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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
When leading churchmen and statesmen cast around for ways of restoring the health of English society at the end of the eighteenth century, the theme to which they constantly returned was the renewal of the parish. The parish was the basic social unit in church and state, small enough to be conceived in terms of personal relationships. On the principle that, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, it seemed obvious that if you could make the parish a healthy harmonious unit, then die life of the nation as a whole would become healthy and harmonious. Ideally the parish was a large family, with the squire as its father and the incumbent as its spiritual father. Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1820:
Every parish being in itself a little commonwealth, it is easy to conceive that before manufactures were introduced, or where they do not exist, a parish, where the minister and the parochial officers did their duty with activity and zeal, might be almost as well ordered as a private family.
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