The passing of Barchester

Getting on for seven years ago now, we stayed in the hotel which has been fashioned inside the perimeter of Canterbury Cathedral, as noticed at reference 1. A hotel which included an ecclesiastically flavoured library where I came across a copy of the book at reference 2, which, as someone who has consumed a fair bit of Trollope over the years, caught my eye. I did not read the book there and then, but on return I did buy one second hand and have now got around to reading it. A short and readable book of around 150 pages of text.

As the preface points out, most of what most of us know about the Anglican clergy of Victorian England, if anything, is derived from Trollope's Barchester novels. The present book provides some real life background, being a study of the cluster of clergy around one William Lowell, Dean of Canterbury, 1788-1857. A cluster mainly made up of his relatives and in-laws, with female relatives showing a marked tendency to marry in-house, as it were. A time when clergy got on by making up to people like the Dean, or better still a bishop.

At the start of the period, the Anglican Church needed a bit of a shake-up, a bit of reform. And reform was in the air. It was on the cards that the church would be detached from the state (from where we get the famous word 'antidisestablishmentarianism') and a good chunk of its very considerable property would also be detached. Merit would rule. Priests would be expected to set a good example. Pluralism would be abolished. The emoluments attached to livings would be evened out. Church appointments would not longer be in the gift of landowners and landlords. Maybe - heaven forfend - congregations would even be allowed to appoint their own clergy. In the event, the Anglican Church adapted and survived, a power in the land, certainly until the coming of the First World War, and more in the country than in the towns.

My own father, for example, at about that time, fiercely resented the power of the parson in the small country village in Huntingdonshire in which he grew up. By what right did he lord it over the villagers? By what right did his wife condescend to interfere in the affairs of their families?

Advowson

Something called advowson was central to organisation of the Church, with the OED entry for this word being snapped above. We also have advowee, advower, advowry and advowsonage, all straightforward derivatives which I have rarely if ever seen or heard used.

Now suppose we take the Church of the Holy Trinity of the parish of Long Melford in Suffolk. The pastoral care of the parish would have been the job of a priest (or parson or pastor), who might have been called the rector. The parish would have had various endowments, usually in the form of land, and, roughly speaking, the rector would have been entitled to the rents from that land. That was his income, income which varied enormously from parish to parish.

Now the rector had something of a life-hold. He might move or swap, but it was difficult to simply evict him. So the important thing was how he got there in the first place. The right to put someone into a parish, to appoint someone a rector, was the right of presentation. And the right of presentation was itself property, I dare say at times itself bought and sold. These rights were mostly held by bishops, but some were held by their deans & chapters, some were held by corporations such as the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and some were held by the Crown, in effect the Prime Minister of the day. And quite a lot were held by grandees, by the owners of the land. One would say that such a such a living was in the gift of so and so or of such and such corporation. The connection between churches and their Oxbridge college is often visible in the list of priests often to be found on walls. All this was called advowson.

In the beginning, the right of presentation came with a responsibility to make sure that the parish was looked after properly. That the interests, in this case of the Holy Trinity, were being looked after properly.

So if a young priest wanted to get on, he needed to make up to someone who suitable livings in his gift - all this being a men's world at this time. He needed a patron who would look after him. And to get a good patron it helped to be related to one, to have done well at college or to be good with people.

Supporters of the system argued that patrons were generally careful about who they presented to the livings in their gift. That they did better than just give them to younger sons who were otherwise without income and without occupation for their time. That all this gave a better result than the sons of candlestick makers being crammed for university or civil service exams.

Much of the present book revolves around the workings of this system, alive and well at the time of Dean Lowell.

The passing

So how did the Church manage to survive? A good part of the Dewey answer seems to be that in nineteenth century, entering the Church conferred gentility. A chap with a decent education in a decent living counted as a gentleman, particularly in the country, the sort of chap a real landowner might have as a guest, a friend or as a hanger-on. He was also apt to be a magistrate and involved in various aspects of local government. Perhaps not a very important person, but an important person nevertheless. This was something that a moderately successful man of business could aspire to for his children: a bit of social mobility that provided a good safety valve; provided new blood with a vested interest in the status quo.

But a system which started to collapse as the number of jobs for able and/or respectable lay people in the middle classes increased and when the public at large started to expect their clergy to earn their living properly, to put on a show, perhaps by extravagant preaching, perhaps by doing good works. When curates started to expect to be paid a proper wage to do a proper job when once they had to put up with deputising for rectors (simplifying things a bit) for a pittance. Being a rector with plenty of spare time to collect butterflies, indulge in a spot of fly-fishing or write learned books about Dead Sea Scrolls was one thing; being an underpaid and overworked social worker was quite another. Never mind the cost of heating some massive and badly insulated rectory.

Another factor was the long decline of rents on agricultural land, consequent on the end of the Napoleonic wars and the arrival of cheap wheat from places like Australia and Canada. Cheap wheat to feed the workers in factories in towns. A decline in rents which translated to falling incomes for rectors.

There is, unfortunately, a down side to all this. The clergy used to stand for living a decent life, had a pulpit from which to harangue (and sometimes entertain) the people amongst whom they lived. Whereas now, we might have our councillors in the town hall and our celebrities on the box, but that is not quite the same thing. At least, not to my mind.

Lords spiritual

Twenty six bishops - the Lords Spiritual as opposed to the Lords Temporal - out of a membership of getting on for a thousand - still sit in the House of Lords. A bit of a nonsense in this day and age, when there are probably more practising Moslems in the country than practising Anglicans, but scarcely a big bit of nonsense. Plenty of more important things to deal with first.

Orley Farm

While all this was going on, I happened to put my hand on a rather handsome copy of 'Orley Farm', published by the Trollope Society, which had been lurking at the bottom of the heap in my bedside table for some time. A book that I have read more than once over the years, but not recently. A book built around legal shenanigans around Orley Farm, big enough to provide a comfortable income for its (gentleman) owner. This being set in the days when gentlemen often owned two part farms: they lived in the house and played farm on half the land - while a real farmer farmed the other half and paid the rent on which the gentleman actually lived.

A book which I now know propelled Trollope to success and which was illustrated by woodcuts made by Dalziel of drawings made by Millais. The Dalziel brothers being the subject of a passing interest back in 2021 and noticed at reference 4.

Now I generally like the paintings of Millais, remembering here a large exhibition of his work, which I now find was as long ago as 2007 and noticed at reference 5. To be fair, there was also a contrary note, some years later, when I saw him in company with Holman Hunt. 

That being as it may be, I was not so taken on this occasion with these illustrations for Orley Farm, which I thought rather patchy. Some of them seemed to have a lot, to my eye, of unsightly black. Perhaps they were early work, before Millais got properly going as a fashionable painter. Effectively after Constable, although their lives overlapped by around ten years.

All marked with the neat Millais monogram bottom left and what looks like the Dalziel scrawl bottom right.

Conclusions

A book which would have been greatly improved for me by an opening summary, by a survey of the ecclesiastical scene more generally in the period covered. Who were the Hackneys? What did the Tractarians tract on about? Some macro history in which to place this micro history - where macro and micro are not intended in any way to be suggestive of quality or worth. They are just different disciplines.

Nevertheless, an interesting read. I may well give it another go someday.

PS 1: three mentions of Orley Farm in the archive, two of which involved reading same. See references 5 and 6.

PS 2: it occurs to me now, that the remark above about knowledge of Anglican clergy might be a bit out of date, that this knowledges now derives more from the stories of Agatha Christie than those of Trollope, or more precisely their adaptations on television; a rather different take altogether. Most of the world has moved on. I was also moved to look up the word 'parson' in OED and it seems that the original Latin word was person, which medieval Latin corrupted to parson, meaning a rector. Which then got generalised to ordained persons generally, that is to say to include vicars, curates, preachers and so on. The immediately preceding word being 'parsnip'.

PS 3: after breakfast: still a cold and frosty morning here at Epsom. But still very little action to be seen on the bird feeder, up for a couple of weeks now.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/03/canterbury-close.html.

Reference 2: The passing of Barchester: A real life version of Trollope - Clive Dewey - 1991.

Reference 3: Orley Farm - Anthony Trollope - 1861.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/fake-127.html.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/11/wakes.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-massive-dose.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-fix.html. Orley on morphine did not work very well.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/constable.html.