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1. “When precisely was the Anglican
golden age from which the eighteenth century Church fell short?” Jeremy
Gregory perceptively asks at the conclusion of a recent review of a
‘pessimistic’ book on the Anglican Church in the eighteenth
century.[1] It is, as Guglielmo
Sanna’s historiographical article shows, the principal question that has
dogged the eighteenth century Church of England since the end of that century.
Despite the bookends of the religious census of 1851 and the stark evidence of
the shortcomings of the church in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
Tractarians and evangelicals of the nineteenth century claimed a superiority
over their Anglican predecessors that implied the existence of such an earlier
golden age. It was, of course, nonsense, but it is from this taproot
—which has proved so resistant to weeding— that the
‘pessimist’ scholars can claim a historical tradition. The yardstick
of the canons of 1603 has been held up by recent pessimistic historians and the
Church in the eighteenth century measured against it. But no earlier period,
certainly not the Church in 1603, saw the achievement of such perfection. The
Canons were an aspiration for the Church, a counsel of perfection that the
nineteenth century Church failed to meet, and sought to blame its failure on its
predecessor. Thus for the Victorian Church the sins of the sons were visited on
the fathers.
The recent debate between optimists
and pessimists can best be approached from relatively recent contributions:
Peter Virgin and Michael Snape for the pessimists and Mark Smith, Jeremy
Gregory, Jeffrey Chamberlain and me for the
optimists.[2] However in 2003 Mark
Goldie sought to call a halt to the debate, arguing that the wrangle over the
Victorian view was “the longest shadow in modern
historiography”.[3] Yet in his
reply to Smith, Michael Snape claimed: “I am not at all persuaded that
time has been called on this long-running debate” and it is “very
much present” in Jeremy Gregory and Jeffrey Chamberlain’s collection
of essays The National Church in its Local
Perspective.[4] The truth of the
matter lies somewhere between the two views. The weight of historiography is
undoubtedly leaning toward the conclusion of a moderately optimistic verdict on
the eighteenth century Church.[5] Yet
the most recent and innovative studies of the eighteenth century Church have
been works which have, at least in part, engaged with the optimist vs. pessimist
debate and have shown that Snape may be right when he claims that the debate has
some way to run.[6] Certainly
Guglielmo Sanna’s essay shows that interest in the historiographical
debate is still alive. While Goldie condemns competing optimistic and
pessimistic studies as “historiographical mulch” which are
“too confined to church history”, nevertheless they can influence
the wider fields of political, social and intellectual history. Goldie is right
that, for the most part, and with the signal exception of Jonathan Clark’s English Society 1688-1832, religion in the eighteenth century has failed
to gain sufficient purchase among this wider historiography. There is no doubt
that religion has gained a greater foothold than it had, say, thirty years ago,
but it does not occupy the central place that it should, and to which Clark
admirably laid claim. And this is (in part) due to the internecine feud between
optimists, pessimists and denominational historians. Beside the equally
deplorable secular introspection of many political and social historians, it is
clear that ecclesiastical historians have failed to engage sufficiently with
political and social concerns. This is because revisionist historians have
tended to focus on qualitative studies and arguments and have not, in general,
developed a strong quantitative analysis, which could promote robust judgements.
Two exceptions to this are Daniel Hirschberg and Stephen Taylor, whose doctoral
theses have advanced some quantitative
data.[7]
In
the last dozen years the field has changed somewhat. Jonathon Barry has focused
our view on the connection of religion, politics, culture and patronage largely
in his outstanding studies of
Bristol.[8] Craig Rose has shown
connections between the Church and charity schools and Kathleen Wilson has
connected it to voluntary
hospitals.[9] Sermons —spoken
and in print— and public theology have been considered by, among others,
Tony Clayton, Jim Caudle and Newton
Key.[10] The role of the Church and
the clergy in the development of the Enlightenment and in intellectual history
has also been considered in Brian Young’s Religion and Enlightenment in
Eighteenth Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke, Roy
Porter’s work on the enlightenment and my study of Benjamin
Hoadly.[11] Robert
Cornwall’s study of the Non-Jurors has given us a fresh view of a
counter-enlightenment strand in English
thought.[12] Little by little,
therefore, religion is elbowing its way out of the historiographical shadow and
into the glare of bigger and more fashionable themes. But it remains the
Cinderella to the ugly sisters of popular culture and electoral
politics.
Above all, scholars of Hanoverian
religion can, and should, engage with popular culture and electoral politics,
themes which are central to the historiography of the eighteenth century. There
is no doubt that the popular culture of Hanoverian England was suffused with
religion in general and Anglicanism in particular. From the cradle to the grave
the Church of England touched the lives of the vast majority of people, even in
an age of Goldie’s “voluntary
Anglicanism”.[13] Above all
the timing and content of folk moments of feasts, fasts and fairs were
determined by Anglicanism. Moreover few aspects of popular consumption were
divorced from religious culture. As important as this religious engagement with
popular culture was the Church’s role in electoral politics. It is clear
that some parliamentary patrons regarded the clergy as electoral whips for their
congregations. Clergy preached from their pulpits and visited their
parishioners, there could be few better political agents and canvassers. In some
boroughs the evidence of engagement in partisan electoral politics by clergy and
dissenters is clear.[14] And
historians like James Bradley have shown how electoral behaviour and religion
were closely linked.[15] At regular
intervals the clergy stood with their congregations on the hustings and made
clear that the Church, the Protestant and Constitutional Settlements of 1689,
sought votes for either the Whigs or the Tories. In some cases this drew
religion and the clergy into debates on trade and commerce, and even foreign
policy.[16] What the political
historians of the eighteenth century have failed to convey is that the
politician who ignored the religious geography or ideology of England was likely
to fail. Even in the second half of the eighteenth century it was hard to prize
apart religious and political ideology. These, then, are two important issues
which eighteenth century Church history should engage with if it is to edge
further out of the shadows.
2. There are,
however, two other important themes which should preoccupy eighteenth century
Church historians, and which have been central to my research in the last two or
three years. The first of these is the concept of “sacred” or
religious space. This is an important emerging theme in early modern religious
scholarship but there is silence on the topic from eighteenth century Church
historians.[17] Secondly the
eighteenth century Church is blighted by the teleology of the ultimate
separateness of Methodism and Nonconformity, and by easy assumptions that are
made of the solidity of ecclesiastical divisions. It is to these two themes that
I want now to turn.
The religious geography and
“sacred space” of most English market towns was such that the Church
and State dominated the heart of them. Market places were often surrounded by
churches, market houses, municipal buildings and castles. These framed the
public space in many towns. In Taunton, Somerset, for example, the market place
was bounded by the churches of St Mary Magdalen to the east and St James, to the
north, the Castle, to the west, the market house to the south. Taunton was a
town which, in 1715, contained the single largest dissenting congregation in the
country.[18] It was also a town with
a strong Puritan past and was polarised between Anglicans and Dissenters. In
Taunton the quadrilateral of the churches, castle and market house created a
natural public arena that served the multiple purposes of economic, religious,
political and cultural space. This theatre of public space of the town was
employed by the parishioners on their way to Sunday worship; but it was also
used for the annual state-endorsed celebrations of the commemoration of the
Gunpowder plot, the landing of William of Orange in 1688, Oak Apple Day, the
birth of Elizabeth I on 17 November, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and
occasional feasts and fasts –declared to celebrate victories or avert
danger. In October 1739 it was agreed that St Mary’s, Taunton would mark
the political calendar with peals of bells paid for by the parish on 29 May, 11
October, 30 October, 5 November and 20
January.[19] St James’s church
added the anniversary of the accession of Elizabeth
I.[20] In this way the conscious
memory of a Protestant community was kept alive and renewed for each generation.
Across the country the pealing and tolling of bells was an audible signal of the
Church’s presence. In Taunton, St James’s church, which was founded
to accommodate those people who just lived outside the borough boundary, had as
good a peal of bells as its mother church. Its bell dated 1610 was inscribed
“Come when I call” and another bell, installed in 1626, with
“Soll Deo Detur Gloria”. These bells gave an audible quality to the
sanctified space over which they rang.
This
public space also witnessed seasonal and weekly markets, quarterly assizes, and,
at wider intervals, the hustings and polling of parliamentary and corporation
elections. These were the occasions of drama and moment in Taunton, as in many
market towns, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and these events and
spaces were appropriated by the Anglicans. But this sense of a public space, in
which the religio-political state and the moral economy became a reality, was
one that heightened tensions in Restoration Taunton. The public urban space
became a locus for religious contest and competition. In this space those
Nonconformists who did not attend the services of the parish churches became
visible and obvious, they walked the streets and loitered in the market place at
the time of the services of the established Church. It was this that lay at the
root of the Anglican desire to implement the Clarendon Code of laws, including
the Conventicle Acts and the Five Mile Act. These laws sought to expunge the
evidence of the Dissenters” refusal to conform. In Taunton, Bishop Mews of
Bath and Wells used constables —and even the militia— to apprehend
and prosecute such visible Nonconformists –whose presence seemed to be a
rebuke to the Church and an encouragement to those who wavered in their
commitment to it. Mews even resorted to the excommunication of those not
attending the parish church as a means to deny them use of the public
space.
In Taunton, as in many market towns, the
Dissenters’ meeting houses lay outside the town’s central space,
they were often located on the margins of a town. But in Taunton the annual
11th May celebrations —which commemorated the relief of the
town’s Parliamentary garrison from a devastating royalist siege in
1645— were offensive and inflammatory to the Anglican Corporation because
they were the occasion on which Dissenters invaded the public space, which was
normally the preserve of the Church and State. The 11th May
celebrations began in the market place with the beating of drums and continued
with drinking; later in the day sermons and bonfires took over the space between
the churches, the Castle and the market house for the day. The orderly Anglican
and municipally-controlled space was given over to the chaotic celebrations of
Dissenters. On such days Taunton became a bi-confessional town. These events
celebrated the overthrow and execution of the King, the abolition of the Church
of England and its bishops. It was these treasonable ideas that lay behind the
festival’s dangerously triumphal tone; and it was the one day of the year
on which Dissenters could own the space that was seemingly denied to them for
the remaining three hundred and sixty
four.[21] This is why successive
mayors found the commemoration so intolerable and in one case used the same
space to bring cart loads of pews and fittings from the Dissenters meeting house
and set them ablaze.
In the same public space
the Anglican Corporation sought to dominate the elections, but the market place
was also a space redolent with violent political and religious memories. In the
market place Taunton’s corporation had been forced to declare Monmouth
king at sword-point in 1685 and Judge Jeffreys’s sentences of death were
carried out. —Significantly executions in Taunton were usually carried out
at the stonegallows, two miles outside the town, but Jeffreys had sought to
invade the moral space of the town, to its lasting outrage, by carrying out the
mass executions of the “bloody assizes” in the market place. Here
too William III was proclaimed king and ushered in a period in which the market
place during divine service was no longer occupied by Dissenters who were under
threat of prosecution. After the passage of the Toleration Act of 1689, those
who worshipped at the meeting houses could do so legally, though they still
walked across the space once a year to take communion at St Mary’s to
qualify for public office under the Test Act.
After the Glorious Revolution the husting in the
market place also saw the election of John Trenchard, John Speke and Edward
Clarke, men who were enemies of the exclusive role of the Church of England, and
sought to repeal the Test Act. Corporation-backed Tory candidates tried to wrest
the control of the borough seats from the Dissenters’ Whig candidates, and
the Anglican mayor and clerk, as returning officers, could disqualify voters and
could enfranchise those who came forward to vote. The chicanery of bribes,
dubious qualifications of recipients of alms and charity, the rejection of the
votes of the properly qualified and the descent into violence in the 1754
election took place here. Moreover the hustings set up in the market square
enabled the whole town to see for whom the Dissenters and their ministers voted.
From the second decade of the eighteenth century
the hallowed space of market place was also used by unemployed weavers, spinners
and wool workers from the depressed cloth trade to seek employment or the poor
relief of the parish. It was here that the impoverished men and women of Taunton
took direct action to prevent millers and farmers from raising the price of
flour and wheat. Incensed by profiteering the moral economy of the crowd exerted
itself for fairness and honesty. In November 1756 a mob broke into a mill and
found a hoard of fifty sacks of flour, which they carried to the market place
and sold at forty-five shillings a bushel. Six months later a group of women
gathered in the market square and “by means of their united vociferations
and repeated clamours, constrained the farmers to bring down the price [of
wheat] to six shilling six pence [from eight shillings sixpence a bushel] which
the good women were willing to
pay.’[22] Perhaps the identification of the space as public, shared and hallowed, gave the
women licence to seek economic fairness and justice
there.
The soothing of such religious and social
divisions was also signalled by the use of the public space of the town. In 1764
a Masonic lodge was founded and warranted by the Grand Lodge of England. Its
founders were Anglicans and Dissenters and moderate Tories and Whigs, they
brought together men of all trades and complexions in Taunton. The formal
opening of the lodge on 9 August 1764 included a procession through the market
place. Two days after Christmas in 1765 the Freemasons, both Anglican and
Nonconformist, processed to St Mary Magdalen church where they sat in the
Corporation pews and heard a sermon on the text from Romans ch. 12, v 10:
“Be kindly affectioned one towards another with Brotherly love in Honour
preferring one another”. In this way the public space of the town
witnessed the decline of religious strife and its use for more eirenic
pursuits.
3. The second theme I want to
explore is the conception of hard and fast religious divisions into which
historians neatly compartmentalize men and women in the eighteenth century.
Jeremy Gregory has recently argued that Wesley’s progression from Anglican
to Methodist was not a linear development but followed a more confused and
complex trajectory, and one which did not prevent Wesley from stubbornly
regarding himself as both an Anglican and a Methodist. Moreover Gregory’s
view opens the way for us to consider whether this permeable boundary between
Anglicanism and Methodism applied to the whole Church and Methodist connexion.
Certainly there is evidence that until late in the eighteenth century Anglicans
and Methodists were not separate, and did not intend to
be.[23] Plenty of people regarded themselves as Anglicans and Methodists. The doctrinal
and religious division between them was so flimsy that in 1760 Edward Goldney
claimed that if Archbishop Thomas Secker adopted lay dress and spoke in public
denouncing vice and irreligion as he had from the pulpit, he would be attacked
as a
Methodist.[24]
It is also possible to see the same permeability
between the Church and other dissenters. In Taunton, where the Paul’s
Meeting was the largest dissenting congregation in England in 1715, the
ministers of the meeting were routinely buried in the parish church of St Mary
Magdalen. This practice was established by George Newton who had been Puritan
vicar of Taunton before the Civil War and happily accommodated the Presbyterian
settlement of the Commonwealth. Newton was ejected from the living in 1662,
following the Act of Uniformity, and conducted an independent Presbyterian
ministry thereafter, which led to periods of imprisonment, until his death in
1681. Newton was buried in St Mary Magdalen, but he was not the first
Presbyterian to be buried at St
Mary’s.[25] Joseph Alleine, formerly Newton’s curate, also ejected from the living and
frequently imprisoned for continuing to preach and lead worship, who died in
November 1668 aged just thirty five, was buried in the chancel of St Mary
Magdalen, Taunton, where his funeral sermon was preached by
Newton.[26] The interment of the Nonconformists Newton and Alleine in an Anglican church
suggested the degree to which Independents and Presbyterians were not yet seen
as separate from the Church of England. But when their successor, Mathew Warren,
died in June 1706, he was also buried in St Mary’s Church –though he
had no connection with the Church. Like Newton, he was recorded as “Pastor
of the Presbyterian Congregation” on his tomb in St
Mary’s.[27] This was an important use of sanctified space, inside the church. Will Coster
has suggested the significance of the exclusion of groups from burial in the
church or churchyard in early modern
England.[28] Refusal to bury Dissenters in Anglican churchyards was an attempt to monopolise
sacred space which the former bitterly
resented.[29]
The
connection of the dissenters with the parish church did not cease with the
burial of Presbyterian ministers. Nathaniel Markwith, who held the living of
Taunton from 1696 until 1703, also accommodated the Dissenters by recording the
baptism of the children of dissenters in his parish
register.[30] Throughout the eighteenth century some Anglican clergy referred to
Nonconformists as “our Dissenters”, suggesting proximity of
relationship between the Church and Dissent that could be distinguished from the
relationship between, say the Anglican and Roman Catholic
churches.
It is not just between Anglicans and
Methodists and Dissenters that divisions and categories have been misunderstood
by historians. Within the Church of England the terms “High Church”
and “Low Church” have been used with a degree of abandon. After
their introduction at the Glorious Revolution, the terms became widely used, but
have been assumed by historians to have been hard and fast divisions. Yet it is
clear from two case studies that high and low churchmanship were also permeable
divisions. George Smalridge and William Talbot were respectively the archetypes
of High and Low Churchmen. Smalridge was a Tory, an ally of Atterbury and a
stalwart member of Henry Sacheverell’s defence team at his trial in 1710.
He also preached traditional High Church theology. But he was also widely
regarded as holding heterodox views of the Trinity, usually associated with Low
Churchmen, and in particular seemed to question the divinity of Christ. William
Talbot, a Whig and usually identified as a typical Low Churchman, certainly had
most of the characteristics of a Latitudinarian. He replaced the Non-juror
George Hickes as Dean of Worcester after his ejection in 1689, and throughout
the turbulent years of the Convocation controversy allied himself with the
Tenisonite Low Church bishops. Yet as Bishop of Oxford, and later Durham, he
advanced high views of the sacrament and urged frequent receipt of Holy
Communion as a means to promote the sacraments. Talbot also repeatedly opposed
the idea of a split between High and Low Churchmen, which had its origin in
political abuse rather than theological
principle.[31] If Smalridge and Talbot were representative, and there is some evidence that
they were, the terms “High Church” and “Low Church” were
not exclusive and incompatible. It was possible for churchmen in the first half
of the eighteenth century to be both low and high churchmen in different aspects
of their thought —in the same way as Wesley could be both and Anglican and
a Methodist. These studies suggests that churchmen were able to embrace both
High and Low Church principles and thus a reconceptualisation of the presumption
of exclusivity in the two parties is needed. Historians need to revise their
views of the Church parties in the early eighteenth century and to recognise
that they existed as overlapping and complementary tendencies around Anglican
core values rather than exclusive and opposing bi-polar
strictures.
4. As Guglielmo Sanna has shown,
the history of the Church of England in the eighteenth century has undergone a
renaissance in the last twenty
years,[32] yet as a field of study it has enormous further potential to engage with the
wider historical themes of the period. If eighteenth century Church history is
to exercise the influence it justifies, it must reach into these wider themes.
There are already the “green shoots” of a widening historical field
developing from it. In 2005 alone three valuable studies appeared which broaden
the bounds of eighteenth century church history. Claire Haynes has shown that
the role of visual culture in the early eighteenth century Church of England was
being contested between those Anglicans who regarded the Reformation as complete
and those who believed it to be a continuing process. Both groups held that
popish pictures and art in churches could be acceptable if, and only if, the
spectator could be trusted to look
'properly'.[33] Mark Knights’s study of the Toleration Act and occasional conformity has
shown that the values of moderation and reasonableness that High and Low
Churchmen, Anglicans and Dissenters adhered to were widely elevated and esteemed
in the period after
1689.[34] C. D. A Leighton has argued that the Non-jurors represented a rationalist strand
in the English counter-enlightenment and, though lost to the Church of England,
continued to exercise an important critical historical
viewpoint.[35]
Historiography
is necessarily an introspective process. I hope this contribution to the CROMOHS
seminar is an encouragement to professional historical extroversion; to branch
out into new and exciting themes in the history of the long eighteenth century,
and to show how ubiquitous religion in general, and Anglicanism in particular,
were. My contention that “the culture of eighteenth century English
society was infused -indeed drenched- with Anglicanism” means that there
are few topics in this period that cannot be enhanced by the inclusion of a
religious
perspective.[36] Let this be a call to arms, to be intolerant of purely secular accounts of
eighteenth century English society, and to restore religion and the Church of
England to the place that they rightfully should command in the history of the
century, so that, in Guglielmo Sanna’s words, the Church will no longer be
“almost unworthy of the scholar’s attention”.
References
[1] English Historical Review, cxx, 489, December 2005, p. 1392. Gregory was
reviewing Michael Snape’s book: The Church of England in
Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the 18th Century, (Studies in Modern British Church History), Woodbridge: Boydell and
Brewer,
2003.
[2] P. Virgin, The Church in an Age of Negligence, Cambridge, 1989; M. Snape, The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of
Whalley in the 18th Century, Studies in Modern British Church
History, Woodbridge, 2003. M. Smith, Religion in Industrial Society:
Oldham and Saddleworth 1740–1865, Oxford, 1994; J. S. Chamberlain, Accommodating High Churchmen: The Clergy of Sussex, 1700-1745, Chicago,
1997; J. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828, Archbishops
of Canterbury and the Diocese, Oxford, 2000; J. Gregory & J Chamberlain
(eds) The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the
Regions, 1660-1800, Boydell & Brewer, 2002. In his IHR “Reviews in
History” essay on Michael Snape’s book, Mark Smith includes me as an
example of an optimist, citing W. Gibson, “A Happy Fertile Soil which
bringeth forth Abundantly”: The Diocese of Winchester, 1689-1800 in J.
Gregory & J Chamberlain (eds) The National Church in Local Perspective:
The Church of England and the Regions, 1660-1800, Boydell & Brewer,
2002. Perhaps the strongest expression of my optimism is found in W. Gibson The Achievement of the Anglican Church, 1689-1800: The Confessional State in
England in the Eighteenth Century (Studies in British History Monograph
Series) Edwin Mellen Press,
1995.
[3] M. Goldie, “Voluntary Anglicans”, Historical Journal, 46
(2003),
p.988.
[4] IHR “Reviews in History” 2005. http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/smithm.html
[5] See for example: J. Gregory & J Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in
Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions, 1660-1800, Boydell
& Brewer, 2002. J. Walsh, C. Haydon & S.Taylor (eds) The Church of
England c.1689-1833, Cambridge, 1993. W. Gibson, The Church of England
1688-1832: Unity and Accord, London, Routledge, 2001.
[6] See for example: J. Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660-1828,
Archbishops of Canterbury and the Diocese, Oxford, 2000. J. S. Chamberlain Accommodating High Churchmen: The Clergy of Sussex, 1700-1745, Chicago,
1997. W. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly 1676-1761, Cambridge, James Clarke & Co,
2004.
[7] D. R. Hirschberg, “A Social History of the Anglican Episcopate,
1660-1760” Michigan Univ PhD thesis 1976; S. Taylor, “Church
and State in England in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: The Newcastle Years,
1742-1762” Cambridge University PhD thesis, 1987. My Achievement of the
Anglican Church, 1689-1800: The Confessional State in England in the Eighteenth
Century, sought to provide some quantifiable analysis but there are few
similar
studies.
[8] J. Barry, The Politics of Religion in Restoration Bristol in T. Harris,
P. Seaward, M. Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration
England, Oxford, 1990, and idem, Cultural Patronage and the Anglican
Crisis in Bristol 1689-1775 in Haydon, Walsh and Taylor, op.
cit.
[9] Craig Rose, “Evangelical Philanthropy and Anglican Revival: the Charity
Schools of Augustan London, 1698-1740”, in: The London Journal, 16,
1991. K. Wilson, Urban Culture and Political Activism in Hanoverian England:
the example of voluntary hospitals in E. Hellmuth (ed), The
Transformation of Political Culture, Oxford,
1990.
[10] T. Clayton, The Sermon, the Public Sphere and the Political Culture of Late
Seventeenth Century England and James Caudle, Preaching in Parliament:
Patronage, Publicity and Politics in Britain 1701-1760, both in Lori Anne
Ferrell and P. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion,
Literature and History, 1600-1750, Manchester, 2001. Newton E. Key,
“The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast
Sermons, 1654-1710” in Journal of British Studies, 33,
1994.
[11] B. W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century England:
Theological Debate from Locke to Burke, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998. Roy
Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Allen Lane, 2000. W. Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, op.
cit.
[12] R. Cornwall, Visible and Apostolic: The Constitution of the Church in High
Church Anglican and Non-Juror Thought, University of Delaware Press,
1993.
[13] See W. Gibson, The Church of England 1688-1832: Unity and Accord, op.
cit., chapter 5 “The Church and
Culture”.
[14] W. Gibson, Religion and the Enlightenment 1600-1800: Conflict and the Rise of
Civic Humanism in Taunton, Oxford, 2006. J. E. Bradley, Popular Politics
and the American Revolution in England, Petitions, the Crown, and Public
Opinion, Macon, GA, 1986. J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English
Radicalism, Cambridge, 1990. S. Abbott, “Clerical Reponses to the
Jacobite rebellion in 1715” in Historical Research, vol. 76, no.
193, 2003. S. W. Baskerville, “The Political Activity of the Cheshire
Clergy, 1705-1752” in Northern History, vol XXIII,
1987.
[15] J. E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England,
Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion, Macon, GA, 1986. J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism, Cambridge,
2002.
[16] F. Squire, The West Country Farmer, Taunton, n.d.; idem, The West
Country Farmer Number 2...Taunton, 1732. B. Hoadly, An Enquiry into the
Reasons of the Conduct of Gt Britain, with relation to the Present State of
Affairs in Europe, London,
1727.
[17] A. Spicer & S. Hamilton (eds), Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, 2006. W. Coster & A. Spicer (eds) Sacred
Space in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2005.
[18] According to the Evans List of 1715. Examples from Taunton are derived from my
forthcoming book: Religion and the Enlightenment 1600-1800: Conflict and the
Rise of Civic Humanism in Taunton, Oxford,
2006.
[19] Somerset Record Office [SRO], DD/SAS/C795 TN.15. 19 October
1739.
[20] SRO, DD/SAS/C795 TN 105, from
1674.
[21] For European examples of such competition for space, see A. Eurich, Reclaiming Civic Culture in Early Modern France in Coster and Spicer, op.
cit.
[22] Quoted in N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, Oxford, 1998, pp. 68,
232.
[23] J. Gregory, “In the Church I will live and die”: John Wesley, the
Church of England and Methodism, in W. Gibson & R. Ingram (eds), Religious Identities in Britain 1660-1832, Aldershot,
2005.
[24] E. Goldney, Divine Recipes, for mankind to enjoy life comfortable on earth,
and to be qualified for heaven, humbly dedicated to His Royal Highness, George
Prince of Wales. And Scriptural remedies for healing the divisions in the Church
of England; particularly of those people called Methodists. Humbly dedicated to
the Bishop of Winchester, London, 1760, p.
18.
[25] Matthews, Calamy Revised, p.
364.
[26] Life of the Revd Joseph Alleine, Religious Trace Society,
n.d.
[27] Warren’s successors as Nonconformists ministers in Taunton were usually
met with the pealing of bells by the parish church on their first entry into the
town.
[28] W. Coster, Burial Space and Society in Chester, 1598-1633 in Coster and
Spicer, op.
cit.
[29] See for example, W. Gibson, Religion and Society in England and Wales
1689-1800, London, 1992, p.
129.
[30] J. E. King, Inventory of Parochial Documents in the Diocese of Bath and Wells
and the County of Somerset, Taunton, 1938, p.
336.
[31] W. Gibson, George Smalridge and the Definition of Church Parties,
1700-1720 in W. Gibson & R. Ingram (eds) Religion, Politics and
Identity in Britain 1660-1832, Ashgate Publishing, 2005 and W. Gibson,
“William Talbot and Church Parties 1688-1730” in The Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 2006
(forthcoming).
[32] The Institute of Historical Research “Theses in Progress 2005”
records 13 doctoral studies on the eighteenth century
church.
[33] C. Haynes,”The culture of judgement: art and anti-Catholicism in England, c.1660–c.1760” in Historical Research, Volume
78, Issue 102, November
2005.
[34] M. Knights, Occasional Conformity and the Representation of Dissent:
Hypocrisy, Sincerity, Moderation and Zeal in S. Taylor and D. Wykes (eds) Parliament and Dissent, Parliamentary History, Edinburgh,
2005.
[35] C. D. A. Leighton, “The Non-Jurors and their History” in Journal
of Religious History, vol. 29, No 3, October,
2005.
[36] Gibson, Church of England 1688-1832 Unity and Accord, op. cit., p
148.
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