The clergy of late Anglo-Saxon England have not received the most favourable of presses, as the quotation above shows. Too often they are defined for us by the much more literate monks of the Benedictine reform movement, who, although they formed only a small part of the late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical establishment, set the tone and the agenda for the rest from the reign of Edgar onwards. More problematic for the historian of the clergy is that they have not been recorded for us in sufficient detail. For the historian of the later Middle Ages, that is to say of the period from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 onwards, the standard approach to the clergy is a prosopographical one, made possible by the existence of enough pieces of information to supply biographical outlines for large numbers of individual clerics. Since the 1960s scholars have been steadily producing detailed lists of later medieval clergy in Britain – English cathedral canons between 1066 and 1540, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, Yorkshire parish clergy and Scottish higher clergy and university graduates.