by Daniel Pool
The Church of England
In 1800 the Church of England enjoyed a position of extraordinary influence in English society. It was the official state church, it had its own court system, with virtually exclusive jurisdiction over wills, marriages, and divorces, it was entitled to one tenth of the nation’s farm produce each year through the tithing system, and its members alone were eligible to attend (and teach at) Oxford and Cambridge and to hold public office. Significantly, its leader, the archbishop of Canterbury, took precedence over everyone in the kingdom except the royal family and, along with the archbishop of York, sat in the House of Lords along with the church’s twenty-four bishops. It was, of course, the Protestant church that evolved in the wake of Henry VIII’s break with Rome. The monarch became “supreme governor” of the church, and by law the Book of Common Prayer was required to be used in all church services so as to ensure the uniformity of liturgical practices and worship. The “prayer book,” as it was sometimes called, contained among other things the text for the service of the two sacraments of the church—baptism and communion—and a rubric, or set of directions printed in red for the conduct of services. The prayer book also contained a catechism, a series of questions and answers concerning the faith to be mastered by those seeking to undergo confirmation, along with the Thirty-nine Articles, the elements of belief to which a clergyman or lay member of the church had to subscribe. The articles contained a number of relatively straightforward statements of Christian faith, together with some deliberately anti-Catholic dicta such as a requirement that services be conducted only in English. Parents customarily took their newborns to church to be christened, or made a member of the church, by being dipped in water while friends or relatives of the family called godparents forswore the devil for the child on its behalf. When the child reached its teens and had mastered the catechism, it ratified or “confirmed” those same promises independently—now that it had come of age—at a confirmation ceremony, in order to demonstrate that it now appreciated the full import of the promises its godparents had made on its behalf. This involved a laying on of hands by the bishop to make the confirmation candidate an adult member of the church.
The Church, Somerford Keynes.
As befitted a large and powerful institution, the Church of England had an elaborate hierarchy of governance. At the top, just below the monarch, were the archbishop of Canterbury, who lived in Lambeth Palace, just across the Thames from Westminster; and the archbishop of York, each with responsibility for the “province” covering his part of England. The archbishops were chosen, generally from among the bishops, by the prime minister. The Canterbury prelate, by long custom, had precedence over his counterpart in the north of England. In addition to exercising a general supervision over the church, the archbishops are of most interest to the novel reader because of their ability to grant special marriage licenses enabling one to get married anywhere at any time.
The bishops, priests (i.e., the local rectors and vicars), and deacons made up the three “orders” of church. Laypeople becoming ordained thus spoke of “taking orders.” Historically, bishops were chosen by the monarch, but by the 1800s Parliament—as it had with so many other royal functions—had largely usurped this one, too. Casaubon “is a tiptop man and may be a bishop—that kind of thing, you know, if Peel gets in,” says Mr. Brooke to Dorothea in Middlemarch. When a bishop died, as we see at the beginning of Barchester Towers, the prime minister consulted with the two archbishops on what was supposed to be a list of at least three candidates. When one had been agreed upon, a written congé d’élire (“permission to elect”) was sent to the dean and chapter of the bishop’s see authorizing them to select a new bishop, as was their nominal right. But this was merely a courtesy. The congé d’élire always included a Letter Missive—which designated the person whom the chapter was actually required to elect.
The bishop’s special responsibilities were to ordain new clergy, to confirm the faithful who wanted to become full members of the church, and to supervise the diocese, the administrative unit of the church over which he had authority. If he were lucky, he would eventually get to sit in the House of Lords. Historically, both archbishops and the nation’s twenty-four bishops all had had seats there, but when the population grew and the church created additional bishops in the 1800s, no additional parliamentary seats were created for the additional clergy. In consequence, except for the bishops of London, Durham, and Winchester, the twenty-four episcopal seats in the House of Lords had to be parceled out on the basis of seniority, and some clerics just got left out until the older bishops died off. Dr. Proudie in Barchester Towers is lucky. “He was selected for the vacant bishopric, and on the next vacancy which might occur in a diocese would take his place in the House of Lords.” Nonetheless, in the House of Lords or not, the post of bishop was a grand one. The bishop was customarily addressed as “My Lord,” and his primary residence was always known as a “palace.” As garb emblematic of the office, he wore an apron and sleeves made of lawn, one of the finest varieties of linen.
The archdeacon was the bishop’s subordinate and assisted him in governing the diocese, in part through the making of “visitations,” or inspection tours throughout the parishes in the diocese. He was often assisted by one or more rural deans, who kept tabs on parish operations in the diocese. In the immediate vicinity of the bishop’s cathedral there was invariably a chapter house, a meeting place for the dean, and canons who composed the chapter. They were in charge of seeing to the physical maintenance of the cathedral and the conduct of its services. The canons were sometimes referred to as prebendaries, since they were generally paid by a prebend, or a share of the endowment that had at one time been given to the cathdedral. (Cathedrals often had attached to them as well a precentor or a minor canon who helped with the choral services; the minor canon was not a member of the chapter.)
The local representative of the church was the parish “priest,” as the vicar, rector, or perpetual curate of a parish was known. He conducted the services in the local parish church, tended to the sick, officiated at baptisms, christenings, funerals, and so on. His post was officially known as a “benefice” or a “living” and it could be used to maintain a handsome life-style. The minister was entitled to all or part of the local tithes, the mandatory annual payments by parishioners to sustain the church, which, until they were commuted to a monetary payment in 1840, consisted of one tenth of the farm produce in the area. In addition, he was often able to obtain some revenue from the glebe, that is, the farmlands that went along with the parsonage itself. The glebe could be quite a help to a clergyman with a large family, like Jane Austen’s father, who used the glebe at Steventon to grow wheat and raise sheep, cows, and pigs to help feed his eight children. In The Warden, we learn that the living of Septimus Harding, Crabtree Parva, “was only worth some eighty pounds a year, and a small house and glebe,” but that there were also sizable livings like Crabtree Canonicorum, where “there are four hundred acres of glebe; and the great and small tithes, which both go to the rector, are worth four hundred pounds a year more.”
Naturally, as we learn in Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, these were sought-after positions, especially since the only formal obligation was to preach one Sunday sermon each week. Some livings were “within the gift” of the bishop. Such a living, called a “collation,” could be bestowed by him unilaterally, and its incumbents were called “rectors” and received all the tithes. Other parishes, however, were administered by “vicars,” who were entitled to only part of the produce, the so-called “small tithes,” because these clergy were actually the representatives (“vicar” has the same root as “vicarious”) of the real rectors. These latter reserved for themselves the “great tithes” of corn, wood, and hay. Typically, such a parish was one in which a monastic order centuries before had purchased the living and in so doing become the de facto rector and received all the tithes. In such instances, the order appointed a deputy or vicar (or somet
imes a “perpetual curate” like the accused Mr. Crawley in The Last Chronicle of Barset; the Brontës’ father was the real-life perpetual curate at Haworth) to perform the clerical duties of the parish. In later years, such livings generally passed into the hands of large landowners, like Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is the “patron” of the obsequious Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice, and then people might curry favor with the patron to get the post, since the church would not usually ordain someone a full priest unless he had a living to go to.
In 1830, some 7,268 of the 11,342 livings in England and Wales were in the control of private parties. Lady Catherine bestowed her living gratis on the unctuous Mr. Collins, and Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, likewise, gave a living at Mansfield free to the Rev. Mr. Norris, who has “scarcely any private fortune” and who is both his friend and the new husband of his sister-in-law. Since they carried a nice steady income with them, however, such livings were much sought after, and, in fact, they were widely bought and sold—just like annuities—as well as simply given away. In fact, when the Rev. Mr. Norris dies, Sir Thomas winds up selling the Mansfield living to a Dr. Grant in order to pay for his son Tom’s “extravagance.” Indeed, as late as the 1880s, perhaps one third of the 6,000 livings in private hands were still bought and sold in this manner. They were even advertised for sale in the Times. “Often the notice mentions that the incumbent is old,” wrote a contemporary observer, “and the property is so much the more valuable, for the succession will be speedier.”
Told in Sense and Sensibility of a living worth “about two hundred a year,” John Dashwood finds it all but incredible that it should have been given away: “For the next presentation to a living of that value—supposing the late incumbent to have been old and sickly and likely to vacate it soon—he might have got I dare say—fourteen hundred pounds.” In a well-to-do family, the alternative to giving away the living or selling it was to give it to one of the younger sons in the family who would not, like the eldest, be inheriting the estate. This, in fact, is what Sir Thomas proposes to do with two livings at his disposal in Mansfield Park, i.e., to give them to his younger son Edmund. The problem here was always that of ensuring that the living would somehow become vacant at precisely the time that the son fulfilled the requirements for ordination and was actually eligible to become the incumbent. Typically, a family with a younger son in this situation would keep such a living “warm” for him—as Sir Thomas Bertram tries to do for Edmund—by appointing a friend and/or curate to fill the post on a temporary basis until the son was ordained. This was the plan with one of the livings destined for Edmund, which, had his brother’s extravagance not necessitated selling it, “would have been duly given to some friend to hold till he were old enough for orders.” John Dashwood infers a similar scheme in Sense and Sensibility upon hearing that Colonel Brandon has offered a free living to Edward Ferrars: “Edward is only to hold the living till the person to whom the Colonel has really sold the presentation is old enough to take it.”
If you did get a living, there was a certain ritual to be observed in assuming the office. Once you had been appointed (or “presented”) to the living by your patron, if the living was not a collation, the bishop was then more or less obligated to “institute” you, or perform the tasks necessary to make you the true spiritual incumbent of the priest’s office in the parish. In addition, you also had to be “inducted,” that is, placed in possession of the physical church property itself, which might involve being led up to the church door and having your hands placed on it, ringing the bells, and so on. Chapter 23 of Barchester Towers is entitled “Mr. Arabin reads himself in at St. Ewold’s”—this additional step called for the reading aloud of the Thirty-nine Articles to the congregation from the pulpit of the parish church.
Below the bishop and the parish priest came the third and lowest of the three orders of the church, the deacon. He was a parson in training who assisted the parish priest in conducting the services, especially communion, helped the children with their catechism and visited the sick. After a year he could become a rector or vicar himself.
Altogether different from the dean was the curate, a full-fledged clergyman—but one without a benefice or living of his own. He assisted the rector or vicar in a parish. The curate was not the same as the perpetual curate, who was basically the same as a vicar, i.e., a permanent incumbent of a living which belonged to some lay rector. The real curate was, in fact, the “poor relation” of the Church of England, a source of cheap labor who very often made life cushy for clergymen who held livings but didn’t really want to do the parish work associated with them. In Middlemarch, for example, Edward Casaubon is the rector at Lowick, but his absorption in his studies leads him to abjure all duties except giving the Sunday sermon; he leaves the rest to his curate.
The situation in another nearby town is somewhat different, as we learn when Eliot tells us of the rector, Mr. Cadwallader, “being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.” That is, the rector held more than one living simultaneously, not an unusual circumstance in the early part of the century. “Her father was a clergyman,” we learn of Catherine Morland in the first paragraph of Northanger Abbey. “He had a considerable independence besides two good livings.” Jane Austen’s father himself was rector of both Deane and Steventon in Hampshire, and the incumbents of no fewer than 6,120 out of the 10,533 livings in England in 1827 were nonresidents. Where the rector was a nonresident, the spiritual care of the parish would generally be entrusted to a curate. It was also not unusual for a clergyman to hold an incumbency and a nonparochial post like a deanery. Sometimes, as in the case of the Reverend Vesey Stanhope, whose family’s return wreaks such havoc in the Barchester Close in Barchester Towers, the rector did not even have to live in England. “He held a prebendal stall in the diocese; one of the best residences in the close; and the two large rectories of Crabtree Canonicorum, and Stogpingum. Indeed,” says Trollope, “he had the cure of three parishes, for that of Eiderdown was joined to Stogpingum. He had resided in Italy for twelve years.” However, in the wake of the reform spirit that swept through England in the fourth and fifth decades of the century, this practice of pluralism, as it was called, became the target of increasing criticism, and the Pluralities Act of 1838 officially abolished it.
In fact, this criticism was part of a larger wave of reaction against laxity in the church, a reaction born in part of the preachings of John Wesley, a member of the Church of England who had begun preaching a new, back-to-the-Bible, born-again gospel of the heart at open-air services attended by craftsmen, poor people, and laborers in the early 1700s. His followers separated from the church of England and formed the Methodist Church. Its grim emphasis on hellfire and damnation made the term “methodist” a by-word for dour, uncharitable churchgoing fanaticism. The term is applied to the misanthropic farm servant Joseph in Wuthering Heights and to Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch by Mrs. Cadwallader when she describes Dorothea as having “a great deal of nonsense in her—a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff.” None of the Victorian novelists seem to have liked the sect; in Tess of the d’Urbervilles the villainous Alec d’Urberville becomes a preacher for the “Ranters,” or Primitive Methodists, without any discernible change except to make his sordid passion more hypocritical.
Wesley’s message was really for the poor and the working class. When it filtered upward to the middle class, it took the form of the Evangelical movement, whose members, like the Brontës’ father, remained inside the Church of England. Not that the Evangelicals pleased Dickens and Trollope any more than the Methodists. Murdstone and Obadiah Slope are classic portraits of the baneful influence of the new movement. “Low Church” in their tendencies, they preached the desperately sinful nature of man and abhorred ceremony and ritual. As other influences from within the Church of England grew, they transformed it from the relatively relaxed latitudinarian institution that we encounter in Middlemarch or Silas Marner (“there was no reason, then, why the
rector’s dancing should not be received as part of the fitness of things quite as much as the Squire’s”) into the austere, disapproving bastion of grimness that Bishop Proudie and his wife represent in Barchester Towers. “I can remember,” says one observer in The Last Chronicle of Barset, recalling the earlier era, “when the clergymen did more dancing in Barchester than all the young men in the city put together.”
Barchester Towers centers on the conflict between the Low Church tendencies of this new Evangelical faction and the old-fashioned High Church tendencies represented by Archdeacon Grantly. But in fact, the “High Church” group split within itself. Originally, High Church designated no more than the old, comfortably Tory group within the Church of England, the element characterized by men like the Grantlys in Barchester Towers and the morally relaxed, hunting and fishing clergy in Middlemarch. However, a group at Oxford University centered around John Keble and E. B. Pusey, a professor of Hebrew, began publishing in the 1830s a series of tracts (the group was sometimes known as the Tractarians) opining that the church was too close to the people. They suggested reconsidering some of the practices that had gone out when the church had divorced itself from Rome, such as chanting, the wearing of colored vestments, and so forth. But this High Church predilection for ritual and semi-Catholic doctrine, as Trollope points out, was no more to the liking of the old-fashioned Grantly faction than the Low Church tendencies of the Proudies. “They all preached in their black gowns as their fathers had done before them; they wore ordinary black cloth waistcoats; they had no candles on their altars, either lighted or unlighted; they made no private genuflexions. . . . The services were decently and demurely read in their parish churches, chanting was confined to the cathedral, and the science of intoning was unknown. One young man who had come direct from Oxford as a curate to Plumstead had, after the lapse of two or three Sundays, made a faint attempt, much to the bewilderment of the poorer part of the congregation.” The conflict is dramatized in the dispute between Obadiah Slope and Mr. Arabin, the former declaring that “the main part of the consecration of a clergyman was the self-devotion of the inner man to the duties of the ministry. Mr. Arabin contended that a man was not consecrated at all, had, indeed, no single attribute of a clergyman, unless he became so through the imposition of some bishop’s hands, who had become a bishop through the imposition of other hands, and so on in a direct line to one of the apostles.” The battles between these groups went on for years, with the addition of still another, “Broad Church,” faction, which tried to provide for a moderate, common ground among the other groups. As late as 1874, however, feeling was still running sufficiently high on the matter to lead to the passage of the Public Worship Act, under whose provisions a number of Anglican churchmen actually went to jail for allegedly introducing “Catholic” practices into their worship.