It used to be a fashionable historical pursuit to examine the nature and structure of the episcopate in different periods. Wow many were of baronial stock; how many monks, or religious; how many scholars; how many deans, archdeacons, dignitaries and canons; how many local men? Givenenough material, we can make some splendid patterns. In an English setting, one category was very important: how many were curial bishops, men drawn from the king's immediate circle or from the ranks of the royal administration? The pattern is never static; it changes. My purpose in this paper is to examine that changing pattern under the Norman and Angevin kings and to seek to understand the scale of the changes and some at least of the underlying causes of change.

Take the English kingdom between 1066 and 1216, and take the category of curial bishops: the patterns which emerge are very interesting. I distrust absolute figures. It needs only a slight change to throw the whole sequence out. The figures for England would fall along these lines. There were 136 bishops consecrated and 74 of them were unmistakably curial bishops, court men. Technically, 53 were not in the king's employ, nor were they part of the king's immediate circle before their election, though some of them became curial figures after they had been made bishops. There are 9 bishops about whom very little is known. Over the whole period, from 1066 to 1216, some 54% of the episcopate were men who had made their way through the royal service, or who belonged to the king's immediate circle. Perhaps 60% of the episcopate were committed royalists. They did not support the king in every decision, but in general they could be relied upon to back his wishes.

The balance of curial and non-curial bishops changes from one reign to another: we are not dealing with a static pattern. In the reigns of William the Conqueror and his sons there was a preponderance of royal clerks in the episcopate. At one point, in 1121-2, Henry I had 16 such men in the kingdom, and despite changes in policy there were still 9 curial bishops at the time of his death. In Stephen's reign, the number of royal clerks on the bench declined sharply, and in 1154 there was only one former royal servant among the bishops.