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July 2002

Parish History Episode 16

The Parish System

Alfred the Great is remembered as the king who saved England (or at least Wessex) from the Danes. It was, however, his successors - Edward, Athelstan, Edred - who, as we saw in last month’s article, extended their power over all the rest of England, and who drove the Danes out of this country (but much of Scotland and Ireland still remained under Norse rule). Edred had killed Eric Bloodaxe, and had at last brought all Northumbria under Saxon rule.

Their era had been full of wars, but more peaceful times came with the reign of King Edgar “the Peaceable”, from 959 to 975. His is a reign that has been almost forgotten. Of course, a king who chooses to be remembered by such an epithet as “the Peaceable” can hardly expect to get much mention in the history books. It was a thoroughly boring period, with no great wars or rebellions or assassinations or plagues, or anything for historians to write about.

But it was during this period that English church life was brought back to something like the splendour that it had displayed before the Viking onslaught: indeed, it began to develop on more systematic and effective lines than it had known before the invasions. There may have been the beginnings of a development of parish churches in parts of Southern England by the early Ninth Century, but hardly any system of parishes existed in the North. But with the conquest of the North by the South, the system began to spread throughout England.

Hitherto, the Church in Northumbria had still, in many ways, been a monastic church, as had been the Celtic Church which had preceded it. The great abbeys, like those at Gateshead, Monkchester (now Newcastle), Tynemouth, Jarrow, South Shields, Monkwearmouth and Hartlepool, had been the centre of religious life in their areas, and though the monks were disciplined Benedictines rather than Celtic charismatics, they still tended to be the chief purveyors of Christian rites and sacraments to the people. Folk preferred to say their confessions to a monk rather than to a “secular” priest, serving a church built by a thane for the supposed benefit of “his” peasants, and they liked to carry their bairns to the nearest abbey to be christened, and likewise the bodies of their dead, to be interred in the abbey grounds.

However, the thanes, the local lords, were beginning to build and endow local churches on their land, so that the sacraments could be celebrated locally. They might still take their own children, and their dead kindred, to the abbey, for baptism or a funeral service, but they did not wish to see their servants and peasants taking one or more days off work, whenever there was a birth or a death in the family, and walking away to a distant abbey for the service, when there was a church and a priest in the village, who could provide them with the same rites, with only an hour or two’s interruption of their normal duties. A “Time and Motion” man would have agreed with their attempts to raise productivity.

Originally the local priest, “the thane’s priest”, would say Mass in his master’s private chapel, and would also preach to the peasantry, on the village green, perhaps under an oak tree - a tree which might once have witnessed pagan rites - but at a later stage, the thane would probably build a simple wooden church for his priest, so that Mass could be said and heard in comfort in an English winter.

Such churches have not of course survived. But later stone churches might be built upon their foundations, already consecrated. And, as was mentioned in the January issue of “Signpost” (in the article “Churches of Stone”), a number of stone-built churches had been built in the Seventh Century, particularly at monastic sites, such as St. Paul’s, Jarrow, or St. Peter’s, Monkwearmouth, but also in King Oswy’s “new townships”, such as Escomb and (old) Seaham (St. Mary’s Church). Most of these had been destroyed by the Vikings (they seem to have missed Escomb), but the churches were now (early Tenth Century) being rebuilt. To these were added several new, much larger, stone churches, which seem to have acted as “Collegiate Churches”, served by several priests, who between them gave extra back-up to the local churches built by the thanes. Some of these collegiate churches were served by monks - e.g., Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hart village (replacing St. Hilda’s, Hartlepool, not yet rebuilt), and Staindrop; while the cathedral church at Chester-le-Street was also served by monks (of “the Family of Saint Cuthbert”); while yet others, at Norton (now a suburb of Stockton-on-Tees) and Billingham, seem to have been new foundations, and to have been served by “secular” priests.

Possibly in these arrangements we can detect the first signs of the later “rural deaneries” into which this and other dioceses would be divided: the nuclei of our neighbouring Deaneries of Chester-le-Street, Jarrow and Wearmouth, all in the North-East of Durham Diocese, were already in place, while in the South-East of the Diocese, one can discern the beginnings of the Deaneries of Hartlepool and Stockton. But there was no sign of any collegiate churches - or, for that matter, any churches at all - in what are now the Deaneries of Houghton-le-Spring and Easington. This area was still the waste land, not yet recovered from Halfdane’s devastation of the land.

This investment in the things of the Kingdom of Heaven of course cost money, and at the start the cost of it all was borne by the thane. He gave the land, built the church, found the priest, and appointed and paid him (though of course the bishop ordained him and instituted him), and, if he thought better of it, perhaps dismissed the priest, and even reduced him to bondage again (he was often in origin a thrall, who had begun his vocation as an altar-boy for his predecessor, and who had then been raised to the priest-hood on the death of his teacher). All this was regarded as scandalous by Church reformers, and the bishops fought hard for the rights of their priests, and gradually a concept of what would be known as “parson’s freehold” began to evolve, and priests came to be undismissable by patrons. This not only made life easier for spiritual (and also for lazy) priests, but it tended to benefit the peasants, out of whose ranks the priest had come. They began to be able to look to their priest for support in the things of this world, as well as for godly counsel and spiritual guidance in the things of the next world.

In order to maintain this parochial system in working order, worldly wealth was required, and one could not always rely on the generosity of the thane, or patron, and his descendants, especially if the priest denied him what he saw as his rights. Part of the resources needed to support the priest came from the glebe land, originally a gift from the patron, which was his private farm, worked by himself, and which provided the fare for his table. There were, however, more important needs for the Church than feeding the priest and his family, and much money needed to be forwarded to the bishop, and even to the Pope at Rome (Peter’s pence), just as we now have to pay our “Parish Share” to the higher authorities in the Church. To obtain the money to fulfil these obligations, a complicated range of taxes was evolved; the most onerous of these was the tithe, a tax of one tenth of the produce of the land, levied on all crops and livestock, and based on such Biblical texts as GEN 1420, 2822, LEV 2730, NUMB 1821-26, DEUT 126-11, 1422-29 and II CHRON 315-21.. There was Biblical warrant also (LEV 23:9-11, etc.) for the smaller tax of the first fruits of the harvest, which the Church wished to levy over and above the tithe.

The tithe was meant to be split three ways, one third going directly to the parish priest, one third being set aside for the maintenance of the church fabric, and one third for the relief of the poor. If it had worked out like that, the priest would have found himself a wealthy man, with one thirtieth of the produce of the village his own to use as he pleased (and his own glebe farm as well !), and another thirtieth “banked”, or otherwise stored in his name, for use on the church building, and another thirtieth in what might be termed a patronage fund for him to spend on the poor and needy, at his discretion. But when this was realised, others soon came to relieve him of the surplus of his wealth, and to enable him to live a life of honest poverty.

In the majority of parishes the tithes - particularly the Great Tithe, the tithe on corn - were appropriated to the bishop or an abbot, or were impropriated by a lay person - a king, an earl, a thane, or, in later ages, such bodies as merchant guilds. In either case, the ap/impropriator was required to provide a salaried priest to serve the village, and this individual became known as a vicar. Generally his salary, or stipend, was very meagre; for, after all, the vicar had his glebe land, and various fees, and, if he could collect them, some lesser tithes. Where the parish priest retained the right to collect the Great Tithe, he would be much better off in worldly terms, and would be known as a Rector.

We will later learn that Houghton-le-Spring was, from the point of view of the incumbent, the Rector, a rich parish, and, in the Mediaeval period, many greedy clerics, amassing collections of wealthy parishes which they held as absentees, lived well on the tithes of such parishes as Houghton, while starveling clerks performed their duties for them. In 1836 (the same year as the secular, palatine powers of the Bishops of Durham were abolished by law) the Whig administration abolished the lesser tithes, and “bought out” the Great Tithe on corn, replacing it with a harvest tax, most of which was paid over to the parishes of the Church of England. Grain prices fell greatly during the Nineteenth Century, as competition opened up with overseas farmers, and, with reduced tithe payments the Church became much more dependant on voluntary offerings by its parishioners. Then, after 1918, as described in last month’s “Signpost” (in an article reprinted from 1936), Parliament gradually phased out tithe payments altogether, in the hope of reviving British agriculture, then apparently moribund.

The reason why the Church became for centuries more and more dependent on the Great Tithe was that it was found, by the Tenth Century, that this was a tax which was much easier to enforce than most others. The milling of grain was becoming increasingly mechanised (an early example, perhaps, of Europe pulling ahead of other continents, through technological advance), and water-mills were beginning to be found in almost every village (at Rainton Mill, in the case of Houghton, as we will discover in the Twelfth-Century Boldon Book: but at this period, after Halfdane’s march in 875 from Tynemouth to York, there does not even seem to have been a village at Houghton). Up to then, grain had been ground into flour tediously by the labour of one or two slaves, generally women, rubbing the grain between two quern-stones, a process frequently referred to in the Bible ( EX 11:5, DEUT 24:6, JOB 41:24, MATT 24:41, or, with a blind male slave, JUDG 16:21). It was hard labour, and the quern-stones became worn out (as did also, one assumes, slave-women’s bodies), and, long before there were coal-mining villages in Durham, communities like Quarrington Hill grew up where millstone of the right quality could be quarried, to supply the farms, and later the mills, of a wide area with the means of grinding grain into flour.

The importance of this for tithe collection was that the peasant now took his corn to the mill to be ground, and the miller also took a tithe of it (partly for himself, but mostly for the lord, who owned the mill), and it was an easy task for the miller, who knew exactly how much corn he was grinding, and the priest, to check that their tithes were the same, and thus the peasant had difficulty in evading his obligations.

The Tenth Century thus saw, as England and the rest of Europe began to recover from Viking raiding, innovations in technology which helped to make agriculture more prosperous, and also innovations - by the Church much more than by the frequently illiterate thanes and kings - in administrative efficiency. England was being incorporated into new systems of Canon Law, more or less uniform throughout all Western, or Latin, Christendom. Every acre of inhabited land was now seen as part of a parish, and that parish part of a diocese. No longer did people look to the nearest abbey for spiritual leadership.