In February 1917 the Geographical Journal published a paper by C. B. Fawcett in which he analysed some principles which might underlie any successful division of England into those larger administrative areas which a new concept of devolution in government would require. His paper became a small book, The Provinces of England, which was published in 1919. Both the paper and the book are now regarded as classics in the English literature of this particular field of geographical studies. Ecclesiastical areas and the boundaries containing them are susceptible to a similar analysis and, prompted by the need for additional dioceses to meet pastoral problems arising from the growth and redistribution of the population, Anglican churchmen had been attempting such analyses many decades before the appearance of Fawcett's paper.

The purpose of this article is first to give some account of a short collection of Anglo-Norman councils of the eleventh century, then to suggest that one of these councils, hitherto unknown, represents the canons of a council held by archbishop Lanfranc in 1072, and lastly to offer a tentative explanation of why the whole collection came to be put together.