[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.should be glad if it could bee an English man, the vestry of Martin s Bran-don Parish instructed its correspondent undertaking to recruit a parson onits behalf.St.John s Parish vestrymen asserted that we have reason to giveCredit to the English Clergy because they for the most part are sincere & stickmore close to their Holy Vocation than those of other nations that make morepretentions of Piety. 3Whether true or not, Virginia was hardly in a position to compete withthe Mother Country for the services of her native sons.The latter naturallyhad first call upon available livings at home.Young men in orders who werebright and ambitious, those with family and political connections, could evenlook beyond a parish cure to positions of greater dignity, power, and richeswithin the church s elaborate hierarchy.4Yet throughout the colonial period there were always parsons of Englishbirth in Virginia as there were elsewhere in the North American and WestIndian colonies.A few restless, adventurous sorts or those driven by mis-sionary zeal may have deliberately sought overseas postings.Some may havebeen ill-suited for the ministry, in trouble with the authorities, or in flightfrom trying personal situations.For most, however, the choice of an American living directly related to disconcerting realities about the English church.Clerical appointments were part of extensive clientage or patronage relation-ships.Local landowners and gentry by mid-century owned 53.4 percent of alladvowsons (legal right to appoint) in the church.5 Because there was no uni-form tax-based salary for clergy, the value of parish livings varied greatly.Many would barely subsist a minister and his family or, even in more extremecases, suffice to support a single man.Other benefices brought very handsomereturns.Clergy on the inside track acquired rights to more than one parishliving pluralities and hired their less fortunate or less politically astutebrethren at low wages to do the work.And so among the English clergy therewere vast disparities in income, position, and prestige.Throughout this period, moreover, there were always more clergymen thanthere were parish livings.As many as a fifth of all clergy in eighteenth-centuryEngland are estimated to have been permanently without a living. 6 Conse-quently, there were sound reasons for Englishmen in holy orders to try theirfortunes spiritual and otherwise in the far-flung colonies.7Two other general observations might be hazarded about Virginia s par-sons of English birth.At least two-thirds came from peripheral regions ofthe Mother Country: northern border counties, the Midlands, and the WestCountry.8 Counties bordering on Scotland, for example, contributed a dis-.88 parsons
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]