For 1200 years, the chapter of Southwell collegiate church exercised authority over 28 neighbouring parishes. It was termed a peculiar, and many of its ways were indeed peculiar in the popular sense.
That all changed in 1841 when the energetic Victorians abolished the peculiar. But the authority of the prebendaries, the members of the chapter, did not lapse until their deaths, and the last one to die was Thomas Henry Shepherd in 1873.
Southwell Minster, famed for its foliage carving, became a cathedral only in 1884. Its world in the half century before is sketched in fascinating detail by Michael Austin, a canon there, in A Time of Unhappy Commotion (Merton Priory Press, £14.95). Its interplay of personalities and power would have appealed strongly to Trollope.
Looking back from 1873, Christopher Wordsworth, the Bishop of Lincoln, said that "Southwell had been ruined by non-residence, pluralities, want of definite work and consequent secularity". Some of those guilty of such faults had seen it differently.
Take pluralism. Some absentee clergy did live high on the hog, but the pickings were not always rich. Edward Otter, for example, who held several livings, in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, York and Northumberland, paid a clergyman only £20 a year to discharge the duties of the donative curate of Sibthorpe. But that was all the income that the living produced.
Richard Barrow, who died in 1838 aged 91, was a vicar choral of Southwell, whose function it was to perform liturgical duties there on behalf of a prebendary. He held five livings, granted to him by the prebendaries of Southwell, But since his income as a vicar choral was only £25 a year, he had to supplement it somehow. The gross income from his five benefices totalled £452 a year, enough to support a gentleman.
Southwell had performed choral services, day in, day out, for centuries. We who tune in to Radio 3 for choral evensong think of this as a great benefit. But in 1836, when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were busy reforming duties and payments, the average lay congregation at choral services at Southwell was fewer than one person a day. The Commissioners proposed reducing the vicars choral from six to two.
The Pluralities Act of 1838, tightened in 1850, allowed a clergyman to hold two benefices if they were within three miles of each other and one of them was worth less that £100 a year. Some of the 21 benefices in the gift of Southwell chapter were indeed among the poorest in Nottinghamshire – Edingley being worth £51 a year and Halloughton only £46.
One clergyman, John Ison, who held the united benefice of Boughton and Kneesall, in the gift of Southwell, was trying to live at the age of 76, with five sickly dependants, on £90 a year. The Archdeacon of Nottingham reported to the bishop that there was often little or no food or fuel in the house.
The reforms of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners did not solve church funding. Until 1868 church rates were raised by churchwardens of a parish to fund mending of highways and relief of the poor – and, in Farnsfield, provision for a "Buyer of Sparrows" who paid 6d a dozen for the birds. It was the only form of local government that many in rural areas knew.
The churchwardens, known collectively as the vestry, were also responsible for raising money to mend the nave of the church. But in the parish of St Mary, Nottingham (where George Wilkins, a Southwell man, was the incumbent), the annual vestry meeting refused to vote for a church rate. As a result the church was declared structurally unsafe and was closed for worship from 1843 to 1848.
Archdeacon Wilkins blamed "the Dissenters" who agitated against the church rate. It was emblematic of the travails of the Church of England in a time of social upheaval. It wasn't all Barsetshire cream.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/8246629/Peculiar-people-in-Southwell.html
Southwell had performed choral services, day in, day out, for centuries. We who tune in to Radio 3 for choral evensong think of this as a great benefit. But in 1836, when the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were busy reforming duties and payments, the average lay congregation at choral services at Southwell was fewer than one person a day. The Commissioners proposed reducing the vicars choral from six to two.
The Pluralities Act of 1838, tightened in 1850, allowed a clergyman to hold two benefices if they were within three miles of each other and one of them was worth less that £100 a year. Some of the 21 benefices in the gift of Southwell chapter were indeed among the poorest in Nottinghamshire – Edingley being worth £51 a year and Halloughton only £46.
One clergyman, John Ison, who held the united benefice of Boughton and Kneesall, in the gift of Southwell, was trying to live at the age of 76, with five sickly dependants, on £90 a year. The Archdeacon of Nottingham reported to the bishop that there was often little or no food or fuel in the house.
The reforms of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners did not solve church funding. Until 1868 church rates were raised by churchwardens of a parish to fund mending of highways and relief of the poor – and, in Farnsfield, provision for a "Buyer of Sparrows" who paid 6d a dozen for the birds. It was the only form of local government that many in rural areas knew.
The churchwardens, known collectively as the vestry, were also responsible for raising money to mend the nave of the church. But in the parish of St Mary, Nottingham (where George Wilkins, a Southwell man, was the incumbent), the annual vestry meeting refused to vote for a church rate. As a result the church was declared structurally unsafe and was closed for worship from 1843 to 1848.
Archdeacon Wilkins blamed "the Dissenters" who agitated against the church rate. It was emblematic of the travails of the Church of England in a time of social upheaval. It wasn't all Barsetshire cream.
From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/8246629/Peculiar-people-in-Southwell.html
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