Operating on a level simultaneously local, national and international, the Church was a unique institution that formed one of the premier engines of social and geographic mobility across Western Christendom. At one and the same time Cornwall held a place in the diocese of Exeter, the Ecclesia Anglicana and the wider Catholic Church, with these many ties all contributing to connectivity. While the Church created an enduring personal link between the county and a leading spiritual lord in the person of the bishop of Exeter, only one of the bishops appointed to the see in this period actually hailed from the south west and that was Walter de Stapeldon, who came from just across the Tamar in Devon. A very active diocesan, he ordained no fewer than 836 priests, 865 deacons and 813 subdeacons, making an impressive six formal visitations of the archdeaconry of Cornwall and three partial journeys. Bishop Stapeldon was a force to reckoned with in the affairs of the peninsula.

In contrast to Stapeldon's relatively local origins, Bishop Grandisson, his successor but one, was of distant Savoyard extraction, but he too itinerated around Cornwall. In a dialogue with the parishioners of St Buryan in 1336, Grandisson communicated with them ‘through the medium of his own voice’, although his words needed to be translated into Cornish for a minority of monoglot Cornish-speakers. Despite such linguistic challenges, the bishop still received oaths of loyalty from the parishioners and confirmed ‘innumerable’ children while in the far west of the county. There is evidence that Grandisson was a conscientious diocesan who felt a high degree of affinity with his see, in his will bequeathing money to the infirm in the diocese and even remembering the Cornish landholder Ranulph Blanchminster. More prosaic considerations also linked these bishops to the county's residents. In 1389, for example, Bishop Brantingham is found taking action in chancery to recover £400 from Sir Robert Tresilian, Henry Giffard and John Tregorrek, while in the following year he received homage from John Trevenour pro terris et tenementis. The bonds between a bishop, his see and its people emerge as many-faceted.