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Patterns of Religious Worship in 1851

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

K. S. Inglis
K. S. Inglis
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer in History, University of Adelaide
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Extract

In 1851 an official census of religious worship was held in Great Britain for the first and last time. Alongside the ordinary decennial census, parliament sought information about attendance at public worship on a given Sunday, about the number of sittings available in churches and chapels, and about certain other matters. Because the result could be interpreted as showing that half the nation were Nonconformists, parliamentary defenders of the Establishment resisted any proposal to repeat a census of this sort. Every ten years from 1860 to 1910, they recommended instead a census of religious profession, by which the Church of England would certainly appear to be comparatively stronger. On these occasions nonconformist members of parliament invariably said that they would have a census of attendance or none at all. Consequently, since 1851 no official information about the religious preferences of the population has ever been collected. Its very uniqueness is one reason for coaxing out of the 1851 census of religious worship all the evidence it can yield. It is a richer quarry than its comparative neglect by social and ecclesiastical historians might suggest. The purpose of this article is to discuss how reliable it is as a source and what it reveals about religious practice in large English towns.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 1960 , pp. 74 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1960

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References

page 74 note 1 Religious Worship (England and Wales), Report, P.P., 1852–3, lxxxix, 1. There was a separate report for Scotland.

page 74 note 2 A form was sent to every clergyman in charge of a Church of England building, asking where the church or chapel was situated, when and how it was consecrated, how much accommodation (free and appropriated) it had, how many people were estimated to have been present at each divine service on 30 March 1851, and how many were present on the average during the past twelve months (or for a shorter period if the building was new). If the building was first used in or after 1800, the author of the return was also asked to say how or by whom it was erected, and how it was paid for. Finally, a space was left for remarks. A second form, sent to people in charge of other places of worship, sought similar information. They were not asked, however, about costs or endowments; but they were asked to say whether the building was separate and whether it was used exclusively as a place of worship.

A third form was drawn up specially for the Society of Friends. In no case was anybody compelled, as in the general census, to give information.

page 74 note 3 In this article, ‘Nonconformist’ always includes ‘Methodist’.

page 74 note 4 Young, G. M. and Handcock, W. D. are, therefore, in error when they write: ‘Nonconformist objections prevented the repetition of the count of 1851 at subsequent censuses. …’ (English Historical Documents, xii. (1) 1833–74, London 1956, 335.)Google Scholar

page 75 note 1 Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, clix, 1722–3.

page 75 note 2 Ibid., 3rd series, CXV, 629–31.

page 75 note 3 Ibid., 3rd series, CXXXV, 25.

page 75 note 4 Mann, H., ‘On the statistical position of the religious bodies in England and Wales’, Journal of Statistical Society, XVIII. (1855), 141.Google Scholar For a biographical note on Mann, see Foster, J., Men-at-the-Bar, London 1885, 303.Google Scholar

page 75 note 5 Of the 34,467 places of worship enumerated in England and Wales, the number of sittings was not ascertained in 2,134 cases, and the number of attendances in 1,004. In 390 cases neither accommodation nor attendance was ascertained.

page 76 note 6 Public Record Office, Ecclesiastical Returns, 1851, H.O. 129, 469/8/1/1.

page 77 note 1 Ibid., 479/10/3/5.

page 77 note 2 Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, CXXXV, 33.

page 78 note 1 The Times, 9 January 1854, 6.

page 78 note 2 After gathering opinions and making his own enquiries, Mann suggested that one-half of those people attending a service in the afternoon had not been present in the morning, and that one-third of the people at evening service had not been present at any earlier time during the day. This formula was not popular among Nonconformists. For, although it was generally agreed that Nonconformists were more inclined than Anglicans to attend more than one service each Sunday, it was abo true (as Mann noted) that members of the Church of England tended to worship earlier in the day than Nonconformists. In Church of England buildings, 16 out of every 100 sittings were occupied for the evening service; in Nonconformist chapels at the same service, 45 out of every 100 sittings were occupied. To assume, therefore, that two in every three evening worshippers had also attended earlier in the day, was to reduce the number of Nonconformist worshippers far more drastically than the number of Church of England worshippers. Wesleyans in particular thought Mann's estimate unjust.

page 78 note 3 Halevy, E. wrongly paraphrases the report thus: ‘Over half of those who should have attended had stayed away’ A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, London 1951, iv. 393.Google Scholar

page 79 note 1 Previous estimates were usually based on the figures of membership and accommodation published by religious bodies. These were inadequate mainly because some denominations collected fuller information than others, because criteria for membership varied, and because no reliable inference could be made from these figures about the actual numbers attending services. For one widely-quoted estimate based on evidence of this sort, see Baines, E., The Social, Educational and Religious State of the Manufacturing Districts, London 1843.Google Scholar

page 80 note 1 This figure is reached by adding the morning, afternoon and evening attendances, given as percentages of population, in the official report. The figures that follow have been calculated by the writer from crude figures in Table F of the Report.

page 83 note 1 It may be observed that in Liverpool and Wigan, Roman Catholic attendances were higher than Nonconformist attendances; and that in Preston, Roman Catholic attendances appear, from the figures, to have been higher than Church of England attendances. The figures for Preston are in this respect misleading. This is one of the very few cases in which the number of missing returns is substantial: returns were not submitted for seven out of seventeen Church of England buildings in Preston, and the proportion of Roman Catholic worshippers in the town is thus made to look even more striking than it was. Even allowing for the missing returns, Preston belongs clearly to the group of towns in which attendances were lowest.

page 85 note 1 The most substantial bodies excluded from this table are the Presbyterians in Sunderland, South Shields and Tynemouth, and the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion in Rochdale.

page 86 note 1 ‘Methodist’ here includes Wesleyan Methodists, Methodist New Connexion, Primitive Methodists, Bible Christians, Wesleyan Association, Wesleyan Methodist Reformers and Independent Methodists—i.e. all the groups which after 1900 formed the United Methodist Church. It does not include Calvinistic Methodists or the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion; in any case, the support for these bodies was slight in England.