In the 1140s Bishop Robert de Béthune of Hereford issued a charter adjudging two churches to the Norman abbey of Lire and its abbot Hildier who had come all the way to Hereford to press claims to them. After explaining the validity of Lire's claim to the church of Fownhope, Robert went on to say ‘Similarly I grant to [Hildier] the church of Much Marcle, anciently subjected to Lire, in which in my time I found two priests, one having a concubine and the other not only having a concubine but also being a simoniac, which was recognised and proved in my presence and that of my chapter.’ Robert had the two priests ejected and allowed the abbey of Lire to take direct control of the church. The document spotlights two clerics being forced to come to terms with changing attitudes among the ecclesiastical authorities to clerical marriage and to the ownership and transmission of churches. How typical were they of the clergy of the diocese of Hereford in the twelfth century? and, in wider terms, what sort of people became clerics in the diocese in the eleventh and twelfth centuries? which families did they belong to? how were they educated? how did they obtain preferment? how prevalent was clerical marriage and how did it help them to fit into local networks?

Posing these questions about the diocese of Hereford in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the period when the Gregorian reform movement was beginning (rather slowly, it must be said) to have an impact, brings into play two separate areas of historical enquiry.