The aim of this article is to identify the political, social, and economic anxieties that prompted East-Anglian secular elites —at the dawn of the fourteenth century— in the commission of private devotional books whose marginalia included, as new and recurrent themes, the monstrous cleric and the monstrous bishop. Establishing a dialogue between documentary sources produced during the period and the close relationship that weaves the texts of the psalter and the visual periphery that used to accompany them, this work suggests that monstrous bishops and clerics expressed the discomfort of East-Anglian lords towards the Avignon Papacy and the disciplinary crisis that faced the English clergy during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.