Pages

Tuesday 13 September 2011

In what ways did the Church of England reform itself?

By the early 1830s, despite the work of these individuals and groups, there was a feeling that the Church was faced with the alternatives of thorough reform or ‘complete destruction’. [1] This fear was sufficient to remove the obstacles to organisational change and pastoral renewal that had long prevented its adjustment to industrial and urban society. The ecclesiastical and political crises of 1828-1832 were closely connected. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, though they had little impact on the daily lives of Anglicans and Nonconformists, gave legitimacy to the ‘de facto’ situation. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 ended the civil disabilities against Catholics even if it had little impact on anti-Catholic sentiments and arguably may have increased them. This dramatically symbolised the failure of the old monopolistic and exclusive conception of the Establishment and its replacement by a pluralistic conception of religion. The blind  conservatism of the  Church of England’s leadership during the reform agitation,  a conservatism motivated by a fear that the country was near revolution and that the  church faced disestablishment,  the 1832 Reform Act and  the Whig  electoral landslide meant that moderate reform  could  no longer  be avoided. [2]   The State increasingly took control of this ‘metamorphosis’ and the initiative for reform.  The restructuring of the Establishment was something imposed by a Parliament that could not afford to wait for some consensus on reform to emerge within the Church itself. [3]

In June 1832, an Ecclesiastical Revenues Commission was established, but for two and a half years it had achieved little concrete. It investigated the financial structure of the Establishment but, as the debate about the Church intensified outside Parliament, proposals for reform were either defeated or allowed to lapse.   The breakthrough came with the setting up of a new Commission to ‘consider the State of the Established Church’ in early 1835 during the minority Peel administration.  It consisted of senior churchmen and Anglican politicians, including Peel, whose task was to prepare bills ready to present to Parliament to tackle the abuses that had been shown to be widespread in the Church of England. For Peel, it was essential for there to be ‘judicious reform’ to give ‘real stability to the Church in its spiritual character…I believe enlarged political interests will be best promoted by strengthening the hold of the Church of England upon the love and veneration of the community’. [4] Peel recognised that unless something was done quickly church reform might fall into the hands of politicians less sympathetic to the Anglican cause and possibly jeopardise the position of the Church as an Established body. By establishing a permanent body that involved the Church of England in initiating its own reform, Peel sought to encourage a greater sense of responsibility among Anglican leaders and hopefully shield the Church against further damaging attacks. [5]

The Ecclesiastical Commission survived the change in government in April 1835 and in 1836,  Melbourne  established it on a  permanent  basis  as  the Ecclesiastical Commission and, under the chairmanship of Charles James Blomfield,  bishop of London,  it quickly became the  main instrument of organisational improvement in the Church. [6] It never became a government department answerable to Parliament through a minister and retained a degree of independence thought necessary if reform was to triumph over the opposition of vested interests in the House of Lords and in the Church at large. But, since the Church possessed no effective assembly or courts of its own, the initiative at the most vital points in the development of this body had to come from government. Major reforms of the Church’s structure occurred in the second half of the 1830s and during Peel’s ministry (1841-1846). The boundaries of existing dioceses were modified and new dioceses created in 1836; severe restrictions were placed on pluralism in 1838 and in 1840, excess revenues were distributed from cathedrals to those with greater needs. The Whigs also introduced the Registration Act in 1836 placing   the registration of births, marriages and deaths in the hands of civil officials and not the Church and in 1838 the Dissenters’ Marriage Act ended the obligation of nonconformists to marry in an Anglican church. [7] A Populous Parishes Act was passed in 1843 empowering the Ecclesiastical Commission to create new parishes and providing the necessary stipends (payment for the vicar or curate) out of Church funds but it was clear to Peel that the cost of building new churches would have to be covered by the more efficient use of the Church’s existing resources and charitable contributions. [8] An impressive fund-raising campaign resulted in £25 million being spent on building and restoration work between 1840 and 1876. Improving the quality of the clergy proved a gradual process and the ideal of a fully-resident clergy remained difficult to put into practice and pluralism and non-residence remained relatively common until the 1870s. It should not be assumed that this necessarily resulting in poor standards of clerical attention to their parochial duties. Many of the rural clergy lived only a short distance from their parishes and were as efficient as they would have been had they been technically resident.

Of crucial importance in attempting to re-establish the popular position of the Church was resolving its financial grievances caused by the unpopularity of church rates and tithes. Though compulsory church rates were not abolished until 1868, legal judgements made it clear that they could only be collected where authorised by the churchwardens and a majority of the vestry. As Dissenters were eligible to vote for both, in some towns such as Birmingham the rate lapsed.  This was preferable to Nonconformists than the scheme that the House of Commons seriously considered for repairing all parish churches from publiv funds. [9] The Tithe Commutation Act 1836 ended tithes in kind replacing them with money payments based on the average prices of corn, oats and barley over the previous seven years. [10]

The approach of the Commission was both radical and realistic.  The decision to use excessive endowments to help poorer parishes resulted in 5,300 parishes being assisted in this way between 1840 and 1855.   By 1850, the numbers of non-resident clergy had fallen significantly strengthening the work of the Anglican ministry. The increase in the pastoral efficiency of the clergy was accompanied by a decline in their status relative to other professions.   The number of clergymen on the County Bench fell. The Church was saved in the 1830s and 1840s by giving up some of its social and secular administrative functions and by a further surrendering of its autonomy to the State. The religious dimension of the priestly office had become paramount. However, these initiatives did little to stem the numerical slide of the Church of England in urban and increasingly rural areas.


[1] On the problem of church reform see, Virgin, P., The Church in an Age of Negligence: ecclesiastical structure and the problems of church reform, (Cambridge University Press), 1989.

[2] Burns, R. Arthur, ‘The authority of the church’, in Mandler, Peter, (ed.), Liberty and authority in Victorian Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 179-200.

[3] For the role of the state see Brose, O., Church and Parliament: The Reshaping of the Church of England 1828-1860, (Cambridge University Press), 1959, Thompson, K. A., Bureaucracy and Church Reform: A Study of the Church of England 1800-1965, (Oxford University Press), 1970, and Machin, G. I. T., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain 1832 to 1868, (Oxford University Press), 1977.

[4] Parker, C. S., (ed.), Sir Robert Peel: from his private papers, 3 Vols., (John Murray), 1899, Vol. 2, p. 266.

[5] Dibdin, L. T., and Downing, S. E., The Ecclesiastical Commission: a sketch of its history and work, (Macmillan), 1919. See also, Manning, H. E., The Principle of the Ecclesiastical Commission examined, (J. G. & F. Rivington), 1838.

[6] Blomfield, Alfred, (ed.), A memoir of Charles James Blomfield, Bishop of London [1828-56], with selections from his correspondence, 2 Vols. (John Murray), 1863, and Johnson, Malcolm, Bustling intermeddler? The life and work of Charles James Blomfield, (Gracewing), 2001.

[7] Cullen, M. J., ‘The making of the Civil Registration Act of 1836’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 25, (1974), pp. 39-60, and Ambler, R. W., ‘Civil registration and baptism: popular perceptions of the 1836 act for registering births, deaths and marriages’, Local Population Studies, Vol. 39, (1987), pp. 24-31.

[8] Welch, P. J., ‘Blomfield and Peel: a study in cooperation between Church and State, 1841-6’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 12, (1961), 71-84.

[9] Brent, Richard, ‘The Whigs and Protestant dissent in the decade of reform: the case of church rates, 1833-1841’, English Historical Review, Vol. 102, (1987), pp. 887-910.

[10] At first this commutation reduced problems to the ultimate payers by folding tithes in with rents (however it could cause transitional money supply problems by raising the transaction demand for money). Later the decline of large landowners resulted in many tenants becoming freeholders and having to pay directly; this also led to renewed objections of principle by non-Anglicans. In 1936, the rent charges paid to landowners were converted by the Tithe Commutation Act to annuities paid to the state through the Tithe Redemption Commission. These payments were transferred to the Board of Inland Revenue in 1960 and finally ended by the Finance Act 1977. In Ireland, tithes were abolished in 1869 when the Church of Ireland was disestablished. In Scotland, teinds were not finally abolished until 2000.

Tuesday 6 September 2011

What role did individuals play in Anglican church reform?

The Church could not resist the pressures for reform since it was not united in maintaining its authoritarian and conservative position. Critical opinion from evangelicals and from the laity led to concentration on the reform and reinvigoration of the parish. The Church of England and the Church of Ireland had been joined by the Act of Union. It became increasingly necessary to reform the gross abuses  and alter  the political position of the Church of Ireland and  this, by  extension,  raised  the  same  question in relation  to  the Anglican Church. Since it had no governing body of its own, the Church had to depend on Parliament and party politicians for support in its reactionary attitudes. The Church might claim to be aloof from public opinion, but after 1832 politicians could not afford to be.

Initially, reform of the Church was left to individuals. The Church of England still commanded considerable support among lay people who remained willing to donate large sums of their money and, in some cases their time and skill, to maintaining and extending its fabric. Charles Simeon, the Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge, sought to improve the quality of those entering the Church. [1]   There was little professional training for clergymen in the late eighteenth century and Simeon supplied the need in Cambridge with instruction to improve the quality and delivery of sermons. His example probably encouraged the establishment of the first specialist theological colleges at St Bees in 1816 and Lampeter in 1828. Simeon maintained that good evangelical clergymen were necessary but he also believed in the need to ensure that there was continuity of ‘gospel ministers’ in livings if the work of the Church was to be maintained.   The idea of a corporation or trust to secure advowsons had already been operated but in 1817, Simeon began his trust with the purchase of the patronage of Cheltenham. Simeon was perhaps more aware than many of his contemporaries of the need to secure a foothold in the growing industrial towns. His most important successes came as a result of the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 that compelled corporations to give up their patronage. He and, after his death in  1836, his  successors secured  Bath,  Derby, Macclesfield, Bridlington, Beverley and two parishes in Liverpool. He was very conscious of the need to operate within the framework of the Church of England and disliked the insistence of evangelicals who believed that their commission to preach the gospels meant that they could override parochial boundaries.  He insisted on church order and this probably deterred many Anglican Evangelicals leaving the Church of England.

Lay influence on the Church of England was felt from the systematic nationwide penetration of the Anglican evangelicals associated loosely with William Wilberforce. The British and Foreign Bible Society [2] and the Church Missionary Society, [3] founded in 1803 and 1811, independently of the success they enjoyed abroad, played a major part in extending evangelical influence in Britain.   The Bible Society sought to disseminate copies of the Bible without note or comment; by 1825 it had issued over four million.   Many non-evangelical clergymen disliked this since they emphasised the importance of the Book of Common Prayer as well as the Bible and were suspicious of the co-operation with Dissenters that the Society encouraged. The Evangelical campaign sought to bring the working population within the orbit of the Established Church with the aim of keeping them in their place.  

Evangelicalism was seen as an antidote to revolution from the 1790s.   Hannah More (1745-1833) and her sister Martha played a considerable role in educating people for their place in society. [4] In 1795, she started the Cheap Repository Tracts in response to cheap radical literature especially Paine’s Rights of Man.  All 114 tracts had the same evangelical and conservative intention and an annual circulation of over two million copies. By 1830, the evangelicals had directed their attention at all sections of society. Wealth, social and political contacts, and the crisis occasioned by the French Revolution, helped them to spread their ideas among the aristocratic elite. The anti-slavery campaigns mobilised middle-class opinion and the Cheap Repository Tracts provided ‘proper’ reading for the working population.

Joshua Watson (1771-1855) was concerned to improve the ability of the Church to appeal to the growing urban population. [5] A wine merchant with wide commercial and financial interests, he retired from business in 1814 to devote himself to good works. He appealed to High Churchmen, in contrast to the Evangelicals, and the group that gathered at his house in Hackney became known as the Hackney Phalanx that publicise their activities through the British Critic. Watson was prominent in the formation of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in 1811.   Its purpose was to encourage parishes to start their own schools and within three years it had raised sufficient contributions to establish 360 schools in that there were 60,000 pupils and nearly a million twenty years later. It was not supported by the state until the government introduced grants in 1833. Though the 1839 Whig educational proposals were mangled by Anglican opposition, a committee of the Privy Council did take over the supervision of education and Watson’s resignation in 1842 coincided with the assertion of the authority of the State in education.

The  other  charitable  effort  that  Watson  led  was  the movement  to  build new churches.   There was little point in educating children into the Anglican faith if, when they grew up, they could not become regular churchgoers.   This was a very difficulty enterprise for private charity, even if money could be found.   Until 1818, a new parish had to be created by Parliament and to build a new church in an existing parish required the consent of the patron and the incumbent, either of whom might feel their rights were being infringed. In 1818, Watson formed an Incorporated Church Building Society and in the same year, the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool established an official commission with a grant of £1 million with a further £0.5 million added in 1824. [6]  Parliamentary grants were virtually used up by 1828 and were not renewed, but such was the stimulus given to private subscribers that the commission did not finish its work until 1857. By then it had built 612 new churches accommodating 600,000 people. This figure does not exhaust the total number of churches built as many were built or rebuilt by private means.


[1] Carus, William, (ed.), Memoirs of the life of... Charles Simeon...with a selection from his writings and correspondence, (Hatchard and Son), 1847, is an essential if partial source. Moule, H. C. G., Charles Simeon, (Methuen), 1892, and Hopkins, H. E., Charles Simeon of Cambridge, (Hodder & Stoughton), 1977, remain good studies of his life. Piper, John, Roots of Endurance: Invincible Perseverance in the Lives of John Newton, Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce, (Crossway Books), 2006, is a more recent study placing Simeon in his evangelical context.

[2] Canton, William, The History of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 5 Vols., (Murray), 1904-1910, Howsam, Leslie, Cheap bibles: nineteenth-century publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society, (Cambridge University Press), 1991, and Batalden, Stephen, Cann, Kathleen, and Dean, John, (eds.), Sowing the word: the cultural impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804-2004, (Sheffield Phoenix), 2004.

[3] Elbourne, Elizabeth, ‘The foundation of the Church Missionary Society: the Anglican missionary impulse’, in ibid, Walsh, John, Haydon, Colin, and Taylor, Stephen, (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689-c.1833: from toleration to Tractarianism, pp. 247-264, and Stock, Eugene, The History of the Church Missionary Society: its Environment, its Men and its Work, 4 Vols., (Church Missionary Society), 1899-1916.

[4] Stott, Anne, Hannah More: The First Victorian, (Oxford University Press), 2003, is an excellent biography; pp. 169-190, consider the Cheap Repository Tracts. See also, Pedersen, Susan, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: tracts, chapbooks, and popular culture in late eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 25, (1986), pp. 84-113.

[5] Churton, Edward, Memoir of Joshua Watson, 2 Vols., (J. H. and J. Parker), 1861, and Webster, A. B., Joshua Watson: the story of a layman, 1771-1855, (SPCK), 1954.

[6] Port, M. H., 600 New Churches: the Church Building Commission, 1818-1856, 1961, rev. ed., (Spire Books), 2006.