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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
When students of early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history come to compile a religious ‘map’ of England, their attention will be drawn to a matter commented upon often enough by contemporaries, but almost entirely neglected now—the catastrophic decline in the influence of the Church in much of the countryside. The greatest triumphs of Nonconformity were won in the rural areas of Wales, and by the time of the religious census in 1851 English Dissenters had established a long lead over the Church in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, were ahead in Huntingdonshire, and were within striking distance of drawing level in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. In the southern and south-eastern counties the Church preserved its formal ascendancy, but often attracted a smaller proportion of the people to its services on census Sunday than in counties which were overrun by Dissent. The real tragedy for the Church in this period, it may be argued, was not that industrialisation concentrated people where her. endowments, manpower and accommodation were thinly spread, but that things went so badly where her resources were concentrated. It is the object of this paper to draw attention to this major question of ecclesiastical history and geography, and to suggest that part of the answer to it lies in the tithe question.
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page 67 note 2 E.g., K. S. Inglis's Churches and the working classes in Victorian England, London 1963, in which the rural working classes never appear, and who misses the point of Bunting's valid assertion that Methodism was primarily a rural system (12).
page 67 note 3 Lay tithe-owners were also involved, but when the remaining tithe was compulsorily commuted in 1836, three-quarters of the total value of £4,000,000 p.a. was in Church hands. Tithe was still a primarily ecclesiastical impost.
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page 69 note 2 Parliamentary debates, 3rd Series, xxvii. 200.
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page 71 note 4 Parliamentary papers H.C. 1887 LXIV.
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page 72 note 2 Clergy not only profited from enclosures but often helped to execute them as Commissioners: M. W. Beresford, ‘Commissioners of Enclosure’, Economic History Review, xvi. 139.
page 73 note 1 Omitting as totally unrepresentative the golden living of Winwick in the gift of the Earl of Derby, which, with 1, 264 acres, had more than half the glebe of the entire diocese.
page 73 note 2 Cobbet, Rural Rides, i. 168; ii. 383, 402, 406, 416, 441.
page 73 note 3 57 Geo. III c.99.
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page 80 note 1 Times, 30 December 1830, 2.
page 80 note 2 Times, 29 August 1831, 5.
page 80 note 3 Some colleges became notorious for their actions, e.g. at Kendal (Parliamentary debates, 3rd Series, vi. 589–90, xx. 880; Parliamentary papers H.G. 1837 VI pp. 58–62; Times, 4 September 1833, 5) and Hornchurch (Parliamentary debates, 3rd Series, ii. 29–38).
page 80 note 4 Parliamentary debates, 3rd Series, xx. 608–10, 709–10, 794 f., 831–3, 868–71, 879–81.
page 80 note 5 Parliamentary papers H.C. 1833 XLIII.
page 80 note 6 Times, 30 August 1833, 2, 3.
page 80 note 7 Tithe Commutation Act, 6 and 7 William IV c.71 cl. xxxvii.
page 80 note 8 Times, 10 February 1831, 5.
page 80 note 9 Times, 17 November 1830, quoted in Hammond, Village Labourer, ii. 49.
page 81 note 1 Except in the backward county of Dorset, where almost a third of the population was at church on census day.
page 80 note 2 Horace Mann, who organised the census of religious worship in 1851, computed that not more than 58 per cent, of the community could attend church on any given Sunday: Census of Great Britain, 1851: Religious worship, Report, cxix–cxxi.
