of matters that have been the stuff of controversy in the historical literature for a long time—the role of the clerical magistracy, religion and “social control,” Ritualism and the countryside, and the relationship of Dissent and trade unionism, to name but a few. That said, there is a certain one-sidedness in Lee's study. Its provenance is the rich social history of religion in Britain, a stream of historical writing that has opened our eyes to the intricate relationship between religion and social and political influence but that has often seemed blind to the possibility of real popular piety. As a result, Lee's study has a somewhat dated aspect. Its immersion in the recent historiography of religion in Britain is relatively slight. His analysis is essentially driven by an elite/popular polarity that fits much of the material he offers as evidence but makes rural religion itself actually evanescent. He does not seriously seem to consider that there might have been significant numbers of “true Anglican believers” in rural churches, or that the clergy's reforms might just as much have sponsored and encouraged new forms of genuinely popular piety as represented forced, imposed patterns of religious experience. It is surprising that he does not appear to have read or used for comparative purposes Sarah Williams's fertile study of popular religion in Southwark, South London, for example (yes, an urban area, but one in which a high proportion of the poor were migrants from the countryside), or any of Hugh McLeod's extensive works on oral material, or Mark Smith's provocative study of religion and industrialization in Lancashire. These are significant limitations.

Nevertheless, Lee's study is an important one that will be argued over and raided for insight for years to come, and historians of Victorian religion cannot afford to ignore it. It is written clearly and concisely and is well supported with the usual scholarly apparatus.