ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in this book. The book focuses on the prescriptive texts composed by bishops and higher churchmen for the delivery of pastoral services, helps to redress the balance in favour of the local church. It suggests that pastoral care continues to be important to higher churchmen throughout several centuries and that the mushrooming of local churches across the medieval west accompany by a real concern among the clerical elite to educates and trains the local priests who serves the people of Europe. The chapter not only traces churchmen's continued concern with pastoral care between the ninth and early thirteenth centuries but it focus on different facets of the relationship between church and people in the development of ecclesiastical institutions. The laity fulfils an important material and rhetorical role for the clergy that needs the laity in order to articulate their own vision for the Church.
