Land and God, is a volume of essays in his honour draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese.

For over 50 years Dr Nicholas Bennett has been one of the lynchpins of academic research in Lincolnshire as archivist, academic and general editor of the Lincoln Record Society. This volume of essays in his honour consists of contributions from Dr Bennett's colleagues on the Council of Lincoln Record Society. It draws together research from the twelfth to the twentieth century and across the eight counties of the ancient diocese of Lincoln. The volume includes editions of previously unpublished records as well as reanalyses of more familiar texts, as the contributors exam medieval secular and ecclesiastical records, nineteenth-century accounts and twentieth-century magazines. The articles demonstrate how the concerns and challenges of Church and State remain remarkably similar over 800 years. As well as addressing familiar themes though the volume allows the reader to engage with the lives of great men and of those who are otherwise unknown, including bishops and rectors, justices and criminals, and widows and suffragettes.

Tudor Paperwork: accounts revealing the trials and tribulations of church officials during the Reformation period.

The Louth churchwarden's accounts are some of the county's most comprehensive surviving parish records. These continue in an almost unbroken sequence from the beginning of the sixteenth century, opening a panorama on the financial undertakings of a large and relatively prosperous parish church. The first published transcription, edited by Reginald Dudding, Rector of Saleby (1859-1937), covered the years 1500/1 to 1523/4 and recount the construction of the church's magnificent spire in considerable detail. The documents transcribed in this present publication date from 1527/8 to 1570/1 and comprise of two volumes now deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives. These, alongside the comprehensive parish registers commencing in 1538, illustrate the fiscal and social interactions between a local parish church and its parishioners. Importantly, although these texts are in hindsight historically significant, to the churchwardens of the period they were primarily a statement of the financial situation of the church; merely Tudor paperwork.