The Worcestershire Historical Society has done good service in printing the important _Sede Vacante_ Register in the possession of the Dean and Chapter of Worcester. When there was a vacancy in the see, the spiritualities were administered by the Prior of Worcester, who then had the right to visit both the parochial clergy and the religious houses subject to diocesan control. This register covers all the vacancies--sometimes extending over more than a year--between the death of Bishop Giffard in 1301 to the enthronement of Bishop Bourchier in 1435. During this period the prior, either in person or through two commissioners, visited the episcopally-controlled monasteries, eighteen in number, on eleven different occasions. Eighty-four of these visits are duly recorded; only two of them revealed any special cause of offence, one of them being at Wroxall nunnery and the other at Studley priory. This voluminous register has been fully edited, with prolonged introductions, by Mr. J. Willis Bund, chairman of Quarter Sessions, etc.; a gentleman entirely free from mediæval proclivities. Commenting on the usually received supposition of monastic immorality, he considers that this register disproves such charges, and gives it as his opinion that the English monastic clergy were not one bit more immoral “than the secular clergy of the nineteenth century.” The jests and jeers of cynical and satirical writers of mediæval days, who were themselves usually men of depraved lives, as to the supposed laxity of life of monks and nuns, based upon the actions of a few degraded and disgraced religious, coupled with the foul slanders of Henry VIII.’s self-interested tools, have so long succeeded in saturating unreflective minds with scandal that it has become difficult for even well-intentioned writers (who have made no personal investigations) to escape from the evil and lying atmosphere with which the whole subject has been so long surrounded.