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bashing his head on his desk three times and repeating ‘I hate the Church of England’. He was not the only one. The Reverend Dr Edward Drax Free had a fearsome reputation as a binge drinker while still at Oxford, and when he was made rector of All Saints, Sutton, he started his tenure by impregnating his housekeeper, keeping his church firmly locked, selling most of the portable contents, not to mention the lead from the roof, and turning the churchyard into a farm. Eventually besieged in his rectory, he armed himself with a brace of pistols, his favourite maid, and an enormous stack of pornography. Even then, however, some of his parishioners were prepared to smuggle food in to him. The siege lasted two weeks and only ended when he ran out of claret. What happened to the maid is not recorded. The loyalty of at least a few of his parish is an astonishing common thread through this amazing catalogue of human frailty. A Cornish clergyman prone to wandering off absent-mindedly during services was chained to his own altar rail by the ladies of his congregation. Some, such as Edwin Boston, said to be the original of the Fat Controller in the Thomas the Tank Engine books, who had a railway in his garden and travelled around his parish by steamroller, had possibly endearing foibles – parishioners were always welcome to ride on his train – but others, such as Lancelot Blackburne, Archbishop of York, who had been a pirate in the Caribbean, was described as seldom having the behaviour expected of a cleric, and seldom that of a pirate. What is also amazing is that so few of these reprobates left the Church. Only one, Canon Brian Dominic Titus Leo Brindley, vicar of Holy Trinity Reading, who had a habit of processing with the blessed sacrament around his church while being fanned with ostrich feathers, became a Roman Catholic – and was not admitted to the priesthood. This is an engagingly presented book, complete with a glossary of ecclesiastical terms, which, on inspection, turn out to be as scurrilous and ironic as the rest of the contents. Butler-Gallie’s prose is, however, not beyond reproach. He seems not to know the difference between ‘astronomy’ and ‘astrology’ (p. 45) and, like many of his regency clergy, seems not to know the meaning of ‘disinterest’ (p. 100).