Born in 1683 on the eve of the Glorious Revolution and dying in 1744, shortly before the final roll of the Jacobite dice six months later, the counsellor-at-law, Mannock Strickland, lived through a period of ebbing fortunes for his English Catholic co-religionists. His faith having ruled out his being called to the Bar, Strickland rose as high as he could in his chosen profession but maintained a side-line in representing the interests of several exile religious communities. He acted as agent for four English convents: the Augustinians at Louvain, the Benedictines in Dunkirk, and the Dominican and the Benedictine communities in Brussels. He also had dealings with the English male house of Carthusians at Nieuport. Strickland's papers have survived at Mapledurham in Oxfordshire, the editor of the volume at hand, Richard Williams, asserting that they are the only complete set of an English lawyer's papers to have been preserved from the period. In this volume, Williams reproduces letters, account books and bills of exchange from Strickland's dealings with the exile houses, particularly the convents. Of especial interest are the letters though, oddly, considering the book's focus on Strickland, it is not actually his letters that survive but those that he received from the nuns. Nevertheless, from the correspondence reproduced here it is possible to build a picture of Strickland's activities on their behalf, from the general investment of funds and the chasing of money owing, to the passing on of books to the expat women. Williams also provides an introduction to the volume, as well as some useful pen pictures of recurring individuals. The introduction is light on engagement with the historiography of the English convents, with some highly contentious opinions ventured, Williams very much viewing the documents with Strickland rather than the women religious as the principle point of attention. For example, Williams take a dim view of Cecily Tunstall, procuratrix for the Augustinian canonesses at Louvain, painting her in a disparaging light against Strickland's alleged professionalism, a picture that seems harsh from reading the documents. After all, the ‘little’ jobs that Tunstall wanted to have done may have been irksome to Strickland but they were the job of the agent. Admittedly, after all his training, Strickland may not have enjoyed acting as the eighteenth-century equivalent of a debt collector, tasked with the unenviable job of tracking down convent benefactors for non-payment, but then he did accept that role, presumably out of religious affinity, though his motives are not explored by Williams. Overall, for historians of the exile religious communities and scholars of early eighteenth-century legal and economic studies, this volume is a rich resource to be discovered and exploited from a range of perspectives.