Parish (Church of England)

The parish with its parish church(es) is the basic territorial unit of the Church of England. The parish has its roots in the Roman Catholic Church and survived the English Reformation largely untouched. Each is within one of 42 dioceses:^[1] divided between the thirty of the Canterbury and the twelve of that of York. There are around 12,500 Church of England parishes.^[2] Historically, in England and Wales, the parish was the principal unit of local administration for both church and civil purposes; that changed in the 19th century when separate civil parishes were established. Many Church of England parishes still align, fully or in part, with civil parishes boundaries.

Each such ecclesiastical parish is administered by a parish priest, specifically Rector, Vicar or Perpetual curate depending on if the original set up of the rectory had become lay or disappropriated meaning its medieval rectorial property rights sold or bestowed on another body such as an abbey. This person may be assisted by curate(s) and/or deacon(s), who are also ordained and by lay clergy such as readers. High variance exists in the size of parishes, attendees and the number of christenings (baptisms), marriages, funerals and donations. Each parish is considered in the annual assessment and rebalancing of the diocese which pays the clergy's income (and indirectly by the Commissioners as regards most old endowments which are held in common). A parish priest may serve one parish or more and some are part of a team ministry. As a shorthand, the term can mean the community or the combined annual congregation.

Etymology

A Latin variant of the Greek paroikia, the dwelling place of the priest, was used by the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus (who lived c. 602 to 690). He applied it to the Anglo-Saxon township with a priest.

First seen in written English when that tongue came back into writing in the late 13th century, the word parish comes from the

The

In general

Most ecclesiastical parish boundaries, in a few places perambulated each year by beating the bounds, loosely resembles one or more great estates of more than one thousand years ago but more precisely tends to date from simplifications since the 17th century to fit a parish with the updated landowner's bounds assumed (taken on) over intervening centuries thereby minimising disputes.

Some sparsely populated areas of England were outside any parish, i.e.

Parish priest

Each parish should have its own parish priest (titled Vicar of..., Rector of... or Perpetual Curate (usually going by Vicar of...) and prefix-styled and called the Reverend (Rev.), and mostly in the high church tradition Reverend Father or less formally Fr. (Father)), perhaps supported by one or more curates and/or deacons. Termed ecclesiastical pluralism some parish priests have held more than one parish living (benefice), traditionally placing a curate in charge of those where they did not reside. The church property is in a special form of ownership ex-officio, vested in them on institution and during tenure and so on as to successors.

Today most parishes of low attendance that are neighbouring are served by the same priest who leads in the churchmanship style and preaches, leads the worship and gives the sacrament in one church (or sometimes more) of each parish by rotation. Formal amalgamation of parishes is generally a quite slow reform but has happened for centuries. In those of higher attendance the priest does so without such inter-parish rotation, but will typically rotate intra-parish if the parish happens to have more than one active church and no other ordained clergy.

Further services are very often given by lay readers or other non-ordained members of the church community (most often called assistant readers).

In the

Until the 19th century rise of literacy especially, such patronage (advowson) might well help sway local opinions. However, a patron's candidate has always had to be approved by the diocesan bishop.

An example can be seen in the article on

To ease internal frictions and more evenly manage and distribute funds and clergy the church set up Ecclesiastical Commissioners. All the ecclesiastical parish's major acts such as repairs, day-to-day financing, building lettings, fundraising for local schools and usual charities and church grounds are administered by the parochial church council. This is partly ex officio (by virtue of a certain role) constituted and partly elected from the congregation.

A few purely civil parishes had been created between the English Civil War and the wholescale Victorian reforms, but they were few in number: Bedfordshire had one such; not created until 1810.^[12]

Parish clerk

The ancient parochial office of

In the absence of any other authority (which there would be in an incorporated city or town), the vestry, the ecclesiastical parish administrative centre, was the recognised unit of local government, concerned for the spiritual but also the temporal as well as physical welfare of parishioners and its parish amenities, collecting local rates or taxes and taking responsibility for the care of the poor, roads, law enforcement, etc. For example, parishes carried out the duties as legislated by the Poor Law. What follows is a snapshot of the system at a particular point in time:

1835

In 1835 more than 15,600 parishes looked after their own:

• "churches and burial grounds, parish cottages and workhouses, their common lands and endowed charities, their market crosses, pumps, pounds, whipping posts, stocks, cages, watch houses, weights and scales, clocks and fire engines.
• Or to put it another way: the maintenance of the church and its services, the keeping of the peace, the repression of vagrancy, the relief of destitution, the mending of roads, the suppression of nuisances, the destruction of vermin, the furnishing (
  billeting
  ) of soldiers and sailors, even to some extent the enforcement of religious and moral discipline. These were among the multitudinous duties imposed on the parish and its officers by the law of the land.
• The parishes spent not far short of one-fifth of the budget of the national government itself."^[14]

Central government placed its obligations on parishes without specifying how they should be carried out. So no two parishes were organised in the same way, unless by coincidence.

The responsible householder found himself bound to serve in succession in the onerous and wholly unpaid public offices of

• Churchwarden,
• Overseer
  ,
• Surveyor of Highways,
• Constable;

by rotation every man was called upon in church to send his team or go in person to labour for six days on the roads. The whole parish had to turn out, when summoned, to join in the

The property-less employee escaped the

Increasingly from the 17th century, the wealthy classes in town or country could buy exemption from, or commute for money, many of the innumerable personal obligations imposed by the parish,^[15] and largely interacted with the vestry therefore only as a taxing authority.

Civil parish

• Parish church
• Parish pump
• Parish registers: Birth certificate, Marriage certificate, Death certificate
• Archdeaconry
• Diocese

References