The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840

Church History, March, 2009 by E. Brooks Holifield

The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840. By W. M. Jacob. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. viii 360 pp. $99.00 cloth.

It was once customary to describe the Church of England in the eighteenth century as a morass of corruption, indifference, and mediocrity. From Alfred Plummer and Lewis Namier to Christopher Hill and J. H. Plumb, the story was pretty miserable. During the 1980s, such historians as Norman Sykes, Gordon Rupp, Norman Ravitch, and John Pocock accomplished a significant revision that restored some respect to the priests, bishops, and laity of the eighteenth-century church and found far more vitality than earlier critics had ever discovered. Jacob's thorough and comprehensive study of the clergy of the Church of England from 1680 to 1840 enhances that revisionary turn and depicts an English Church that enjoyed remarkable success in large part because of a conscientious, competent, well-educated clergy. Readers would do well to turn first to the online version of Guglielmo Sanna's "The Eighteenth Century Church of England in Historical Writing" (http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/seminari/sanna_church.html) in order to grasp the full significance of Jacob's conclusions in the light of recent historiography.

Jacob not only argues that the clergy were the closest group in the eighteenth century to a profession in the modem sense, he also suggests that they enjoyed considerable success in their ecclesiastical, social, and governmental functions, which integrated them at every level of society in leadership positions. They came mostly from the "middling" sort of society, but the status of their work, their relatively high levels of education, and the demand for their services meant that they enjoyed close relations not only with ordinary English people but also with the urban elite and the county gentry. Usually beginning their work as curates, they advanced through a system of preferment and patronage that, for all its faults, "produced able and distinguished" clerics (93).

Not all was rosy. Salaries were acceptable but modest, and they usually required pluralism and nonresidence because it often took two or three parishes to scrape together enough money to sustain a priest and his family. The bishops disliked the pluralism, but the ideal of one resident incumbent in every parish did not flourish until the Victorian era. Clergy made their money from glebe lands, tithes, fees, and patrons, and they often had to endure conflict with tightfisted farmers to get their accustomed pay, but Jacobs does not think that the tithe disputes seriously undermined their position of respect.

In their parishes, they had to manage the glebe lands, keep up a modest residence, and carry out a full range of religious functions. They preached, usually twice, on Sundays, and they also had services on other days of the week. The laity demanded frequent preaching and seemed, for the most part, to like what they heard. Clergy led other weekday services, officiated at monthly communion, oversaw festivals and fasts, directed choirs, and performed the conventional rites of passage. They visited parishioners, especially the sick and dying, and they oversaw charity in the parish, often administering the poor laws and acting as bankers for their parishioners. They led religious societies, labored at reconciliation, and performed the functions of magistrates. In addition, they catechized regularly, organized charity schools, oversaw Sunday schools, distributed tracts, and erected libraries.

On occasion they misbehaved, but not much and not often. The rates of complaint ranged from 2 percent in some areas to 10 percent in others, figures similar to the findings in the American colonies. But anticlericalism was subdued, and the integration of clergy into the economic and communal life of English society did not represent, Jacobs argues, any secularizing tendency or failure in spirituality. They handled their multiple responsibilities "creatively" (315). The depiction that emerges is close to the account one finds in John K. Nelson's A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Jacob treats the chronology early and briefly, in his introduction, and then organizes the book topically, with examples illustrating each topic taken from 160 years of history, often juxtaposing events and figures separated from each other by a century or more. A topical approach of this kind can be somewhat static, and the context can fade into the distant background. But the alternative also has its own drawbacks, including the need to return again and again to the same topic in different periods. On balance, I find Jacob's topical approach more helpful as a means to gather information and insight quickly, even though it loses a little in the way of dramatic effect. The research is impressive. Jacob scoured archives, manuscripts, and hundreds of printed sources. This is now the book to go to in order to learn about the eighteenth-century clergy of the Church of England. It is a superior work of scholarship.