In the course of a few short years, the Long parliament dismantled the traditional apparatus of the English Church, abolishing episcopacy and replacing the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory for Publique Worship.¹ The abolition of bishops in 1646 and of cathedral chapters in 1649 left the state in possession of land, tithes and advowsons across the country. Much of this estate was sold by a regime ever hungry for money, but tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues were reserved for the improvement of clerical wages. Nevertheless, the haphazard augmentation of livings during the 1640s demonstrated that the committees charged with regulating the Church had no clear idea of the value of its property, the quality of its ministers or the condition of the parishes.²

Consequently, parliament ordered a survey of the Church to be made. Local juries were to catalogue the resources in each parish, evaluate their clergy and consider the need for the union or division of parishes. Returns are extant for thirty-five counties, produced between 1650 and 1659. They provide an essential snapshot of the state of the Church during the English Revolution. The recommendations made in these documents would have dramatically redrawn the parochial map, redistributed resources and rooted out incompetence. Nevertheless, few of the proposed reforms had been implemented by the time they were reversed by the Restoration. This chapter will examine the surveys of six counties – Dorset, Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Middlesex, Norfolk and Wiltshire – made between 1650 and 1657, to analyse the state of the Church in the 1650s, assess the problems facing ecclesiastical authorities and evaluate the effectiveness of the successive bodies appointed to reform the Church during the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

The parochial structure of early modern England and Wales was part of the Church’s medieval inheritance, reflecting the wealth and pattern of settlement of an earlier age. Parishes were established in the late Saxon period, and their numbers had grown rapidly thereafter, but the rate of expansion slowed from the thirteenth century as parish boundaries became fixed. The uneven distribution of parishes, probably numbering about 8,800 by the sixteenth century, presented different problems in different regions. In the south and east, many small parishes were too poor to attract a learned ministry. In the uplands of the north and west, very large parishes were once sparsely populated but now the dispersed congregations had swollen far beyond the capacity of many parish churches.³

The contrast was observed in 1641 by one Lancashire man, who compared the populous counties of south-east England to the district of Furness, ‘which for spacious compasse of ground is not much lesse than Bedfordshire or Rutlandshire, [yet] it hath onely eight parish churches’.⁴ The spiritual needs of Lancastrians were served by just sixty parishes in 1640, and the average parish measured 20,000 acres (thirty-one square miles). Twelve were over 30,000 acres (forty-seven square miles), and the gargantuan parish of Whalley measured some 108,140 acres (169 square miles).⁵ Only Northumberland had larger parishes than Lancashire, and only the small counties of Westmorland and Rutland had fewer parishes.⁶ By contrast, parishes in many southern counties were smaller and more numerous. For example, it has been estimated that at least 928 parish churches existed in Norfolk between the eleventh and the sixteenth centuries, sixteen times as many as Lancashire’s total, while a fifteenth-century survey of the same county recorded 782 parishes. Discounting the forty-six parishes of Norwich, this would give an average area of 1,752 acres for the county’s parishes. Norfolk was an extreme example, but elsewhere in eastern England there were 415 parish churches in Essex and 580 in Suffolk.⁷

The provision of parish churches was no less uneven in the urban environment. Cities that had been large from an early date often had many more parishes than were necessary by the sixteenth century – forty-six at Norwich and Lincoln, forty at York – while the growing towns of the late middle ages had to squeeze their expanding population into a solitary parish church, or were served by chapels of ease that remained subordinate to ancient mother churches.⁸ Liverpool, Weymouth and Sunderland were all supplied by chapels of ease, while all six of the churches of Kingston-upon-Hull were technically chapels. Indeed, some urban chapels outdid parish churches in their wealth and splendour. William Worcestre described the church of St Mary Redcliffe, near Bristol, as ‘like a cathedral’, and Elizabeth I called it ‘the fairest, goodliest and most famous parish church in England’, yet it was only a chapel of ease until the eighteenth century.⁹ Chapels were also common in the countryside. Their number is difficult to ascertain because they were often poorly documented, but they tended to be established where large distances, rugged terrain or hostile weather made attending the parish church difficult. Chapels supplied some of the deficiencies of the English Church, but their existence was a constant cause of friction and disputes. They provided regular worship for communities outside the parish church, but other pastoral services were often jealously reserved as the exclusive right of the mother church, to preserve the fees of the incumbent. Meanwhile, the congregation of a chapel had the double burden of maintaining both it and the parish church.¹⁰

Addressing the deficiencies of the Church by founding new chapels had proved attractive because altering the established parochial structure risked upsetting vested interests: creating new parishes deprived their former incumbents of their tithes and fees; consolidating parishes upset the privileges of their patrons. Formal reorganization required the permission of the respective incumbents and patrons of each parish, as well as a licence from the bishop, although informal unions could be achieved by nominating the same cleric to two parishes, especially if both benefices shared the same patron.

Where parochial reform was undertaken before the 1650s, it was a haphazard process resulting from local initiative rather than the product of a coordinated national plan. In the absence of any systematic effort to reform the parochial structure before the middle of the seventeenth century, individual changes were local responses to particular circumstances. The demographic crises of the fourteenth century had left many benefices unviable, and many depopulated parishes were subsequently united. It has been estimated that nationally there was a net reduction of seven per cent of the total number of parishes, from around 9,500 to 8,800, between the Black Death and the Reformation.¹¹ In those counties already possessed of an overabundance of parish churches, the decline was more marked. In Norfolk, where typically seven churches were closed every fifty years between 1100 and 1500, this rate doubled in the second half of the fourteenth century.¹²

During the sixteenth century, parliament was introduced into the question of parochial reform, beginning with legislation passed in 1545 which allowed for the union of two churches within a mile of each other if one was worth less than £6 a year, although such unions still required the consent of the incumbents, patrons and bishop to take effect.¹³ This certainly had an impact in those areas that were oversupplied with parish churches. In Norfolk, 112 parish churches were abandoned during the sixteenth century, mostly as a result of the consolidation of poor parishes with their near neighbours.¹⁴ Further acts were obtained for the reorganization of specific places, including York in 1547, which eventually enabled the closure of fourteen churches and the consolidation of two more parishes.¹⁵ A later opportunity to consolidate unviable parishes in other corporate towns and cities was lost when parliament was prorogued in April 1563.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the involvement of parliament in parochial reform for the first time did not yet represent a systematic approach to parochial reform, the various acts only serving to encourage and enable further local initiatives.

Although Tudor legislation contemplated the union of small and poor parishes, none addressed the problem of large parishes in counties like Lancashire. While it had been possible to close unwanted parish churches as the population collapsed after the Black Death, responding to a growing population proved more difficult, and few new parishes were established in the century before the Civil War. The population of Lancashire is thought to have grown by two and a half times between 1377 and 1563, to about 95,000 in that year, and was estimated to be approximately 150,000 by 1640.¹⁷ In the same period the average Lancashire congregation rose from 630 in 1377 to 1,700 in 1563, and to 2,500 by 1640. As with previous centuries, founding chapels remained the easiest way to fill gaps in the parochial structure, and in Lancashire the number of chapels increased from sixty-one in c.1500 to ninety-nine by 1548, and to 128 by 1640.¹⁸ Many of these new chapels were founded in the large cloth-producing parishes of the east of the county, where population growth was highest: by 1640, Blackburn had seven chapels, Manchester nine and Whalley twelve.¹⁹ By contrast, only two new Lancashire parishes were created during the sixteenth century, Deane in 1541 and Hawkshead in 1578.²⁰

Parochial reform remained a low priority in the early seventeenth century. Efforts to create new parishes at Blindley Heath (Surrey) and Melcombe Regis (Dorset) through legislation came to nothing in 1604, while bills to make St Mary’s in Lichfield a separate parish were lost in 1621 and 1626.²¹ The meeting of the Long parliament presented new opportunities for the reorganization of the parochial structure, although these were initially restricted to the reform of individual parishes. Legislation introduced in 1641 resulted in the separation of the Lancashire chapels of Hoole and Upholland from their respective mother churches. Both examples emphasize the importance of well-connected local men to the success of establishing new parishes. The chapel at Hoole was only established in 1628, endowed by the mercantile brothers Andrew and Thomas Stones.²² Through their influence, Hoole was divided from Croston in 1641, the act installing the Stoneses as patrons of the new rectory.²³ The process of separating Upholland from the parish of Wigan was more drawn out. A bill introduced in 1641 was initially resisted by John Bridgeman, bishop of Chester and rector of Wigan, but passed the Commons in April 1642. Nevertheless, it remained overlooked for over a year until an ordinance was finally passed in September 1643. In the case of Upholland, the influence of the godly landowner Henry Ashhurst and his MP son William was instrumental.²⁴ Elsewhere, Plymouth was divided into two parishes by an act of 1641, but other bills initiated in 1641 – to divide the large London suburban parishes of St Andrew’s Holborn, St Giles’ Cripplegate, St James Clerkenwell, St Margaret’s Westminster, St Martin in the Fields and Stepney, and to make Newport in the Isle of Wight a separate parish – all fared less well.²⁵

Instead of such ad hoc reorganization, the Commons turned its attention to a more general reform of the Church. The Committee for Plundered Ministers, established in 1642 to relieve clerical supporters of parliament who had been ejected from their livings by royalists, was soon given further powers to augment clerical wages, to sequester royalist clergy and to appoint approved ministers to vacant benefices. Initially the committee sought to improve clerical livings from local resources, making grants from sequestered tithes to improve poor livings within the same county.

The committee continued this work until the dissolution of the Rump in 1653, yet at first it had no certain knowledge of where the need was greatest or what resources it could draw upon, and so long as it was reliant upon sequestrations, temporary in nature, the system would remain insecure and inefficient.²⁶ The need for a survey of benefices had first been suggested in April 1642, when committees considering the maintenance of the ministry and reform of Church government were combined, but the project stalled following the outbreak of war.²⁷ Parliament returned to parochial reform in April 1646, when another committee was appointed to consider the settling of a preaching ministry throughout England and Wales, and directed, among other things, to contemplate the necessity of altering parishes and erecting new churches.²⁸ The abolition of the episcopal hierarchy later that year provided parliament with a vast estate with which to endow the parochial clergy, further enlarged in 1649 with the estates of abolished cathedral chapters.²⁹

An Act for the Maintenance of Preaching Ministers was not passed, however, until June 1649. This created a new body of thirteen trustees who were to take possession of these properties and to apply their revenues ‘for providing of a competent maintenance for supply and encouragement of Preaching-Ministers’. The stated goal of the act was to bring the value of each benefice up to a minimum of £100 a year. Commissioners were to survey the state of the Church throughout England and Wales, returning the value of each benefice, the identity of its incumbent, how they served the cure, what they were paid, and whether it was desirable to unite or divide the parish.³⁰ MPs were instructed to nominate suitable commissioners in December, and the first commissions were issued in February 1650.³¹ Over the course of the next twelve months, surveys, some only partial, were undertaken in at least twenty-four counties (see Table 2.1). Once returned to chancery, though, these surveys seem to have languished.

At the same time, an Act of April 1650 transferred responsibility for augmenting clerical livings to the Committee for the Reformation of the Universities, who immediately initiated a review of all existing augmentations. It is not clear whether the 1650 surveys were consulted as part of this task, but the committee was abolished in April 1652.³² Its powers were transferred to the Committee for Plundered Ministers in February 1653, two months before that committee’s own termination upon the dissolution of the Rump. This left only the Trustees for the Maintenance of Ministers, upon whom all of the previous committees’ powers were devolved by an act of September 1654.³³ The trustees were to send for the surveys of 1650 and to commission new surveys to be undertaken where necessary. The 1654 act went further than the earlier acts, empowering the trustees themselves to unite or divide parishes as they thought appropriate. As a result, surveys were produced of parishes in London and seventeen counties between 1655 and 1659, including six counties already surveyed in 1650. These numbers include eight returns comprising no more than a handful of parishes surveyed in advance of intended unions. In total, partial or complete parochial surveys produced between 1650 and 1659 are extant from thirty-five English and Welsh counties, and the city of London (see Table 2.1 and Figure 2.1).

These surveys vary in their nature. Many of the parchment originals of these surveys are still to be found among the records of chancery at the National Archives.³⁴ A number are now badly damaged and difficult to read, so it is fortunate that the trustees had paper copies made in 1654, preserving some surveys for which no original now survives. Their archive, now held by Lambeth Palace Library, also contains several original parchment surveys produced after 1654.³⁵ The Dorset returns of 1650 are singular. Although the act required that the returns be enrolled on parchment, instead the commissioners returned the paper presentments of each individual parish. The diversity within the surveys is reflected not just by differences in the form but also in the content of the surveys, sometimes even within the returns from the same county. While some jurors gave expansive answers, others restricted themselves to very limited comments. Some took up the task of recommending the reorganization of parishes enthusiastically, with Lancashire’s jurors often detailing new boundaries down to individual households, but others were much more hesitant to recommend changes. Many jurors drew upon their knowledge of local topography, their local archives and communal memory to make the case for change; elsewhere jurors did little more than list the names and salaries of incumbents.

Unsurprisingly, those called upon to serve as commissioners tended to be drawn from the new wave of men who made up the backbone of the republican regime, many of whom had only come to prominence during the 1640s. Although twenty-one of the twenty-two Lancashire commissioners were either assessment commissioners or magistrates in 1650, thirteen had not served on a county committee before 1648, and only three had sat on the bench magistrates before 1642. Four of the six Gloucestershire men who presided over the county’s survey were among the most active in the county during the 1640s or 1650s. Wiltshire’s commissioners included the clerk of the peace and members of the corporation of Salisbury, and Dorset’s commissioners included townsmen of Bridport, Gillingham and Sherborne. Nevertheless, there were also men from well-established families, ‘of undoubted position in the country’. The Lancashire commissioners included four MPs and five interregnum sheriffs, the MP Thomas Hodges was a commissioner in Gloucestershire, and the Dorset commissioners included the MPs Anthony Ashley Cooper and Sir John Trenchard.³⁶ In some counties, the commissioners apportioned the separate divisions of their respective counties between themselves. Ten Lancashire commissioners dealt only with the southern half of the county, and nine only with the north.³⁷ In Wiltshire, nine commissioners concerned themselves only with the Salisbury division, while another five dealt exclusively with the Chippenham division.³⁸ This partition between different groups of commissioners may explain why some counties, such as Wiltshire, made only partial returns of the survey.³⁹ It was not true of all counties, however, and in Gloucestershire a single group of commissioners apparently received the presentments of all four divisions of the county during a single sitting at Gloucester.⁴⁰

By surveying their counties according to quarter-sessions divisions, the commissioners used the familiar structures of county government. The act drew further upon this traditional apparatus, requiring sheriffs to call together juries, whose names we can usually learn from the individual returns. A single warrant survives from Lancashire, empanelling twenty-four men to act as jurors, from whom seventeen were sworn.⁴¹ The numbers sitting in juries in Lancashire varied between twelve and seventeen. Where jurors can be identified, as might be expected, they were leading men within their own communities who held parochial office during the 1650s. Lancashire jurors included Ralph Worsley of Platt, father of the future Major-General and a former member of the sub-committee of accounts for Lancashire, and John Gilliam, who would be added to the assessment committee in November 1650. They also included men who would serve as high constables during the Commonwealth, borough reeves of Manchester and Salford, and a common councillor of Liverpool. Not all Lancashire jurymen were of unquestionable conformity to the new regime, however, including as they did the sequestered delinquent Richard Blackburn of Brindle.⁴²

The returns exposed the divisions within the parishes of the nation. Rival factions within parishes saw the survey as another opportunity to pursue particular agendas, while neighbouring communities made competing claims upon each other’s resources. In Shaftesbury, the parishioners of St Peter’s called for the demolition of the neighbouring parish of Cann, described dismissively as a chapel, and its materials to be used to enlarge their own church, a suggestion unsurprisingly rejected at Cann. In Salisbury, the corporation hoped that the former cathedral would be converted into another parish church.⁴³ No doubt, many of these incidents were simply another episode in a longer history of friction. Antagonism between neighbouring parishes, or between chapels and their mother church, might be ancient in origin. Elsewhere, conflict might be the result of more recent conflict. The proposal to unite the two parishes of Abingdon (Berkshire) was later said to have been a ploy by the godly parishioners of St Helen’s to dissolve the royalist congregation of St Nicholas, while Peter Heylyn strove successfully to resist the plan in order to provide shelter to the royalist clergyman.⁴⁴ The returns expose antagonism within communities as well, such as at Toller Porcorum (Dorset), where the parishioners refused to sign a document that was said not to represent the views of the majority of the parish. Some communities simply rejected the authority of the commissioners, with complaints in both Gloucestershire and Wiltshire that parishes had not appeared when ordered to do so.⁴⁵

One key task given to the church surveyors was the evaluation of the abilities and conformability of the various ministers of the nation’s parishes. Elrington suggested that the nuances of the descriptions applied to each minister were intended to be meaningful, but the repetitive nature of many answers seems more formulaic than nuanced.⁴⁶ It is certainly interesting to note, for instance, that the Lancashire surveyors could regard both John Pollet of Milnrow and John Harrison of Ashton-under-Lyne as ‘orthodox’ ministers, Harrison being a strict Presbyterian while Pollet had been accused of malignancy and a scandalous lifestyle. The curate of Newton-in-Makerfield was described as a godly preaching minister despite having been ejected three years earlier.⁴⁷ The jurors of Burcombe (Wiltshire) only noted blandly that their minister Samuel Maniston preached twice each Sunday, although he had been accused six years earlier of kissing girls and offering to be ‘unchaste’ with them.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, jurors could also be scathing of their minister’s abilities. In Wiltshire, where the jurors usually made bland statements, they dismissed the curate of Maddington as ‘no fitt man for the ministerye’, and Roger Flower of Castle Combe as one who ‘maketh use of other mens workes by reading them in the pullpit’. At Buckland (Dorset) the congregation bemoaned the ‘slender guiftes in preachinge’ of the vicar, observing that ‘ther cannot be constant preaching of such that hath not any books especially a bible, such preaching is morr prating’. They complained that he neither catechized the young nor visited the sick, and that he employed a curate who ‘liveth a very disorderly & debased course of life’. The situation was so poor that many parishioners resorted to other churches.⁴⁹

Elsewhere it was apparently the manner of an incumbent’s appointment into a parish which caused dissatisfaction. The congregation of East Smithfield (Middlesex) complained that their minister had been appointed by the Committee of Plundered Ministers ‘not only without the knowledge or consent of one hundredth part of the inhabitants, but without their approbation … by which means the people are not only deprived of Christian fellowship, but of sacramental communion, contrary both to the law of God and this present Commonwealth’. The criticisms of the parishioners of Long Crichel (Dorset) were particularly severe both on their minister and the parliamentary administrators, lambasting their minister as ‘one of those that runs: that [he] was never sent by Christ but by the Committee: For wee conceve that Christ never sends forth a messinger without a message to deliver’. In Lancashire, the criticism of the rector of Middleton by his parishioners was so strong that the county’s commissioners felt compelled to send separate certification of his conformability to the Committee of Plundered Ministers.⁵⁰

In passing judgement upon the clergy, the surveyors were considering political as well as religious inclinations. Clerics in Lancashire, Middlesex and Wiltshire refused to observe the official days of fasts and thanksgiving.⁵¹ The rector of Sapperton (Gloucestershire) had been ejected from the benefice for his disaffection to parliament but continued to receive its profits, while the vicar of Lower Swell was ‘a man disaffected’ who officiated ‘by intrusion without authority’. The rector of Stour Provost (Dorset) was accused of employing disaffected ministers to serve the cure in his place. In Lancashire, the curate of Cartmel Fell was dismissed as ‘an old malignant’, the curate of Burtonwood ‘constantly [made] marriages contrary to the directions and rules appoynted by order of parliament’, and the curate of Blackley had railed against the republic’s Engagement oath. In Wiltshire, ministers at Alton Priors and Boscombe still used the Book of Common Prayer.⁵² We should not assume that accusations against ministers were always disinterested, however. Obediah Wills, the rector of the neighbouring parish of Alton Barnes, was accused of informing against the minister at Alton Priors because he hoped to have the two parishes united, a recommendation made by the Wiltshire jurors in 1650 and 1656.⁵³

The surveys underlined just how unequally the resources of the Church were distributed. Population growth and rising prices meant that the rectors of many of Lancashire’s large parishes enjoyed an income at least equal to the regime’s target. Seventeen of twenty-four rectors earned £100 a year or more, and the average value of a Lancashire rectory was almost £200, although this was inflated by very wealthy benefices such as Winwick, worth £660 a year. In Middlesex, rectors of suburban parishes could benefit from the inflated land values. St Clement Danes was worth £300 a year, and the new parish of Covent Garden £250. However, although the average value of the county’s rectories was £113 a year, only nine of Middlesex’s twenty-two rectories were worth at least £100. In other counties, the small size and population of many parishes reduced the value of rectories. The average income of Gloucestershire’s 128 rectors was £79, and only thirty-two could expect at least £100; in Dorset 152 rectors enjoyed an average income of £77, of whom forty-three received at least £100. By contrast, forty-four parsonages in Gloucestershire and fifty-six in Dorset were worth £50 or less; the Dorset rectory of Castleton was valued at just £6 a year. In Norfolk, where returns were made for approximately one-third of the county’s parishes, the 160 rectories surveyed were worth an average of only £48; only nine were worth at least £100, and forty-eight were worth less than £50 a year.

Many rectories were impropriated, their tithes diverted from the incumbent of the parish into the hands of laymen. Where the surveys recorded the value of impropriations, in Lancashire twenty-four out of thirty-one impropriated rectories were worth £100 or more, in Dorset eighteen out of thirty-one, and in Middlesex twenty-six out of forty.⁵⁴ Where the vicars of these parishes had extensive glebe, valuable small tithes or a share of the rectorial tithes, they had also benefitted from rising values, but where the vicars received only a stipend or customary rents, these were often fixed at ancient values, depreciating in real terms over time. Across all six counties only twenty-one vicars had an annual income of at least £100, while the livings of forty-three vicars were worth no more than £10.⁵⁵

Some of the most egregious examples of the poverty of vicars were to be found in parishes with valuable impropriations. In Middlesex, where the inhabitants of East Smithfield complained that their tithes had been increased by four or even eight times their ancient value by the impropriator, to a total of £500, their vicar at St Botolph without Aldgate was endowed with just £5 or £6 a year. Unsurprisingly, the living was vacant.⁵⁶ The vicarage of Cartmel was one of three Lancashire vicarages with no fixed income, even though its impropriated rectory was worth £350.⁵⁷ Worse still were the circumstances of curates of chapels of ease, many of whom relied upon nothing more than voluntary contributions by the congregation. In Lancashire only eight of 127 chaplains could count upon a certain income of £20 or more, and forty-five chapels had no endowment at all. Small wonder then that forty of Lancashire’s chapels, and another four of its poorest vicarages, were vacant in 1650.⁵⁸ Seventeen of Dorset’s forty-three chapels had no fixed income, and twenty were without a minister; fifteen of Gloucestershire’s thirty-six chapels were unendowed, and twenty-four were vacant.

Although the authorities had spent the previous decade trying to eradicate pluralism, it was an obvious solution where benefices were of low value. In Norfolk, where so many parishes were of small size and little value, at least fifty of the 259 parishes surveyed were held in plurality with near-adjacent neighbours. Through this informal unification the average income for these twenty-five ministers was raised to £72, although the results were still uneven. The wealthy livings of North and West Lynn when combined were worth £125, five times as much as the combined total of Little Bittering and Longhorn. The poorest living in Dorset was Wareham St Mary’s, worth just £2 10s. Its vicar combined the benefice with Holy Trinity and St Martin’s in the same town, to make a total income of £118 (including an augmentation of £30), from which he employed a team of assistants to help him manage the spiritual needs of the town and its neighbourhood.

In order to address these structural problems, the surveyors were to consider how to redraw the parochial structure to meet contemporary needs. They were to recommend where to unite or divide parishes, to transfer areas from one parish to another, or to establish new parishes and build new churches. Across the country, changes were recommended to rationalize parochial boundaries, with individual farms or entire hamlets being moved to neighbouring parishes. No doubt these recommendations reflected existing practice, with the intention that those who already resorted to a more convenient church than their own should also contribute towards the maintenance of that building. Unsurprisingly, in Lancashire the jurors often identified the size of the parish and the distance of many parishioners from any place of worship as a problem, and they seem to have intended that, where possible, no congregation should be further than three miles from its parish church. In other parts of the country, the concern seems to have been to ensure that parishioners did not have to travel further than a mile to worship.

Many communities emphasized the size of their population to resist their incorporation with their neighbours or to reinforce their demands for independence. Although the chapel of Salford was less than a quarter of a mile from its mother church at Manchester, yet it had ‘a competencye of inhabitants and communicants there within itselffe’.⁵⁹ In Middlesex, the suburban communities closest to the capital struggled with swollen populations. The inhabitants of the Middlesex portions of the London parishes of St Andrew’s Holborn, St Botolph Aldgate, St Dunstan in the West, St Giles Cripplegate and St Sepulchre complained that their parish churches could not accommodate them, as did the congregation at Stepney. The Middlesex parishioners of St Sepulchre had also been excluded from the vestry. The populous market town of Uxbridge was left unsupplied, the endowment belonging to its chapel too small to attract a settled minister, but the parish church at Hillingdon was too small to contain the whole ‘multitude of people’. A similar situation was only averted at Brentford, a chapel of Hanwell, for so long as a generous augmentation from the Committee for Plundered Ministers was continued.⁶⁰ Yet it was not only urban communities which had outgrown the cramped confines of their parish churches. The population of fourteen Lancashire chapelries, including three in the parish of Blackburn and eight in the parish of Whalley, comprised 200 families or more, more than many parishes elsewhere in the country.⁶¹ At the opposite end of the scale were the decayed parishes with tiny populations, whose resources were eyed hungrily by neighbouring congregations. Compton Greenfield (Gloucestershire) comprised only six families but had tithes and glebe worth £30, while Winterborne Farringdon (Dorset) was occupied by just three families and no longer had a church but its tithes amounted to £40, both tempting acquisitions for neighbouring parishes.⁶²

Where parish boundaries did not follow topographical barriers, communities might be prevented from attending their church by poor weather and dangerous conditions. In Lancashire, the inhabitants of Tarleton and Hesketh-with-Becconsale could only travel to their parish church at Croston by boat, but even this was impossible during the winter ‘by reason of the greate inundacon of the said waters there’. The congregation at Arkholme could not pass the river Lune to their parish church of Melling ‘without danger of life’, while those living near Overton chapel were ‘so surrounded by the flowing sea twice in twenty foure howers that they cannot pass to their parish church’ at Lancaster. In Dorset, West Orchard was separated from its mother church at Great Fontmel for much of the winter, and the people of Stanton St Gabriel’s hoped to be made a separate parish because ‘the way ioyneinge to the sea is exposed to all violence of winde & weather insoemuch as many amongst us can very seldome repaire to any other church especially in the winter tyme’. The congregation at Tytherton Lucas (Wiltshire) complained that the minister often could not reach their chapel because he was ‘prevented by the rysing of the waters many times so hapning that he cannot come thither for three weekes together’.⁶³ Elsewhere, congregations suffered from the depredations of the recent conflict. At Weymouth, most of the town’s chapel was destroyed during a siege, and what remained was still in use as a sentry post. Its repair would be costly, complained the townsmen, who emphasized the potential dangers if the population of a garrison and port town were forced instead to travel far from home to worship. Another Dorset chapel, Hamworthy, had been demolished during the siege of Poole. However, no mention was made by the Wiltshire jurors of the church at Westport, demolished during the siege of Malmesbury.⁶⁴

The recommendations of the Lancashire jurors would have divided the county’s sixty-two parishes into at least 185 parishes. The huge parish of Whalley was to be divided into sixteen, while Blackburn would be separated into eight. The scheme would have necessitated the erection of twenty-eight new churches and chapels, and the relocation of some existing buildings. The jurors ordered the building of new churches at Litherland and Ince Blundell, ‘the want of such churches being the cause of loytering and much ignorance and poperie’. The Ulverston chapels of Blawith and Lowick were to be united into a single new parish, and the two chapels replaced with a new church ‘in an indifferent place’. The churches of Halton and Burtonwood were to be moved to the centre of their respective parishes to better serve their congregations. The inhabitants of Overton and Middleton were prepared to build a new church in the latter town at their own expense if Overton chapel were made into a parish. The ruined ancient chapels at Garston and Lathom were also to be rebuilt and made parish churches. Nevertheless, although the chapel of Tatham Fell stood ‘quite beyond any inhabitant of the said parish very inconveniently’, no remedy was suggested.⁶⁵

Unsurprisingly, in a county as well endowed with parishes as Norfolk the only recommendations were for their unification. The jurors recommended that 136 parishes, more than half those surveyed between 1655 and 1657, should be united to create sixty-four parishes, reducing the number of parishes by twenty-eight per cent, from 259 to 187. Had this been replicated across the whole county, it would have reduced Norfolk’s 734 parishes to a new total of 528. Of the twenty-five parishes already informally united in the person of the incumbent, fourteen were to be formally united, although Little Bittering and Longham (which shared a minister) were to be united to two other parishes instead. In most cases the reasoning for the proposed unions was the proximity of the churches, many of which were less than a mile apart. The Norfolk commissioners expressed surprise, however, that the jurors had not seen fit to unite Repham and Whitwell parishes, the churches of which were ‘as fit for union as any other in the hundred because the meeting houses stand both in one yard’.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, a greater distance need not prevent unification with neighbours. Although Horsey was two miles from any other church, the poverty of the vicarage, worth just £6, necessitated its union with Waxham and Pauling. The church at Brunstead was said to be ‘fallen downe & … very little’, despite which the parishioners were described as ‘being so averse to union’ with their neighbours at Ingham that the jurors instead recommended the union of the latter with Sutton and Stalham.⁶⁷

Elsewhere, the picture was more mixed. The jurors recommended the union of eighteen Dorset and thirty-two Gloucestershire parishes, creating nine and fifteen parishes, respectively. They also recommended the division of seventeen Dorset parishes into thirty-five, and of ten Gloucestershire parishes into twenty-one. Further changes were recommended to the boundaries of thirteen Dorset parishes and sixteen Gloucestershire parishes. The two surveys of Wiltshire, together comprising more than three-quarters of the county’s 294 parishes, returned recommendations that forty-nine parishes be united into twenty-three, fourteen parishes be divided into thirty-three, and changes be made to the boundaries of seventy-three parishes. In Middlesex, four parishes were to be united into two, eleven parishes (including four London parishes) were to be divided into twenty-four, and boundary changes were made to four more.

In Gloucestershire, the large parish of Henbury was to gain the neighbouring small parish of Compton Greenfield, and lose its chapels at Aust and Northwick, which together would form a single new parish. Three parishes bordering Bristol – Westbury-on-Trym, Horfield and Clifton – were to be united into a single parish, although Westbury’s detached chapel at Shirehampton was also to be separated. The extra-parochial district of Eyford, occupied by just two families, was united to Upper Slaughter, while the nine families of Shipton Sollars were to unite with Shipton Oliffe. No extra provision was made for the populous towns of Tetbury, Cirencester and Tewkesbury, however, despite each having only a single parish church serving respectively 500, 700 and 1,000 families.⁶⁸

In suburban Middlesex, the parishioners of St Andrew Holborn recalled the former deliberations by the Long parliament over the division of their parish, and they were keen to accomplish the project. The parishioners of St Giles Cripplegate hoped to adapt the disused Fortune playhouse to public worship until a more appropriate venue could be erected. New churches were demanded at Smithfield (St Sepulchre) and East Smithfield (St Botolph Aldgate). The large parish of Stepney was to be divided into four, Wapping was separated from Whitechapel, and the large market towns of Brentford, Hammersmith and Uxbridge were made distinct parishes. Meanwhile, the poorly endowed parishes of Paddington and Marylebone were to be united, with the demolition of both ancient churches and the erection of a new church at Lisson Green.⁶⁹

The surveys of the 1650s demonstrated the pressing need for parochial reform. Many benefices were left vacant for want of resources, while numerous parishes were too large or populous to meet the needs of their inhabitants. Despite this, progress towards parochial reform was limited by the end of the decade. The Committee for Plundered Ministers was focused solely upon the augmentation of existing livings, and the dissolution of the Rump in 1653 brought its work to a close without it having made any changes to the parochial system. This left the Trustees for the Maintenance of Ministers as the only body overseeing the administration of the Church, but they too were initially preoccupied with augmentations. By this time many of the augmentations granted in the previous decade had failed, either through overestimation of the available revenues or their loss through the lifting of sequestrations. Parochial reform represented the means to make a more permanent settlement. Early in 1655 the trustees issued commissioners for new surveys to be made, including some counties already surveyed five years earlier, and the first orders for the union or division of parishes followed later in 1655.⁷⁰

Overall, the achievements of the trustees were moderate. Where reforms had the support of local inhabitants, a reorganization of local benefices could be achieved quickly. In Norfolk, fifty-one parishes were united to create twenty-three parishes, with few complications. In Middlesex, although petitions were received for the division of St Andrew’s Holborn, St Pancras, Staines and Stepney, the trustees accomplished nothing.⁷¹ In Lancashire, despite the apparently egregious need for reform of the parochial structure, the only changes achieved by May 1658 were the establishment of Kirkby and Liverpool as new parishes. Further orders that year would have divided the eight parishes of Blackburn, Bury, Croston, Kirkby Ireleth, Kirkham, Middleton, Prestwick and Rochdale into thirty-seven parishes, but came too late to be completed before the Restoration.⁷² In Gloucestershire, ten parishes were combined into five and three parishes were divided into six, a net reduction of two parishes, and in Dorset the division of one parish and the union of two others left the county with the same number of parishes.⁷³ In Wiltshire the orders of the trustees would have produced a net reduction of just four parishes. Eleven parishes were united with neighbours to form five parishes. Chapels at Brokenborough and Charlton were made independent, the large market town of Calne was united with Blackland but its chapel at Berwick Bassett was made a parish church, and the extra-parochial Savernake forest, ‘likelie to increase with inhabitants’, was to become a parish with a new church.⁷⁴ Presumably, positive action by the trustees was a response to local initiative, as with augmentations.⁷⁵ With resources dwindling, petitions for an augmentation might be greeted instead with a proposal for the unification of the benefice with a vacant neighbour, as was found by the London parishes of St Martin’s Ironmonger Lane and of St Olave Silver Street.⁷⁶

Where opposition to reorganization was encountered, the trustees encouraged the two sides ‘to indeavour an accomodation among themselves if it may bee’. Hearings concerning the union of All Hallow’s Honey Lane and St Mary le Bow in London were suspended so that the two parishes ‘may make an amicable & neighbourly agreement in this matter between themselves’. Nevertheless, resistance or delay by influential opponents to proposed reforms was often enough to prevent their success. Patrons prevented unions with neighbours at South Pickenham and at Pattesley in Norfolk, at the latter by promising voluntarily to raise the value of the living to £100. Parishioners at Shaftesbury St Rumbold’s similarly promised to increase the stipend to £100 if it remained separate.⁷⁷ The opposition of the incumbent of Stepney was sufficient to block the separation of Poplar and Blackwall from his parish in 1656, and the division of Shadwell from Stepney was frustrated two years later when objections were raised to defects in the surveys. Defective surveys were also obstructive at Marlborough and Cerne Abbas.⁷⁸ The trustees were so frustrated by objections to several Lancashire surveys that they ordered those opposed to their proposals to pay for new surveys and to contribute towards the costs of the other side.⁷⁹ The proponents of parochial reform were not infallible, however; the proposed union of Hill Deverill and Brixton Deverill in Wiltshire was dismissed because its promoters failed to appear before the trustees to argue the case.⁸⁰

In large cities overloaded with too many poor parishes, the corporations were often empowered to undertake parochial reform directly. Committees of the House of Commons were established in 1645 to consider the reorganization of the parishes of Bristol and Gloucester, but it was not until 1648 that an ordinance was passed for Gloucester. This condensed the city’s ten parishes into four and endowed the new parishes with estates formerly belonging to the cathedral chapter.⁸¹ Of the six disused churches, one had been demolished during the Civil War, four were subsequently demolished or converted into public buildings, and a school was established in the sixth.⁸² The Rump returned to the question of urban parishes while it was debating the bill for the maintenance of ministers in 1650. Prompted by a petition of Norwich corporation in December 1649, a bill for uniting that city’s parishes was introduced in February 1650, when the Bristol bill was also resurrected. Passed in April 1650, it differed from the earlier Gloucester Act by commissioning aldermen and citizens to survey and consolidate the city’s parishes themselves.⁸³ An act for Coventry was passed in March 1651, and another for Exeter in June 1657 led to the closure of all but four of the city’s churches, but the Norwich bill came to nothing despite the continued pressure of the corporation until 1656.⁸⁴

Meanwhile, although the Bristol commissioners had used their powers to appoint ministers, they had done nothing else.⁸⁵ Perhaps stirred into action by the arrival late in 1656 of John Desborough, Major-General for the south-west, a new act was secured in 1657, appointing commissioners who recommended the reduction of Bristol’s seventeen parishes into twelve. A new rate introduced by the act would have raised the average value of the livings to £76, although the actual sums received by each minister would range between £20 and £120. The new rates proved too unpopular, however, and in 1659 the corporation instead ordered augmentations of £20 each be paid to four ministers from the city’s funds.⁸⁶

The ambitious objective of successive regimes to reorganize the Church to create a secure, better-endowed clergy was only partially achieved. Nowhere did the Trustees for the Maintenance of Ministers come close to completing the reforms proposed in the surveys of the 1650s. Even where they did make changes, they frequently fell short of the aim of raising the value of benefices to at least £100. Only in five of the forty-eight cases where the estimated value of a new benefice was recorded did it match or exceed this sum, while eight were still worth less than £50. Even after unification, the new benefice of Biddestone St Nicholas, Biddestone St Peter and Slaughterford in Wiltshire was only worth £23 a year, and that of Matson and Upton St Leonard in Gloucestershire just £36.⁸⁷ Nevertheless, in Gloucestershire, Lancashire, Norfolk and Wiltshire, the average annual value of the new parishes was between £65 and £69. This compared favourably with the values of ancient benefices recorded in the church surveys: slightly lower than the Wiltshire average of £73, slightly higher than the Gloucestershire average of £59, and much higher than the Norfolk average of £40. In Lancashire, the average value of a parish church had been £110 in 1650, but more significantly the average value of their chapels had been just £6, less than a tenth of the value of the new parishes created from them. In Wiltshire, the average income of the county’s chaplains amounted to £18 a year, almost a quarter of the anticipated value of the new benefices.

The slow progress of the trustees highlights the difficulties of reforming the Church during the 1650s. Each new change of regime or innovation in government cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the decisions of predecessors. One of the first orders of the trustees in 1655 reiterated a command previously made in 1646, to divide Motcombe from Gillingham in Dorset.⁸⁸ As was often the case during the 1650s, reforms were frequently a response not to the greatest need but to the loudest clamour of local protagonists. Where there was no opposition to, or indeed where there was active support for, reform, the trustees could effect changes with relative speed, to the satisfaction and benefit of those concerned. However, as had been the case long before the 1650s and would remain so long afterwards, vested interests often prevented reform, no matter how urgent the apparent need. Patrons, impropriators and incumbents represented a potent impediment to the reorganization of the Church, careful to protect their property and rights, but the opposition of parishioners, unwilling to lose their independence or unable to fund the building work entailed by many of the proposals, was also instrumental. While successive parliamentary regimes were unwilling or unable to contemplate more fundamental reform of the property of the Church, ambitious aims to reorganize the Church’s medieval structure and provide a better-endowed preaching ministry were doomed to failure.

A. Craven, ‘“Soe good and godly a worke”: the surveys of ecclesiastical livings and parochial reform during the English Revolution’, in Church and people in interregnum Britain, ed. F. McCall (London, 2021), pp. 41–64. License: CC BY-NC-ND.