WRITING in 1692, the scholarly and (for some) saintly Bishop of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet offered clear advice to clergymen: “Friends and his Garden ought to be his chief Diversions, as his Study and his Parish ought to be his chief Imployments.”
Recent research has told us more and more about parish life in 18th-century England. Historians have overturned the old consensus that the Church was essentially corrupt and fundamentally negligent. We can now see that it simply had different priorities from those of the Victorians, who would go on to portray their predecessors as ineffectual at best. But the lives and lifestyles of Georgian clergy have not been the subject of sustained attention by scholars until now.
This deeply researched and generously illustrated new book sets out to explore the studies and the gardens and the friends of those clergy whom Burnet sought to advise. Based on years of work in archives and libraries across the country, it also sheds light on what parsons ate and what they bought, on the houses that they built and improved, and on the ways in which they fulfilled their duty. Although seriously scholarly — a two-page table itemises “Goods listed in clergy parlours, 1680-1836”, after all — it is a very human and humane account, full of fascinating detail. Read attentively, indeed, the book provides a complete picture of a whole world. Some is disconcertingly familiar. Much seems utterly foreign to modern-day experience.
Many of these clergy, it makes clear, took their ministry very seriously. Professor Stobart records an enthusiast who spent 11 days writing a single sermon — and it is small wonder that one Wiltshire vicar was so infuriated by the lukewarm response of the congregation to his preaching that he threw his Bible to the floor, “trampled on it & then swoare several oaths that he would burne all the books he had in his study”. All preachers have been there.
The office and work of the parson was, none the less, profoundly different from today. “Clergymen had time,” the author observes. They filled it with reading or hunting, with service as a magistrate, or work on scholarly pursuits. They visited and entertained their social equals. Agricultural improvements and the rising value of tithes enabled them to spend more, erecting ever larger and more comfortable houses. In 1753, in fact, one preacher praised bishops for the “care and the expence they were at to repair and adorn their palaces”.
Clergy, the author concludes, needed “to find a compromise between worldliness, the dignity of their social position and their spirituality”. Not all managed — and a revealing chapter surveys the many attacks made by contemporaries on venal, acquisitive, over-fed parsons. That eighty per cent of parsonages surveyed possessed a butler’s pantry suggests that even the most pious were not without some pretentions. Yet, although times have undoubtedly changed, this book explores a perennial dilemma for all clergy: how to live in the world, serve the world, and yet transcend the world. Burnet’s advice probably still stands. We must cultivate our garden.
The Revd Dr William Whyte is Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford, and Professor of Social and Architectural History in the University of Oxford.
Life in the Georgian Parsonage: Morals, material goods and the English clergy
Jon Stobart
Bloomsbury £27.99
(978-1-350-38207-7)
Church Times Bookshop £25.19