Pluralities.

Such was the first important measure of reform in the Church of England. In 1838 it was followed up by a much more significant law. No person was thenceforward allowed to hold more than one preferment; no person holding any Cathedral preferment was in future to hold. more than one benefice; no person was to hold two benefices more than ten miles apart or of the joint value of more than £1000 a year, or two benefices when the population of either of them exceeded 3000 persons. Even in these excepted. cases no person was to hold more than one benefice except with the leave of the bishop and with the approval of the Primate. Heavy pecuniary penalties were attached to nonresidence; the licence of the bishop for non-residence was limited to specified cases; and, when the incumbent was nonresident, the bishop was authorised to appoint a curate in charge, with a stipend dependent on the value of the living.1

In 1839 a further step was taken to increase the usefulness of the revenues of the Church. It was proposed by this measure to reduce the capitular establishments, and to apply the money thus saved to the increased endowment of populous parishes. It was hoped, by the one course, gradually to effect an economy of £130,000 a year, and it was estimated that this saving would be adequate to raise the endowments of all livings in public patronage with fewer than 1000 people to £180, with fewer than 2000 persons to £200, with fewer than 5000 people to £300, and with more than 5000 people to £400 a year. The bill, like every other of this wise series which he described as composed of five ministers, five bishops, and three Tories. Hansard, vol. xxxv. p. 360. Charles Buller desired to appropriate the surplus incomes of the bishops to the working clergy. Ibid., p. 214. Inglis complained that the bill made the bishops stipendiaries, and the Duke of Cumberland had the folly to designate it as a most prejudicial measure. Ibid., vol. xxxiv. p. 598, xxxv. p. 921.

2

1 1 and 2 Vict., c. 106. It took three years to carry the measure. For some of the debates upon it, see Hansard, vol. xxxiii. p. 799, vol. xxxv. p. 1045, vol. xxxvi. p. 597, vol. xl. p. 722, vol. xliii. p. 597, vol. xliv. p. 492.

2 Ibid., vol. xxxv. p. 16. There were in future to be only six canons in Canterbury, Durham, Ely, and Westminster; five in Winchester and Exeter; two in Llandaff and St. David's, and four in the other capitular establishments (3 and 4 Vict., c. 113, schedule).

of measures, did not satisfy extreme Tories. One of them, Inglis, went so far as to declare that Parliament had no more right to pass the bill than to allocate the dock duties of Liverpool to the Corporation of Bristol. Notwithstanding Inglis's opposition, however, moderate men of all parties warmly supported the bill, and the measure introduced in 1839 became law in 1840.2 Thus in a short period of five years future bishops had been converted from great landowners into stipendiaries; steps had been taken for using the surplus income of capitular establishments for the endowment of poor parishes; and an effectual restraint had been placed on the multiplication of pluralities and on the abuses inseparable from non-residence.

The Ecclesiastical Courts.

The revolution which this legislation marks will be much more plain if it is considered in connection with other reforms concurrently introduced and carried. In early English history the union between Church and State had been a union of two distinct organisations in one community. The Church had a separate voice, or separate voices, in the Legislature. When the different estates of the realm ceased to vote separately, she commanded a majority in the House of Lords; by the side of the temporal courts she had her own spiritual courts. She had also sole jurisdiction in testamentary and matrimonial matters.

"The lowest court of ecclesiastical jurisdiction was the Archdeacon's; from thence an appeal lay to the Consistory" or Diocesan Court, "and from thence to the Archbishop or Court of Arches."S From the Court of Arches a further appeal lay to the Crown, which was in such cases accustomed to appoint a commission of review, known as the Court of Delegates. The jurisdiction of the Court of Delegates was 1 Hansard, vol. xlv. p. 859.

2 The Act is 3 & 4 Vict., c. 113. For the debates on the bill see ibid., vol. xlv. p. 849, vol. liii. p. 590. Ten prelates voted for, twelve against the second reading. Ibid., lv. p. 1022.

3 Paterson's Liberty of the Press Speech, and Public Worship, p. 493, a book which contains in a comparatively small compass a great deal of useful information. The Court of Arches was, of course, so called because it was held in St. Mary's-le-Bow, S. Maria de Arcubus.

transferred to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in 1832. The ecclesiastical court not merely punished refractory or immoral clergymen; it concurrently enforced the payment of Church rates, and endeavoured to correct any improprieties of which laymen were guilty.

Spiritual discipline, indeed, was rarely exercised; but its machinery still remained, and was resorted to by injudicious. persons in isolated cases. So lately as 1840 a Church Jewess, charged with a want of chastity by her discipline. sister, was condemned in the Bishop of London's court to acknowledge her offence during the hours of divine service. The churchwardens, wiser than the Court, let the wretched woman in at a side-door, and, locking the gates of the church, kept the congregation outside till the sentence was executed.1 But, though folly of this kind was rare, abuses of another sort were frequent. In the good old days when George IV. was king, a suit arose in the Archdeacon's Court at Totnes, was carried to the Diocesan Court at Exeter, thence to the Court of Arches, and finally to the Court of Delegates, on the right of two persons to hang their hats on a particular peg in church. A clergyman named Morris, the incumbent of a Carmarthenshire parish, summoned one Jones, a weaver, his churchwarden, for failing to provide bread and wine for the sacrament. Jones was a Dissenter, and also poor. He pleaded poverty as an excuse for a neglect which his conscience had suggested to him, was condemned for contumacy, and on failure to pay costs was thrown into Carmarthen gaol. There, too, the same clergyman sent another of his flock, one James, a farmer, who had neglected to attend church.3 James, it seems, had committed the additional offence of voting against the Tory candidate, and he was appropriately cited before another clergyman, Mr. Williams, who was also rural dean and editor of the local Tory newspaper. About the same time, in another part of England, a man was fined Is.

1 For this story see Hansard, vol. lxxv. p. 94.

This story rests on the high authority of Nicholl. Ibid., vol. lxvi. p. 314. 3 For these stories see Ibid., vol. xlvii. pp. 522-526.

and 145. costs for not attending church, and in default of payment was sentenced to ten weeks' imprisonment.1

The mischievous jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts over laymen was not finally abolished till 1860. But in 1840 two Acts were passed which limited their authority. By one of these the Privy Council or judges of an ecclesiastical court were authorised to release persons committed to prison for contumacy.3 By the other, proceedings against a clergyman. could only be instituted after a preliminary inquiry by a diocesan commission, and with the consent of the bishop. But both Conservative and Whig statesmen were prepared to go much further. The Whigs were anxious to abolish all the ecclesiastical courts except the Court of Arches, and to transfer their criminal and testamentary jurisdiction to the ordinary courts. The Tories desired to preserve the Diocesan Courts, and to abolish only the inferior courts. This difference of opinion led to the loss of the various measures of reform which were introduced. But the important fact to note is, that the wisest men on both sides were ready to reform and curtail ecclesiastical judicature. For the first time since the Reformation, Parliament was redistributing the property of the Church for the sake of increasing its efficiency, and curtailing its judicial powers for the sake of preventing the continuance of abuse.5

1 Hansard, vol. lx. p. 310. Lord Houghton (then Monckton Milnes) said that in 1839 and 1840 eleven other persons were sentenced to prison for from three days to nine weeks for not attending church. In 1843 some young men were fined for playing cricket on Burley Common on Sunday. The AttorneyGeneral said they were rightly convicted for assembling outside their own parishes for purposes not justified by the law. About the same time some men charged with poaching were asked by the justices whether they had been in church on the previous Sunday, and were fined 1s. each with £3 costs. These men, in default, were eleven weeks in Lancaster Castle. 762; vcl. lxxiv. p. 999.

Ibid., vol. lxxi. p.

4 3 & 4 Vict., c. 86.

223 & 24 Vict., c. 32. 3 3 & 4 Vict., c. 93. A history of the legislation from 1829 to 1843 was given by Lyndhurst in 1844. Hansard, vol. lxxiii. p. 1311. The bill of that year passed the Lords and was lost in the Commons. For various divisions, ibid., vol. lxxv. pp. 106-131. Lyndhurst declined to reintroduce the bill in 1845 (ibid., vol. lxxviii. p. 261), and Cottenham later on ineffectually attempted to legislate. Ibid., vol. lxxx. p. 836.

The wisest statesmen, however, were not satisfied with attempting to increase the efficiency of the Church and to abolish the anomalies of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The NonThey at the same time displayed a desire to con- conformists. ciliate the Nonconformists by removing some of the serious disabilities under which they still lay. The Dissenters complained that the laws which refused them all share in the great advantages of the universities, which compelled them to pay a rate for the repair of the church, and which allowed a clergyman of the Anglican Communion to conduct their funerals were unjust. Many years elapsed before the benefits of the universities were opened to Dissenters, before they were relieved from the payment of Church rates, and before the burial laws were revised. The accomplishment of these reforms did not fall within the period embraced in this history. But the efforts made to effect them had a significance of their own, and must be recollected by any one who wishes to understand the religious history of the century.

versities

The great Universities dealt with the Dissenters in different ways. At Dublin, ever since the Act of 1793, Nonconformists had been admitted to the studies and to the degrees The Uniof the University. At Cambridge they had been admitted as students, but a test had been exacted from graduates which disabled Nonconformists from taking a degree. Oxford, more intolerant than either of her sisters, exacted a test on matriculation, and thus excluded those who did not conform to the Church from the advantages of her schools. In 1834 a bill to open both the English Universities to Dissenters passed the Commons by large majorities, but was thrown out by a relatively still greater majority in the Lords. Discouraged by their defeat, the Dissenters, instead of continuing the attack, laboured to obtain a charter for the new University of London. The institution of this new University in 1836 removed one of their most obvious grievances, and to a certain extent reconciled them to their continued exclusion

1 Hansard, vol. xxiv. p. 714, vol. xxv. pp. 815-886; cf. May's Constitutional History, vol. iii. p. 198.