English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb.

  • Sidney Webb
Date:
1906 (repr.1922)
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: English local government from the revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act : the parish and the county / by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    had the right to be summoned at Easter, and at such other times as might be necessary, to,assemble in the church at the tolling were cast upon them [the Churchwardens] until quite late in the reign of Henry VIII., when they began to receive orders to provide harness or arms for soldiers, etc. . . . Henceforth [the parish] passes from an ecclesiastical organisa- tion of churchmen for their own special purposes, to a machinery which, in addition, could discharge various functions for the civil power. It was used regularly through the reigna of Elizabeth and James I. for maintenance of army hospitals, for passing maimed soldiers, for relief of wayfaring Irish and others, and for equipments of volunteers. Further, as the Hundred and Manor Courts waned in their active control over the secular interests of the locality, the Vestry became the chief council, of the community, and, having authority to tax the whole area of the parish, it was able to provide for any dropt duties and expenses. By successive stages it became the highway board appointing its waywardens and levying its Highway Rates. The care of the pound, the appointment of hayward, the repair of the stocks, and appointment of tything- man often lapsed into its hands (Churchwardens' Accounts, edited by Bishop Hobhouse, vol iv. p. xv. of the Somerset Record Society, 1890). This is also the conclusion of Professor Maitland. After weighing all that has been said to the contrary by that able and zealous pioneer of history, ilr. Toulmin Smith, it still seems to me that the Vestry is a pretty modern insti- tution ; that we shall hardly trace it beyond the fourteenth century ; that it belongs to the parish, a purely ecclesiastical entity, not to the township ; that it is the outcome of the Church Rate, which in its turn is the outcome of the appropriation of tithes and the poverty of the parochial clergy ; that the Churchwardens also are pretty modern. Gradually the Vestry may take upon itself to interfere with many things ; the manorial courts are falling into decay, and the assembly which can impose a Church Rate may easily aspire to impose other rates ; but the germ of the Vestiy is an ecclesiastical germ. The Vestry belongs to the parish ; and the temporal law of the thirteenth century knows nothing of the parish (The Survival of Archaic Communities, by F. W. Maitland, in Law Quarterly Review, vol. ix. July 1893, p. 227). Nor can we draw from it any valid inference as to any previous assemblies. To our minds it would be as rash to argue from the Vestries or parishioners' meetings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to similar assemblies of an earlier time, as it would be to argue that the commons of the realm were represented in the Councils of Henry II. because they were represented in the Parliaments of Edward I. And so with the Churchwardens (Sir F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland's History of English Law, vol. i. bk. ii. chap. iii. sec. 7, p. 603). We may add that wherever we have explored the early archives we have found that the minutes or other records of meetings begin much later than the accounts of parish officers ; and that they usually grow out of these. It was pointed out in an able Mstory of the Parish of St. Lawrence Po^ininey, by H. B. Wilson, published in 1831, that the use of the term Vestry, for a meeting of parishioners, belongs almost exclusively to post-Reforma- tion times. We find it used by Grindal in 1567 in a circular letter to the London clergy (Mstory of the Church of England, by R. W. Dixon, vol. vi. p. 165), and in a document of 1564, quoted in Annals of the Bfforination, by John Strype, vol. i. part ii. p. 132 of 1824 edition. So in the parish accounts of Steeple Ashton (Wilts), which are continuous from 1542, the earliest date at which the parish meeting is called a Vestry in this record is in 1569. From that date every such meeting is so called (The Parish, by J. Toulmin Smith, 1857, p. 509). In the Churchwardens' accounts of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, Westminster, which exist from 1525, the word Vestry or Revestry does not occur till 1587 ; in the MS. Minutes of the same parish it does not occur till
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