WHETHER monastic or secular, the English Church was founded for the purpose of saving souls, and the cathedral was, in theory, the epicenter of pastoral activity. It is thus more than a little ironic that the two chapters about cathedral culture and pastoral care are the shortest. If it is difficult to nail down the elements of cathedral culture, it is even harder to glimpse diocesans at work in a period before the advent of bishops’ registers and other documents that reflect the rise of ecclesiastical bureaucracy in England. Contemporary sources reveal very little about the practice of pastoral care in the dioceses, and still less about the networks of relationships that characterized the Church at this level. The dearth of sources has led most scholars to assume that episcopal control over pastoral care was minimal in this period. Thus, “the striking lack of any focused interest in the supervision of local clergy or parish life in early eleventh-century tracts on the episcopal office,” observes John Blair, “raises some doubts about how often bishops were in a position to confront such problems.” While such doubts are not unreasonable, the recent collection of essays, Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, sheds much light on pastoral practices in this period, alleviating at least some of these doubts. This chapter brings together the scattered evidence for pastoral care contained in prescriptive, narrative and, especially, liturgical sources. What this analysis will show is that while we will probably never know exactly what Christianity looked like everywhere on the ground, there is more that can be said about contemporary attitudes and expectations toward pastoral care in the dioceses of later Anglo-Saxon England.

On the eve of the Norman Conquest, the ecclesiastical landscape of England was a blend of rural and urban, small and large, central and peripheral. It still bore the imprint in 1066 of the Church's missionary origins, particularly in its diversity.

Given such notable differences in size, location, prosperity and influence, it is not possible to speak of a typical Anglo-Saxon bishopric. Most, however, were rural and relatively poor, and more than a few vied continually with powerful local monasteries for resources both human and financial. The two primatial sees, Canterbury and York, shared jurisdiction over the kingdom, although the archbishop of Canterbury was the undisputed metropolitan in the Anglo-Saxon period and the number of sees it supervised was much greater.