Tag Archives: Parish Registers

Bishop Shute Barrington and the English Parish Register

We have previously hailed Thomas Cromwell, father of the English parish register, and the 18th century priest and antiquary, William Dade (1741-1790), who strove to make the register a more detailed genealogical record.   Contemporary with Dade, and more widely known, was a fellow priest of a very different order, Bishop Shute Barrington of Durham.

Shute Barrington was born in 1734, son of John Shute Barrington (1678–1734), barrister, MP and ardent Protestant, educated at the University of Utrecht and a friend of John Locke.  He was instrumental in reconciling the Scottish Presbyterian church to the union of Scotland and England:  Jonathan Swift wrote in 1708 that he was ‘reckoned the shrewdest head in England’.[1]  He was elevated to the peerage in 1720 as Baron Barrington of Newcastle, Co Limerick, and Viscount Barrington of Ardglass, Co Down.

Lord Barrington was born a Shute, but changed the family surname to Barrington when he inherited an estate in Essex from the husband of a cousin.  His wife was Anne Daines, whose father, Sir William Daines, was MP for Bristol and a prominent local Whig.

Bishop Shute Barrington (1786) via Wikimedia Commons

Shute Barrington was thus born into the Whig intelligentsia as well as the aristocracy; but he was the sixth of six sons (and three daughters).  He was six months old when his father was flung from a carriage and died and so his eldest brother, William Wildman Barrington, 2nd Viscount, assumed a parental role.   Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he followed the traditional path of younger sons and was ordained in 1756.  He gained the favour of George III and became his chaplain soon after ordination and thence began a rapid climb up the ecclesiastical career ladder, becoming Bishop of Llandaff at the age of 35.

A man known for his sincere piety, Barrington was no passive acceptor of the privilege and wealth that fell in his path.  He caused a stir in 1772 in the debate surrounding the 39 Articles in which he went against his father’s principles and opposed the abolitionists.  After losing his first wife in childbirth at a young age, he followed the inclinations of his second wife, the heiress Jane Guise, by standing down from a lucrative post at St Paul’s because Jane disliked living in the residence there.  After becoming Bishop of Salisbury in 1782, he was renowned for his generosity and concern to be ‘the general friend of all’, while retaining friends in the highest places: the story goes that ‘gentleman from Berkshire’ inspected the Bishop’s ambitious restoration works at the Cathedral, paid for by public subscription, and added a contribution of £1,000 to the fund – the anonymous gentleman being George III.  Barrington was an important patron of William Wilberforce and supported the abolition of slavery.

In 1791 Barrington became Prince Bishop of Durham and here he continued energetically in charitable and educational projects, supported by his wife, who once presented every villager in a Durham village with a hive of bees.  He was an influential church reformer, with fingers in many ecclesiastical pies, across a wide political and theological spectrum, from the evangelicals to the Catholic French exiles who settled near Durham during the French Revolution.

For the genealogist, demographer and historian, however, the memorable gift of Bishop Shute Barrington was his introduction of a detailed format for parish registers, along the lines of the pioneer work of William Dade in the neighbouring diocese of York, but in a more manageable format.  From 1798 until the national introduction of printed register books in 1812, baptism registers in the diocese of Durham were required to include the child’s date of birth, the mother’s maiden name and the parishes in which both parents were born as well, as the number of the child in the family.  Details of fathers of illegitimate children were recorded with similar zeal. Imagine the genealogist’s joy to discover a ‘stray’ entry such as this from the Bishop’s Transcripts of St Nicholas, Durham City:

Sarah Parkin, born 28 March 1812, baptised 12 May, daughter of William Parkin, Private Soldier in the 1 Regt of Lancashire Militia & Sarah his wife late Weeks of Surrey

St Nicholas, Durham: Bishop's Transcript (image from FamilySearch)

St Nicholas, Durham: Bishop’s Transcript (image from FamilySearch)

Bishop Shute Barrington lived into his nineties, finally suffering a fatal stroke in 1826.  Wilberforce had described him in his prime as ‘a very sun, the centre of an entire system’.  That system has long since fallen away; what remains, for those of us who care, is the legacy of those meticulous and generous records of the very humblest members of his flock.

 

 

Principal Source: E. A. Varley, ‘Barrington, Shute (1734–1826)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009.


[1] Swift, Works, 1824, 15.318, cited in Arthur H. Grant, ‘Barrington, John Shute, first Viscount Barrington (1678–1734)’, rev. Philip Carter,Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.

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William Dade and the English Parish Register

In a previous blog (July 2013) we lauded Thomas Cromwell, the formidable father of the English parish register.  We turn now to a lesser known pioneer, the 18th century priest and antiquary, William Dade.

Before Rose’s Act of 1812, there was no standardised form in which parish records were to be kept.  Pre-1813 registers manifest a wide variety of skills and enthusiasm in record-keeping, from the barely literate to the garrulous.

Anyone who works in 18th century Yorkshire records will at some point come upon a ‘Dade Register’, in which an unexpected wealth of genealogical information is embedded in a single record.

William Dade, whose own baptism was recorded in the registers of Burton Agnes in the East Riding of Yorkshire, on 26 January 1741, came from a clerical family.  His father was vicar of Burton Agnes; his grandfather had also been a priest.  Dade was a student at St John’s College, Cambridge, from 1759 to 1762, although there is no record of him having obtained a degree.  From university he went into the priesthood, serving as curate in a series of York churches before securing his own parish of St Olave, Marygate, York, in 1771. Like many eighteenth century clerics he was a pluralist, being also the incumbent of St Mary, Castlegate, and St Michael, Spurriergate; and by the end of the decade he had also acquired the livings of Barmston and Ulrome in Holderness (East Riding of Yorkshire).

Unlike the modern hard-pressed clergyman who rushes from one church to another on a Sunday morning, the 18th century pluralist was not over-burdened by parish affairs, which would largely be delegated to curates.  Dade found time to develop the skills of the antiquary, that wonderfully dated term which the Oxford English Dictionary defined (in 1885: the entry has not been fully updated since):

A student (usually a professed student), or collector, of antiquities. (Formerly used, in a wide sense, of a student of early history; now tending to be restricted to one who investigates the relics and monuments of the more recent past.)

Dade’s close involvement with parish registers made him see their potential as a precious source of historical data.  He instituted a form of record-keeping in his parishes which asked for additional information to be added to register entries for the benefit of ‘the researches of posterity’.  Each record of baptism, for example, was to include not only the father’s profession and ‘abode’ but also those of the father’s parents; the entry was also to state where the infant was placed in the family (whether first or second son, etc).  Burial entries were to include the cause of death, the age of the deceased, and family details which made them superior to the Victorian death certificate that was to be introduced in 1837.

Dade’s scheme was approved by Archbishop William Markham and introduced in the whole diocese from 1777.  However, the concept of obedient and copious form-filling had yet to be imprinted in the national psyche.  The extra work that it generated meant that it was short-lived and not all incumbents complied; those in densely-populated industrial parishes found it particularly arduous.  It was discontinued after 1812 when the new standardised parish register books came in.

Dade made Barmston his home and there embarked upon a history of Holderness which, like many a similar project, was never published, although it reached proof stage in 1784 and some fragments survive in the British Library.  The author’s health had already begun to deteriorate and he died in 1790 at the age of 50.

An informative discussion of Dade registers by Roger Bellingham, published in 2004 in Local Population Studies, emphasises the value of these records, not only for genealogists but for those with wider interests whom we might describe as local or social historians, or demographers: to William Dade, without a doubt, they would be antiquaries.

References:

William Joseph Sheils, ‘Dade, William (bap. 1741, d. 1790)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 .

http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/PDF/LPS73/Article_3_Bellingham_pp51-60.pdf

 

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English Parish Registers

The recording of what the Americans call ‘vital statistics’ – the bare events of birth, marriage and death or, in the case of parish registers, baptism, marriage and burial – is something we now take for granted. We fret if our ancestors – through negligence, non-conformity, or being in the wrong parish at the wrong time –evaded that official with the quill pen. We might sometimes spare a thought for the men who invented, designed and developed these crucial records, which in themselves are an expression of the close and sometimes bitter relationship between church and state in English history.

Those of us with English ancestry – or whose livelihoods depend upon the discovery of it – have the formidable Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell (ca 1485 to 1540) to thank for the establishment of parish record-keeping so early in our history.

Cromwell’s own family history was startling; he rose to high office from inauspicious origins. His father Walter Cromwell, a clothier and blacksmith of Putney, was a heavy drinker who owned his own brewery and inn. Walter was frequently summoned to the manorial court for misdemeanours and he was eventually evicted from his property after being convicted of fraudulently altering tenancy documents.

By the 1530s, self-educated, well-travelled and full of religious zeal, his son Thomas Cromwell had established himself first as right hand man to Cardinal Wolsey and then to King Henry VIII himself. The story of his extraordinary career has enjoyed a recent revival through the award-winning novels by Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies (the trilogy will be completed by the yet-to-be-published The Mirror and the Light) and he is soon to take the stage in a double Royal Shakespeare production based on Mantel’s novels, which will run concurrently with a BBC drama series in which Mark Rylance plays the great statesman.

Sir Thomas Cromwell (Wenceslas Hollar [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

Sir Thomas Cromwell (Wenceslas Hollar [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

In 1535, having engineered the King’s position as supreme head of the English church, of which he was now Vicar-General, Cromwell turned upon the church his unique combination of religious and administrative zeal. The Valor Ecclesiasticus, a national census of church lands and wealth, was completed within a year, a bureaucratic masterpiece. At the same time he was determined that every parish church in the land should have a copy of the Bible in English, and this was for the good of the soul, not the royal powerhouse or coffers. Indeed, Cromwell contributed handsomely from his own purse towards the publication of Coverdale’s English Bible.

Those on the receiving end of Cromwell’s enthusiasm found it difficult to separate the religious from the bureaucratic. When his order went out, in September 1538, that every parish priest should keep a weekly record of ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’, many parishes ignored it, risking the fine of 3s 4d; they suspected, with traditional English cynicism, that something more sinister than historical record-keeping was afoot. Anger at the suppression of the monasteries was mingled with fear that the state might have similar designs on parish churches. At the very least, it seemed more than likely that this amassing of personal data was the prelude for some new tax.

The original order, which was to create for England an unprecedented wealth of information about families from the humblest to the highest, was to:

‘Keep one book or register, wherein ye shall write the day and year of every wedding, christening, and burying, made within your parish for your time.’

The book was to be kept secure in the parish chest with keys held by the incumbent and the churchwardens.

geograph-550586-by-Bob-Embleton parish chest

16th century parish chest at St Mary, Kempley, Gloucestershire: © Copyright Bob Embleton and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence

Such was the lack of clerical enthusiasm that a second decree had to be passed in 1547, this time adding the stipulation that the fine should benefit the poor, for Cromwell was also concerned with social reform, and his Poor Relief legislation of 1536 was the first attempt of the state to address poverty on a parochial basis.

On 18 April 1540 Cromwell, who had already been elevated to the peerage, was created Earl of Essex; but his fortunes were already on a grim and downward path.  His reforming zeal had far overtaken that of his King; his involvement in the fiasco of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves had lost him the monarch’s trust; and in Tudor politics there were few exits from such high public office that were not bloody and brutal.  On 28 July 1540 the newly created Earl walked to the scaffold, charged with heresy and treason, and suffered a particularly gruelling execution.[1]  He left his King and country many legacies; but for the genealogist, those yellowing register books in the parish chest were among the most precious.


[1] Howard Leithead, ‘Cromwell, Thomas, earl of Essex (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2009.

 

 

 
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