A Blessed Company: Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690-1776

By John K. Nelson

In this book, John Nelson reconstructs everyday Anglican religious practice and experience in Virginia from the end of the seventeenth century to the start of the American Revolution. Challenging previous characterizations of the colonial Anglican establishment as weak, he reveals the fundamental role the church played in the political, social, and economic as well as the spiritual lives of its parishioners.

Drawing on extensive research in parish and county records and other primary sources, Nelson describes Anglican Virginia's parish system, its parsons, its rituals of worship and rites of passage, and its parishioners' varied relationships to the church. All colonial Virginians--men and women, rich and poor, young and old, planters and merchants, servants and slaves, dissenters and freethinkers--belonged to a parish. As such, they were subject to its levies, its authority over marriage, and other social and economic dictates. In addition to its religious functions, the parish provided essential care for the poor, collaborated with the courts to handle civil disputes, and exerted its influence over many other aspects of community life.

A Blessed Company demonstrates that, by creatively adapting Anglican parish organization and the language, forms, and modes of Anglican spirituality to the Chesapeake's distinctive environmental and human conditions, colonial Virginians sustained a remarkably effective and faithful Anglican church in the Old Dominion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2003
• ISBN: 9780807875100

John K. Nelson

John K. Nelson is professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Book preview

A Blessed Company

A Blessed Company

Parishes, Parsons, and Parishioners in Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776

John K. Nelson

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2001 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Heidi Perov

Set in Centaur

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

All photographs by Lauri Lawson

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book was published with the generous assistance of the Blythe Family Fund of the University of North Carolina Press and the James Sprunt Fund of the Departments of History and Political Science of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Nelson, John K. (John Kendall), 1933–

A blessed company: parishes, parsons, and parishioners in

Anglican Virginia, 1690–1776 / John K. Nelson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2663-4 (alk. paper)

1. Church of England—Virginia—History—17th century. 2. Church of England—Virginia—History—18th century. 3. Virginia—Church history—17th century. 4. Virginia—Church history—18th century. I. Title.

BX5917.V8 N399 2002

283′.755′09032—dc21     2001027542

05 04 03 02 01     5 4 3 2 1

For Nancy

Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

PART I. PARISHES

1. Local Governance: Parish-County

2. Parish Formation

3. The Parish’s Twelve Bishops: The Vestry

4. Levies

5. Provisions: Parsons

6. Provisions: Divine Services

7. Provisions: Parishioners

PART II. PARSONS

8. Origins

9. Preparations for Ministry

10. Recruitment and Placement

11. Station

12. Metes and Bounds of Conduct

13. Clerical Lives

PART III. DIVINE SERVICES

14. The Divine Service

15. The Sermon

16. Rites of Passage

17. Pastoralia

PART IV. PARISHIONERS

18. Adherents

19. Women

20. African Americans

21. Miscreants

22. Dissenters

23. A Blessed Company

Epilogue

Appendix A. Biographical Directory of Virginia’s Anglican Parish Clergy, 1690–1776

Appendix B. Tables

Notes

Index

Illustrations and Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

St. Peter’s Parish, New Kent County, Lower Church (St. Peter’s Parish Church) 179

Cople Parish, Westmoreland County, Lower Church (Yeocomico Church) 179

Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County, Middle Church 180

St. Anne’s Parish, Essex County, Upper Church (Vauter’s Church) 180

Martin’s Brandon Parish, Prince George County (Merchant’s Hope Church) 181

St. Paul’s Parish, Hanover County, Upper Church (Slash Church) 181

Westover Parish, Charles City County, Upper Church 182

St. John’s Parish, King William County, Lower Church (Old St. John’s Church) 182

Christ Church Parish, Lancaster County, Christ Church Parish Church 183

Abingdon Parish, Gloucester County, Abingdon Parish Church 183

Truro Parish, Fairfax County, Truro Parish Church (Pohick Church) 184

St. Mark’s Parish, Culpeper County (Little Fork Church) 184

MAPS

1. Virginia parishes and counties, ca. 1730 18

2. Virginia county and parish formation 24

3. Virginia parishes and counties, ca. 1775 26

Acknowledgments

This brief notice can in no way adequately depict the contributions others have made to this project or convey my appreciation to them. I am indebted: to the interlibrary loan staffs of the Library of Virginia (formerly Virginia State Library) and Davis Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their efficient transmittal of the microfilm reels central to my research; to the microform reading room staffs of the two libraries for making time spent there as productive and comfortable as the nature of the work could permit; to Don Higginbotham, Mike Lienesch, Marla Miller, Nancy Nelson, and John Woolverton, who without hesitation agreed to read in its entirety an early and unwieldy version of this study and by their thoughtful responses played a major and formative role in its ongoing revision; to Bob Calhoun and the unindentified reader for the University of North Carolina Press, who treated the project with great seriousness and critical acumen; to the Triangle Early American History Seminar colleagues, who discussed three of the chapters at monthly meetings and provided scholarly companionship and friendship in addition to their probing assessments; to Mark Thompson, for his patient and expert computer instruction; to Peter Coclanis and History Department colleagues for their sustaining encouragement; to Bill Blythe, whose untimely death has meant an incalculable loss to all who value humane learning, were inspired by his lively curiosity, and were enriched by his friendship; to my editors at the University of North Carolina Press, Lewis Bateman and David Perry, and their assistants, for their insistence upon excellence in every phase of book production; to the Blythe Family Fund and the James Sprunt Fund, for their generous publication support; and, most important, to Nancy, whose love, care, and unstinting loyalty made possible staying the course.

A Blessed Company

Prologue

Late in the 1730s William Proctor arrived at Westover, the James River plantation of William Byrd II. Proctor, a Scot, had been recruited by Byrd’s English merchant contacts to assume at an annual salary of £20 sterling the positions of librarian and tutor at Westover.¹

For William Proctor, young, single, and male, England’s ancientest, as well as most profitable Colony offered a matchless opportunity to fulfill ambition.² Westover afforded an exceptional vantage point from which Proctor could take his measure of colonial Virginia society. From the great house he could observe the operation of the tobacco economy, the varied work of the large slave labor force, and the life the slaves made for themselves in their quarters. There, too, he could converse with overseers of the outlying farms and with artisans maintaining and improving buildings and equipment and preparing plantation products for shipment abroad. He could witness the unloading of crates and barrels coming from England and Scotland in return for shipments of tobacco and containing commodities that both sustained and elaborated the genteel society fashioned by Byrd and his peers: tailored suits and gowns, shoes and stockings, farming tools and household implements, cloth, buttons and buckles, fine chinaware and silver, wine and brandy, books and newspapers. Neighboring farmers came to buy, borrow, or beg seed, tools, and supplies, to get advice on treating the fevers, agues, and fluxes that yearly laid them low, to compare notes on the effects of a recent hailstorm, on methods of fertilizing the soil, or on the most recent happenings at the meeting of the county court. As Virginia custom and fashion dictated, there came also an unceasing stream of guests from among the colony’s leading families drawn by Westover’s proximity to Williamsburg, and the social and political eminence of its master.

I serve a very Honorable & Virtuous Master, Proctor wrote to a brother in Scotland. I am library keeper & have all genteel conveniences; moreover, to save me a risk, he gives me yearly a draught upon his London Factor, & orders my cloathes with his own goods at the English Price, which is cheaper than in Scotland. . . . I have some small addition of one guinea or two p. annum for my Pupill’s Companion, besides the kindness of the Family in having my Linen made or mended.³

Congenial and advantageous as the situation might be, both Proctor and Byrd understood its temporary character. Byrd welcomed the daily presence of a young man who valued learning, who could appreciate his magnificent library, the greatest private collection of books in colonial America, and with whom a serious discussion of literature and philosophy was possible.⁴ He likewise respected the personal ambition that would limit Proctor’s tenure of service at Westover. For his part, Proctor reported that conversations in the library early turned to practical matters and that Byrd encouraged this train of thought. Two options for the librarian’s future presented themselves. One was husbandry. I could wish very soon to settle in a new way of Life, Proctor wrote. Here a Man improves his own Land & transmitts it to his Children; & a poor Man, if diligent, may in a short time (less than seven years) become able to purchase & set up upon perhaps a mile square of Ground.⁵ The second was the ministry: Col. Byrd will certainly procure me a Parish worth 100£ ster’l a year, if I can like it.⁶

Tantalizing as husbandry must have been, Proctor chose the more modest and safer course—a parson’s life. Perhaps he recognized that Westover was no place by which to calculate the odds of succeeding at planting, that the difficulties of starting from scratch would be formidable even with Byrd’s assistance. Perhaps his ambition was checked by deficiencies of imagination and will. Perhaps he knew exactly where his interests and talents lay. Byrd even suggested that there was no need to choose between the two options: My good Master, indeed, frequently is pleasant with me, & says why mayn’t I be at once Parson & Planter, the one assisting the other, but I never yet believed I could follow two things or leave my Book for any thing unless only to aid & countenance a skillful manager cou’d I find him.⁷ Determined not to leave my Book, Proctor recrossed the Atlantic in 1745, presented himself for ordination by the bishop of London, and returned to Virginia, where he would serve as minister of Nottoway Parish in Amelia County until his death in 1761.⁸

This study seeks to reconstruct the everyday context of colonial Virginia Anglicanism, the world William Proctor encountered and possibly helped shape when in 1745 he began his ministry—one of more than 365 clergymen serving the Anglican Church in Virginia between 1690 and 1775. It does not attempt to retell the public history of the church except when and where the provincial arena of governors, commissaries, and legislators impinged directly and significantly upon the parishes. Rather, it explores eighteenth-century Virginia Anglicanism by examining first its parishes; secondly, the men who served as parsons; thirdly, religious rite and ritual; and, finally, Virginians in their varied roles as parishioners.

The Virginia Anglican parish (Part I), a remarkable creative adaptation of its English counterpart, had four distinguishing features: inclusivity; flexibility; multicongregational structure; and lay control. Virginians responded to rapid population growth, physical mobility, and changing settlement patterns by the formation of new parishes (increasing in number from forty-seven in 1690 to ninety-five in 1775), by dissolving those that had outlived their usefulness, and by frequent realigning of existing boundaries. The sequential creation of open-ended parishes and counties to the west, northwest, and southwest expeditiously and effectively extended the Anglican establishment and local governance to new settlers.

A dispersed rural population necessitated large (by English standards) parishes in order to include a sufficient tax base to support their functions. But large parishes precluded parishioners gathering for worship in a single parish church. So Virginians imaginatively improvised a multicongregational structure. Most parishes sustained two to four churches and chapels, while some newly formed open-ended parishes had as many as five to eight congregations. Failure to recognize fully this structural feature has resulted in substantial underestimates of the number of Virginia’s eighteenth-century congregations, of its Anglican adherents, and of the establishment’s size and strength relative to religious affiliations and establishments elsewhere in colonial British America.

Ministry in a multicongregational parish meant putting the parson—each parish had but one minister—on the road rotating his services among congregations from Sunday to Sunday. Elsewhere in the parish, congregations gathered weekly for Divine Service read by lay clerks. The Book of Common Prayer thus facilitated rather than impeded Anglican innovation in the face of the Chesapeake’s distinctive environmental circumstances.

Virginia’s parishes were firmly under lay control by leading gentry families. Conventional wisdom has always acknowledged this but interpreted it as bearing major responsibility for the presumed religious lassitude, indifference, and institutional weakness of Virginia’s Mother Church. A close examination of extant vestry records suggests the contrary. Paradoxically, decentralized gentry lay control yielded by the eighteenth century the most thoroughgoing religious establishment in colonial British America. Vestries proved assiduous in recruiting clergy—the mean annual occupancy rate for the half-century before the Revolution was 89 percent—and in providing them with parsonages and glebes, in building and maintaining churches and chapels equipped with the furnishing appropriate to Anglican worship, in employing clerks and sextons, and in financing and supervising an extensive welfare program for persons unable to care for themselves. All of this cost a great deal; throughout the period and across the entire colony the parish levy was the heaviest tax paid by Virginians (on average per tithable two-and-one-half times greater annually than the county levy).

While the county has long been celebrated as colonial Virginia’s mode of local governance, the role of its essential partner—the parish—has been downplayed, ignored, and sometimes denigrated. Colonial Virginians did not sharply distinguish secular concerns from sacred. Intermingled with the parish’s religious functions—or so they would appear to a twentieth-century observer—were responsibilities of a civil nature such as welfare and processioning of property lines. Even more important is the recognition that colonial Virginians did not sharply demarcate the functions and personnel of the county and the parish. Consequently, local governance is best understood as parish-county.

Virginia’s Anglican parsons—the focus of Part II of the study—were ethnically (or by national origins) a mixed bag, but the inference that they were therefore inferior in education, commitment, and conduct is not supported by the evidence. From the seventeenth century into the 1730s, recruitment was haphazard and unorganized; it yielded clergy from the peripheries of the British Isles—English border counties, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—and from among Continental Protestant refugees. Thereafter, Virginia vestries succeeded in recruiting young men for the ministry locally and from other mainland colonies. All still were obligated to go to England for ordination, but that expensive and often arduous journey was far less of a deterrent than conventional wisdom has suggested. By 1775 parsons in two out of every three parishes were either Virginia-born (34), born elsewhere in the American colonies (7), or men of British or foreign birth who had resided in Virginia prior to ordination (24); i.e., Virginians on the eve of the Revolution enjoyed an American-bred clergy corps.

Parsons typically entered upon their parish duties as young men, served a single parish, and remained in Virginia until their deaths. While much has been made of the refusal of vestries to present parsons for induction and thereby secure for them lifetime legal rights to their livings, parsons with rare exceptions enjoyed de facto tenure. In the half-century before the Revolution, ministers served an average of 12.4 years. Moreover, thirty-three parsons had tenures of 11–15 years, twenty-three of 15–20 years, and forty-seven served 21 or more years. Gentlemen-by-profession, many contracted advantageous marriages with gentry families, acquired land and slaves, and even in several instances took their place on county court benches. The weight of evidence suggests ready acceptance by the ruling gentry, a circumstance probably both a help and a hindrance in the discharge of their ministry. In personal conduct Virginia parsons were neither better nor worse than their clerical contemporaries on either side of the Atlantic, although a compelling case can be made that provisions for the clergy in Virginia represented a substantial improvement over the pluralism, nonresidence, and clientage relations that persisted in the Church of England at home.

Part III considers parish ministry: the Divine Service, the sermon, administration of sacraments, rites of passage, and pastoral care. White Virginians in substantial numbers and African Americans in far smaller numbers attended Divine Service faithful to the rubrics of the Prayer Book, conducted by suitably vested clergy or lay readers, and held in several hundred churches and chapels that were well supplied with Bibles, Prayer Books, and the furnishings appropriate for preaching the Word and administering the sacraments. Sermons stressed a reasonable faith, moral conduct, benevolence, acceptance of the social order and one’s attendant duties, and obedience to all in authority. Instruction and injunction from the pulpit, however, were always heard within the liturgical setting of the Service. Collects, prayers, and prescribed responses, the reading or singing of psalms, scripture passages, and the Creed provided weekly reiteration and reaffirmation of the central teachings of the faith. Parishioners communicated in numbers comparable to those in England’s rural parishes. Throughout the period, parish ministry attended to individual rites of passage from birth to marriage to death. For each, the Book of Common Prayer provided appropriate liturgical definition and setting. Parsons baptized a high proportion of the colony’s white infants and rapidly increasing numbers of African Americans in the decades immediately prior to the Revolution. Only Anglican parsons could officiate at marriages in colonial Virginia. Prayer Book rites likely marked the burial of most white Virginians. Thus liturgy framed and interpreted the course of life. Similarly, a Christian year beginning with Advent and highlighted by the festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday along with the civil calendar and the progression of the seasons defined Virginians’ sense of time. Colony-wide public fasts and thanksgivings underscored the intersection of the civil and religious and the church’s representation of the colony’s fundamental beliefs and values.

All Virginians—men and women, rich and poor, young and old, planters and merchants, yeomen farmers and artisans, servants and slaves, dissenters and freethinkers—were parishioners. Their relation to the parish and their varied roles as parishioners are examined in Part IV. Dissenters, for example, upon application were allowed their own ministers and meetinghouses but were not exempted from parish levies or the requirement that they seek out the Anglican parson when they desired to be married. On the other hand, there is no evidence of dissenters being denied parish assistance when personal needs arose.

Slaves were a major component of the parish tax base, although slaves derived no direct material and seemingly limited spiritual benefit from the parish. There is, however, fascinating evidence of Anglican parsons giving substantial attention to catechetical instruction and baptism of African Americans in the two or three decades preceding the Revolution.

Women’s experiences as parishioners reflected prevailing eighteenth-century social and cultural norms: no female parsons or clerks; no women on the vestry. A few found parish employment as sextons, and many served at public expense as caregivers. As widows, as wives deserted by husbands, as persons dealing with poverty, sickness, or dependent old age, women were major recipients of parish assistance, and, as mothers of illegitimate children, were subjects of prosecution. Nonetheless, the Divine Service afforded the one sanctioned occasion for women’s regular participation in public life: as worshipers and communicants they enjoyed an equal station otherwise denied them.

Women bearing children out of wedlock were not alone in violating behavioral norms. Throughout the period and largely upon charges brought by parish churchwardens, county grand juries presented parishioners—many more men than women—for swearing, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, gambling, and disturbing the Sabbath or the peace. Parishioners as miscreants provide an invaluable means of assessing eighteenth-century Virginia’s community standards as well as evidence that a rural, dispersed population found it possible to monitor conduct deemed essential to a decent, orderly, and responsible society. Fines paid by miscreants, moreover, were returned to the parishes and designated for relief of the poor.

All adult Virginians by law were obligated to attend church at least once in every two months. Previous scholarship has deemed the law a nullity, and the absence of attendance figures or membership rolls seemingly precludes any meaningful estimates of attendance at parish churches, much less adherence to Anglicanism. In fact, questions about membership or adherence can never be definitively answered nor will there be any precise measurement of attendance. Nonetheless, in some counties—notably those in the Northern Neck—grand juries regularly made presentments for nonattendance throughout the period. Elsewhere prosecutions were typically more sporadic or, in some instances, unheard of. But that evidence, uneven and unsatisfactory as it is, taken in conjunction with the anecdotal accounts of worshipers filling churches and chapels and the behavior of vestries in their diligent attention to church construction and renovation strongly suggests that a majority of white Virginians and a much smaller number of African Americans may be counted as adhering to Virginia’s Mother Church. If for no other reason—of course there were other and more compelling concerns and commitments—Sunday worship afforded Virginians the weekly opportunity to meet, to socialize, and to exchange news and gossip. Announcements affecting their common life were made during and after the service; on the doors of churches and chapels were posted notices, both official and private. While parish churches ministered to spiritual needs and aspirations, they simultaneously served as vital social and communication centers for their neighborhoods.

Viewed from its parishes rather than from Williamsburg or London, Virginia’s Anglican establishment appears firmly rooted and tightly woven into the daily and commonplace experiences of eighteenth-century Virginians. Over the period extending from England’s Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, the dominant themes are ones of continuity and evolutionary change in the direction of ever greater uniformity and conformity to Anglican norms, the latter despite the absence of the ecclesiastical superstructure customarily deemed essential. Virginia’s Anglican establishment was alive and vital on the eve of the Revolution. Parish energy had not slackened. New parishes were being formed in response to population growth and mobility, and virtually all ninety-five parishes had resident clergy, the majority of whom were American-bred. Vestries were ordering the building and furnishing of new churches and chapels, providing parsonages and glebes, levying and collecting the parish taxes, and directing increasing amounts of tax monies to the assistance of those in need.

A pervasive Anglican culture linked Virginians not only with contemporaries across the Atlantic but also back across the centuries that had witnessed the fashioning of the institutions, beliefs, and traditions of Western Christendom. It defined through liturgy and preaching the purposes and ends of human life, the nature of society and authority, and the norms of behavior. Community (a blessed company) for most colonial Virginians thus was the shared social, cultural, and spiritual experience of the Anglican parish, or, more precisely, given its dispersed settlement patterns, the neighborhood of farms and plantations in the vicinity of each parish church or chapel.⁹

If the vital signs in the Anglican parishes were still strong in 1775, how then does one explain the fate of the church and the parish system during and after the Revolution? Not only was the church legally disestablished between 1776 and 1790, but the parish system was effectively dismantled, and support for the Anglican faith reconstituted as the Protestant Episcopal Church was woefully weak. The question cannot be avoided, although it is beyond the scope of this study to address it fully. The Epilogue confronts the problem by offering a brief outline of the disestablishment proceedings, a critique of those who have answered the question by positing a weak, dispirited, and unresponsive colonial church, and a suggestion that A Blessed Company affords another piece of mounting evidence that the War of American Independence brought with it sweeping revolutionary social and cultural change. As Thomas Buckley concludes, Virginia’s resolution of the relationship between church and state constituted a genuinely revolutionary course of action.¹⁰

Two emphases distinguish recent scholarly treatments of religion in eighteenth-century Virginia. Unfortunately, both serve to limit or misconstrue an understanding of colonial Anglicanism. Both, in fact, serve to reinforce time-hallowed notions of the church as institutionally weak and dependent and spiritually dead. The first characterizes the Anglican establishment as an instrument fashioned and manipulated by the planter elite first to obtain hegemony and then to uphold dominance in the social order. The church, to be sure, receives greater scholarly attention than was often true of earlier historical accounts of the Chesapeake, but it is at the expense of denying Anglicanism spiritual integrity and institutional vitality.

The second emphasis highlights evangelicalism—New Light Presbyterians, Separate Baptists, and Methodists—as the dynamic source of genuine religious experience (as well as heralds of profound social and cultural change) introduced into the Chesapeake from the mid-eighteenth century on. By implication, evangelicals are credited with christianizing Maryland and Virginia. By implication as well, the success of evangelical denominations (largely, in fact, a post–Revolutionary era phenomenon) validates dissenter attacks on the Church of England as lifeless, this-worldly, weak, and even dissolute.

Underlying past and present scholarly treatment of American religion is a pervasive and sometimes pernicious dissenter bias, most often unrecognized and perhaps even unintended. Religion in the colonial period is made virtually synonymous with seventeenth-century New England Puritanism and eighteenth-century evangelical revivalism. Worship is equated with preaching; spirituality with individual conversion; and institutional authenticity with voluntary association and congregational autonomy. These popularly held but simplistic notions may prevent our coming to terms with the colonial religious experience in all its diversity, richness, and complexity. Virginia Anglicans, for example, expressed their Christian faith through the repetitive liturgical and devotional formularies of the Book of Common Prayer, lectionary-prescribed scripture readings, ritual observances of the festivals of the church calendar, a parish structure embracing all inhabitants and predicated on uniformity in belief and practice, and a commitment to the common welfare in a hierarchically ordered society. The evidence for Anglican spirituality and vital religious practice must largely be inferred from everyday behaviors. That is the task to which this study is directed.

Sometime after his return to Virginia, William Proctor was accepted as rector by the vestry of Nottoway Parish in Amelia County. Portions of vestry records and parish registers are extant for forty-six of Virginia’s eighteenth-century parishes, but the vestry minutes for Nottoway Parish are not among them. And so there is no certainty about the date of Proctor’s appointment, although it probably occurred in 1746. On lists of parishes and ministers in Virginia forwarded to the bishop of London in 1754, 1755, and 1758, he appears as Nottoway’s parson.¹¹ Earlier, in 1749, he relieved a vacancy in nearby Bristol Parish.¹² The vestry minutes of Antrim Parish reveal similar interim services there in 1753, 1760, and 1761.¹³

The court records for Amelia County also confirm his presence. Proctor sought permission in 1752 to build a mill that the court granted the following year.¹⁴ In 1754 a special court of oyer and terminer found Proctor’s slave, Hall, guilty of poisoning, ordered his execution, and compensated Proctor £40 for the loss.¹⁵ Apart from that chilling episode with its emphatic reminder that Virginia clergymen owned slaves, Proctor’s business with the county court was limited. He was never presented by the county grand jury (as were some of his colleagues) for a violation of the community’s moral code. He was twice a defendant in small debt petitions—once as the executor of an estate.¹⁶ But anyone familiar with the litigious bent of eighteenth-century Virginia society, and with the incredible volume of civil actions confronting the county justices month after month, would concur in the judgment that Proctor’s court record implies at least a quiet and inoffensive, even perhaps an exemplary, life. The county court records offer one further and final piece of information—his death in 1761.¹⁷

Fugitive, scattered, elusive, and puzzling as is the evidence—an ordering of the bits and pieces from vestry and county court records, from legislative journals and statutes, from the journals and correspondence of eighteenth-century laypersons, from newspaper items, and from local histories and genealogical compilations, together with a handful of sermons and clergy letters—it does, nonetheless, provide an opening to the everyday world of the Anglican parish and its parsons.¹⁸

I Parishes

Almighty and everlasting God, by whose spirit the whole body of the Church is governed, and sanctified: Receive our supplications, and prayers which we offer before thee for all estates of men in thy holy Church, that every member of the same in his vocation, and ministry, may truly, and godly serve thee, through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

—The Book of Common Prayer (1662)

1 Local Governance: Parish-County

Axiomatic in general histories of early America is the identification of the county as the basic unit of local government in the southern colonies. Description of the county is most often juxtaposed to that of the New England township. Accounts trace their English origins, delineate the creative adaptations of Old World patterns to New World circumstances and aspirations, and emphasize both the diversity of local institutions and the decentralization of authority within colonial British America. This firmly established characterization has provided a useful and broadly faithful means of generalizing about the variety of shapes and practices in local governance. But for Virginia, at least, the designation of the county as the basic institution of local government is both inadequate and inaccurate.

A source of the problem is the imposition upon colonial days of later notions of separate civil and religious spheres. Thus parish supposedly connotes religion; county, the civil realm. Moreover, colonial Virginians have been viewed persistently as this-worldly, indifferent to concerns of the spirit, their established church as weak and rudderless. If religion were of little consequence in the Old Dominion, then the parish must necessarily have been of minor account, a creature of local privilege and a relatively ineffective means of religious ministration, as one recent and highly regarded study would have it.¹

Freed from these traditional viewpoints to look afresh at both parish and county, one finds that a dual institution comes into view. Local government in colonial Virginia is most precisely characterized as parish-county. The linkage needs to be indicated because in practice these two local institutions intermixed personnel, functions, and purposes. Neither can be understood without the other. Of the two, the parish was more immediate to the inhabitants of the Old Dominion; it was rarely, if ever, larger in size than the county; it was sometimes coterminous, but most often smaller. More to the point, the parish levy consistently, year after year and colony-wide, constituted for all but a handful the largest tax paid. The greater portion of funds raised by the parish went for the support of the Anglican ministry—parsons, clerks, sextons, glebes, churches, and chapels—but a significant part, regularly amounting to a quarter to a third or more of the total, went to relieve the poor. The parish was the institution closest to human need and best equipped to respond.²

Joined by mutual responsibility to provide for the material and spiritual welfare of the community, to ensure fair play and an evenhanded administration of justice, to maintain order and secure property, the parish-county provided colonial Virginians the context in which occurred virtually all of their contacts and interrelationships beyond the immediate family, household, and kinship networks. It would scarcely be stretching the truth to describe the parish-county as the vital center of colonial Virginia: not the parish alone, not the county alone, not one or the other deemed the more vital element but they were linked in the minds of contemporaries.³

When the General Assembly in the 1720s sought to manage tobacco production by limiting the number of seedlings that could be planted and tended, the parish vestries—not the county justices—were responsible for appointing and supervising inspectors. The county court in turn dealt with the violators.⁴ Subsequently, when the assembly moved to a warehouse system as a quality-control device for tobacco, responsibility for appointing and supervising inspectors was transferred to the county court justices. By law the justices appointed surveyors of the county roads while parish vestries assigned the hands to the surveyors for clearing and maintaining the roads.⁵ While generally this division of labor was observed, justices and vestrymen were fully capable of devising their own ways of fulfilling the intent of the law. Early in the century the parish vestries, not the courts, hired and supervised ferrymen.

The failure of English authorities to provide bishops and diocesan administration for its Anglican colonies had among its several consequences the absence of ecclesiastical courts. In Virginia the county courts assumed some of the functions exercised by ecclesiastical courts in England.⁶ Twice yearly the county grand juries, upon information offered largely but not exclusively by the parish churchwardens, brought presentments against violators of the laws defining moral offenses and requiring church attendance. Blue Laws were by no means peculiar to New England, nor were Virginians hesitant to enforce their own codes of behavior. The county court in response to grand jury presentments felt it entirely appropriate to admonish churchwardens for failing to supply bread and wine for Holy Communion. Princess Anne County justices on one occasion even ordered the churchwardens of Lynnhaven Parish not to allow an unauthorized person to read Divine Service in one of the parish churches.⁷ The court also heard objections of disgruntled parishioners to the introduction of newfangled hymns in the place of time-honored psalmody.⁸ Those found guilty as charged in Virginia paid fines that were turned over to the parishes to be used in assisting the poor.

Nowhere is there evidence that parish vestrymen or county court justices viewed themselves respectively to be primarily religious or civil officials. Nor is there evidence that they made such distinctions among the array of responsibilities they bore separately or jointly. Deciding to build a church, hiring a parson, appointing tobacco inspectors, or binding out an orphan were all understood as normal or natural functions of the parish vestry, reflecting a sense of community united in its beliefs, values, and needs. Justices approached their diverse tasks with a similar understanding. Vestryman and justice, in fact, were often one and the same person.

Processioning offers another and singular example of parish-county jurisdictional overlay.⁹ Vestries every four years divided their parishes into precincts and appointed for each precinct at least two honest, intelligent freeholders who, with whatever assistance they required, walked the boundary lines of the properties owned by precinct residents. In the presence of the landowners, the inspectors confirmed existing tree blazes and other boundary marks and established new ones if the old had been destroyed or moved.¹⁰ This quadrennial reaffirming of boundaries afforded occasions to resolve disputed lines to the mutual accommodation of the interested parties. The inspectors’ reports that were duly entered in the parish—not the county court—records represented the acknowledgment by all landowners that the boundaries were accurately marked. Recourse by suit through the county court was available to those unwilling to accept the determination of the boundaries by the processioners.

Processioning derived from the medieval English practice of parish perambulations and the jurisdiction that church courts held over matters of property and probate.¹¹ The church courts never got transmitted to Virginia, but the association of parish and property did. Origins aside, however, convenience was the compelling reason for Virginia to assign responsibility for processioning to its parishes.

Over time, English parish perambulations took on a ritual character; they became the occasion or excuse for elaborate feasts, for eating, drinking, and horseplay.¹² Whether any of those traditions carried over to the Virginia countryside is not evident in the matter-of-fact processioners’ reports. Nonetheless, in 1706 the vestry of St. Peter’s Parish ordered processioners to give timely notice to parishioners to bring their Children to See the Said Processioning, and it subsequently reimbursed Thomas Massie for Liquor in going the procession.¹³ Is it too far-fetched to imagine neighbors trailing after the processioners, children taking advantage of this extraordinary event to amuse themselves, and participants and hangers-on adjourning to a nearby ordinary for refreshment?

In summary, no present-day categories such as civil and religious or material and spiritual afford a practicable or meaningful means of distinguishing between the Virginia county and parish. They do not work because these institutions functioned within a society and a culture in which such distinctions were not sharply drawn. Thus local governance was the province of both parish and county, and only as linked institutions sharing, dividing up, and intermingling their interests and responsibilities can Virginia’s local government be properly described.

2 Parish Formation

On 17 September 1744 a member (unnamed) of the House of Burgesses informed his colleagues "That John Austin of King William County, in his presence had said, That if a Bill passed for erecting a middle Parish in that County, that Mr. Power and Mr. Moore [the county’s elected representatives] should never see the Capital again; and also said, that if he lived in the Upper Parish, he would raise a Body of Men, and come down and drive the House of Burgesses into Hampton River."¹ For his rash pronouncement, the House judged Austin guilty of a high Crime and Misdemeanor; he was taken into custody, forced to make a humble submission to the House, and fined for costs.² Beyond this incident nothing is known of Austin, but his example is worthy to note; the business of parish formation obviously could arouse intense feelings among eighteenth-century Virginians.

A parish was the territorial unit devised for the support of the church’s ministry.³ Ancient in its origins, the parish was brought across the Atlantic to provide the fundamental institutional structure for Virginia’s Anglican Church.⁴ Along with parish came vestry, churchwarden, clerk, reader, sexton, and processioning—providing a vocabulary as well as institutional forms by which Virginians made sense of their everyday experience.⁵

If the purposes for the parish and the terms employed to denote its participants and functions were direct transplants from England, the institution that evolved in Virginia was something markedly different in size, shape, and operation—a creative adaptation.⁶ To assume that knowledge of the parish on one side of the Atlantic suffices for understanding it on the other, then as now invites confusion. Influencing the fashioning of Virginia parishes were the selective nature of migration, the development of tobacco as a staple crop and the resultant radical dispersal of population, the virtual absence of villages or towns, the sizable unfree labor force, the inability of England’s ecclesiastical authorities to extend normal diocesan supervision, the disjunctive and disruptive effects of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution at home, and the substantial measure of political autonomy exercised in the emerging colony.

Map 1. Virginia parishes (italics) and counties (capitals), ca. 1730

Just how the interactive dynamics of these factors mingled with chance, circumstance, and personality to shape the parish system defies ready analysis. Much was improvised without benefit of formal record keeping. A bit can be traced through the minutes of the royal council, laws put on the books by the General Assembly, and extant vestry minutes and county court records. What is evident is that the essential features of the Virginia parish system were put in place early in the seventeenth century.⁷ Four of these features require special attention: inclusivity; flexibility; multicongregational organization; and lay control. Whether considered together or separately, they exhibit the creative reworking of an Old World institution to fit the peculiar circumstances of the New.

Inclusivity

Inclusion of all inhabitants within a parish system posed a formidable challenge to Virginia’s Anglican Church. Inclusion was essential to uniformity of religious practice, the maintenance of social order, and the broadest possible base of material support—aims of religious establishments everywhere. Faced with a steady influx of immigrants, rapid population growth by the 1660s, and comparably dramatic physical mobility which spread people quickly and thinly out across the land, those responsible for the spiritual well-being of the inhabitants found it exceedingly difficult to establish and maintain stable and inclusive institutions.⁸

Virginians sought inclusion through open-ended parishes. From early on, institutions of local governance—counties and parishes—were projected outward for those migrating to the frontiers.⁹ The speed of settlement determined when these would be bounded off and when new open-ended parishes and counties would be created. Whatever the pace and direction of movement, it was accommodated by the prior provision—at least on paper—of local governance. Unquestionably this hastened the process of actual institutional formation, assisted in transmitting relatively uniform practices over space and time, and ensured timely representation in the House of Burgesses. One can only speculate what this connectedness and inclusiveness meant psychologically, but it is noteworthy that Virginia would largely escape the backcountry upheavals that wracked its neighbors in the decades preceding the American Revolution.¹⁰

For persons moving inland up the York River after 1679, New Kent County and St. Peter’s Parish offered such open-ended possibilities.¹¹ The same purposes were served elsewhere by Stafford County and Stafford Parish (renamed Overwharton after 1702) for those pushing north and northwestward along the Potomac; by Rappahannock County and Sittenburne Parish for those on the Rappahannock River; by Henrico County and Henrico Parish for those on the James and Appomattox Rivers; and by Charles City County and Martin’s Brandon Parish for those to the south of the James and Appomattox Rivers.¹² In 1720 the General Assembly created two vast western counties, Spotsylvania for the northern portion and Brunswick for the southern, each with its equally large parish, St. George’s and St. Andrew’s.¹³ With the formation of Frederick and Augusta Counties along with parishes bearing the same names in 1738, the assembly again fashioned large open-ended entities to enfold persons venturing into the Blue Ridge Mountains and beyond.¹⁴ Turk McCleskey’s description of Augusta County vividly captures the Virginia strategy: At their creation in 1738, the expansive borders of Augusta County stretched beyond a thin scattering of settlements in the Upper Shenandoah Valley to embrace the continental aspirations of colonial Virginia. From the headwaters of the Potomac to the Great Lakes and from the Blue Ridge west to the Pacific, the Augusta County lines represented to ambitious Virginians the farthest extent of a preemptive claim to the North American interior.¹⁵

Flexibility

Inclusion could be sustained only by flexibility. While meant to be permanent, the parish system was never permitted to be rigid. Old parishes were subdivided; parish boundaries were realigned; some parishes were consolidated; some were dissolved; and new parishes were formed in response to expanding settlement. In 1690 there were forty-seven parishes. When Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence eighty-six years later, there were ninety-five. In the 1760s alone, the General Assembly on twenty-two occasions enacted legislation forming new counties and parishes or consolidating and realigning those already in place.¹⁶

Adjusting local institutions to demographic change posed a daunting problem compounded by Virginia’s reluctance to count its population. Although Virginia was the most populous of Britain’s mainland North American colonies, no censuses were taken between 1634 and 1699. Attempts to count the population were made in 1701 and 1703, then not again before the Revolution.¹⁷ But enlargement of the parish-county system proceeded anyway. In actual practice, much of the initiative for change came from within the existing parishes and counties.¹⁸ These had at hand a means of keeping count in the annual lists of tithables compiled for tax purposes, which in turn made possible periodic adjustments of parish boundaries.¹⁹

Several observations are in order. First, parish formation strove to keep pace with population growth. In 1690, Virginia’s forty-seven parishes served an estimated population of 53,000, an average of 1,128 persons per parish. If the parish was intended primarily, although not exclusively, for its white inhabitants, then the mean per parish in 1690 was 929 persons. By 1730, 114,000 Virginians were distributed among fifty-three parishes, an average of 2,151 persons per parish. But half of the population increase after 1690 was accounted for by the importation of African slaves; thus the parish average of the white population in 1730 stood at 1,615 persons. In 1770 Virginia had ninety-two parishes serving a white population that had mushroomed to almost 260,000. The average of white inhabitants per parish now reached 2,820.²⁰

Virginia’s parishes varied greatly in size and shape as well as in numbers of inhabitants. A small and venerable Tidewater parish like Petsworth in Gloucester County, described in 1724 as some twenty-two miles in length and varying in width from four to ten miles, in no year exceeded 985 tithables.²¹ Another old Tidewater parish, Wicomico in Northumberland County, experienced modest growth in numbers from 575 tithables in 1707 to 1,198 in 1771.²² By contrast, Augusta, the enormous open-ended Mountain parish created in 1738 with eastern boundaries along the summit of the Blue Ridge Mountains and extending uncircumscribed to the west and south, included 1,670 tithables when organized in 1747. In 1769 Augusta’s tithables numbered 4,415.²³

The extraordinary growth, mobility, and youthfulness of Virginia’s population was accommodated institutionally by various means. Not only were new parishes added, but existing ones were divided, reshaped and realigned, combined, and even eliminated. The journals of the House of Burgesses provide graphic evidence of the persistence of parish issues. Most sessions like the one lasting from 2 November to 23 December 1720, which considered seven petitions for parish changes, dealt with similar local petitions requesting alterations of one sort or another.²⁴

Seventeenth-century parish creation reflected conditions peculiar to early settlement, including a powerful sense of rivers as life-sustaining and unifying. Once the Jamestown beachhead had been secured and experimentation with tobacco had demonstrated its potential, population dispersed rapidly along the banks of the major rivers and then along their tributaries. The James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers drew settlers on, afforded means of communication, and provided unobstructed access to ocean-going shipping.

So dominant was riverine settlement that the boundaries of early parishes in many instances were drawn to include persons settled on both banks. Rivers ran through rather than bounded parishes.²⁵ Crossing and recrossing the river was deemed less onerous or hazardous than striking out across country. By the end of the century, however, with the opening up of land back from the rivers and the clearing of paths and roads across country, the role of the rivers altered. While their commercial significance remained central, they were increasingly experienced as hindrances to the daily life and social and political activities of the people. Parishes and counties fashioned in response to pioneering conditions had become anachronistic.

It does not follow that either the perception of needed change or the means of effecting it came readily. The person most responsible for insisting upon realignment of parish boundaries was Francis Nicholson, lieutenant-governor from 1690 to 1692, and governor from 1698 to 1705. Most often remembered for his rapid riding, a predilection for night work, and an insane temper, for his ill-starred courtship of Lucy Burwell, the flaming rows that split his councillors into opposing camps, and his bitter rivalry with Commissary Blair, Nicholson was also a skilled professional soldier, zealous churchman, and a colonial administrator with unparalleled breadth of experience.²⁶ In 1701 as part of a bold legislative agenda, he advocated consolidating parishes to achieve more equality in size; redefining county boundaries—especially those between the James and York Rivers—to make them more compact; setting minimum population requirements for counties (eight hundred tithables) and parishes (four hundred tithables); and, wherever possible, realigning the boundaries of counties and parishes presently divided by a major river.²⁷

Propelling Nicholson’s campaign was his concern with older parishes too small to maintain a minister by which meanes piety decayes the Sabbath is prophaned and the Inhabitants thereby Encouraged in a Loose Lycentious and Dissolute Course of life.²⁸ But the Burgesses were not persuaded or at least they were not disposed to underwrite a general revision of county and parish boundaries. Wary of executive intrusion into matters jealously guarded as its own, the House informed the governor that no action was called for because laws already on the books dealt adequately with any problems. Moreover, the House considered it not Convenient to make any alterations in the bounds of Countyes and Parishes already setled until representation is made from Counties or Parishes that they are aggrieved.²⁹

Although none of Virginia’s governors succeeding Nicholson gave comparable high priority or direction to parish reorganization, much that he had envisioned gradually materialized in the decades following his recall. At the very least, Nicholson had identified the problems, opened matters to public discussion, and suggested directions for change.

Reform came by fits and starts, with vestries and parishioners providing the major impetus. As early as 1691 (anticipating Nicholson’s concerns), the assembly divided New Kent County, forming out of it King and Queen County on the north side of the Pamunkey River. In the same session Lower Norfolk County was divided into Norfolk and Princess Anne Counties, again in an effort to improve travel and communication. The following year, two new counties, Richmond and Essex, were created out of what had been Rappahannock County, and the Rappahannock River now became the boundary line between the two. In 1701, King and Queen County was further divided to alleviate the problems in crossing the Mattaponi River.³⁰

In the half-century following Nicholson’s recall, twelve parishes were dissolved. Denbigh and Mulberry Island in Warwick County, for example, were little more than plantation parishes that had sprung up about the sites of original settlements but over time failed to develop the population base essential for supporting a public ministry. Elsewhere, elimination proceeded through consolidation of parishes too small to handle their responsibilities. York, Hampton, and Martin’s Hundred Parishes formed Yorkhampton Parish; St. Mary’s White Chapel merged with Christ Church Parish in Lancaster County. Deep as their attachments were to local institutions (parishioners persisted in identifying themselves with St. Mary’s White Chapel, for example, long after its effective merger with Christ Church), Virginians adjusted reasonably well to their changing circumstances.

The reshaping of parish lines to make them more convenient and accessible accompanied the culling of stunted parishes. Nicholson would have been gratified to observe the ongoing efforts to reduce or eliminate intraparish river crossings. The James River, for example, cut through Wallingford, Weyanoke, and Westover Parishes. In 1720 portions of the three parishes on the north side of the James became a single Westover Parish. The southside pieces were added to Martin’s Brandon Parish.³¹ After 1721 the James bounded rather than bisected parishes in Charles City and Prince George Counties. Henrico Parish was yet another parish historically bisected by the James. In 1734 the section on the south side of the river was detached and reconstituted as Dale Parish.³²

What took place on the James had its counterparts elsewhere. In 1704 the portion of Sittenburne Parish on the south side of the Rappahannock River was christened St. Anne’s Parish.³³ St. Mary’s, another Rappahannock-divided parish, was realigned in 1713; from its part on the northern side of the river was formed Hanover Parish.³⁴ Legislators dissolved Wilmington Parish in 1723 because the Chickahominy, a River as broad and deep as the Thames at London bridge, had become an unacceptable barrier to effective ministry.³⁵ The Blackwater River in Southside Virginia posed similar difficulties for the inhabitants of Newport and Warwicksqueake Parishes. In 1734 parts of both on the north side of the river were reconstituted as Newport Parish, while those on the south side were formed into Nottoway Parish.³⁶ The same river was the target of yet another reorganization four years later, when sections of Southwark and Lawne’s Creek Parishes on its northern banks in Surry County were united as Southwark and those on its southern banks were formed into the new parish of Albemarle.³⁷

Map 2. Virginia county and parish formation illustrated: the counties and parishes formed from Henrico County (1634) and Henrico Parish (1611, 1634) to 1775

Subdivision of open-ended parishes, consolidation of small, inefficient parishes, and rectification of seventeenth-century river-centered parishes became the three most important means by which the flexibility of Virginia’s parish system manifested itself. Between 1690 and 1776 the General Assembly established fifty-seven new parishes. In addition, it repeatedly authorized minor adjustments of parish boundaries to accommodate population shifts and environmental obstacles other than rivers. The continuous flow of petitions to the House of Burgesses touching facets of parish life demonstrated that the parish system remained fundamental to the shape, perception, and understanding Virginians gave to their common life.³⁸

What impelled vestries and parishioners to push for change, particularly since increased local taxes were the most immediate consequences? One behavioral clue appears in the correlation between the number of tithables and a decision to divide. St. Mark’s Parish (in Orange County until 1749 and thereafter in Culpeper) underwent three divisions between 1739 and 1752. On the first occasion in 1739, the parish had grown to 2,507 tithables. Division left it with 1,904. Two years later when tithables had risen to 2,107, the parish underwent another division, this time leaving the parent parish with a much-reduced population of 979 tithables. When tithables reached 1,663 in 1752, a portion of St. Mark’s was severed again, leaving a base of 1,129 tithables.³⁹ St. Andrew’s Parish (Brunswick County) experienced division twice in the same period. Initially in 1746, its tithables stood at 2,174; the second time in 1754 its tithables had again risen to 2,160.⁴⁰ This suggests an informal rule of thumb that when tithables reached the 1,500–2,500 range, parishes sought legislative permission for a separation because, one can only infer, this was perceived as a maximum population base for parish functions. Other factors and considerations surely were involved, but none likely affected behavior more consistently than population. In their petition calling for a division of Hamilton Parish in 1769, the minister and sundry inhabitants cited as evidence the fact that the number of tithables had reached 2,824.⁴¹ On 20 September 1744 the House of Burgesses considered a petition from the vestry of St. Margaret’s Parish (Caroline County) proposing a new middle parish in the county by combining 800 tithables from St. Margaret’s with 250 tithables from St. John’s—further tangible evidence of the linkage of parish formation with population in the thinking of contemporaries.⁴²

Multicongregational Structure

The formation of a stable and orderly society was made extremely difficult by the circumstances that in Virginia’s formative years disposed settlers to live apart on individual plantations and farms. Early parishes—some of which might later prove too small to support a Church of England minister—were already very large by English standards. Parishes became significantly larger in the course of the seventeenth century as the colony made a valiant effort to keep pace with population growth, mobility, and dispersal. To include enough people within parish boundaries to pay a minister’s salary, to build and maintain churches and chapels, and to provide for those unable to care for themselves, the physical size of the parish would far exceed anything that went by that name in the Mother Country. Size then loomed as a major problem. Could the purposes of the parish be realized in an area so much greater than that in which parish functions originated? How were people to gather weekly for public worship if they had to travel five, ten, twenty, or thirty miles?

Map 3. Virginia parishes (italics) and counties (capitals), ca. 1775

Seventeenth-century Virginians struck upon an eminently practical solution.⁴³ Retaining the definition of the parish as a local institution for the support of a Church of England minister, they innovated by forming congregations—two, three, four, even seven or eight—as were needed to make weekly public worship relatively accessible to parishioners.⁴⁴ For each congregation the parish provided a church building and the necessary supporting staff and supplies. Virginia’s Anglicans identified themselves not with the parish church, but with one of the several churches within the parish. Ministers became itinerants, riding circuit from Sunday to Sunday among the congregations within their parishes.

The Book of Common Prayer made the multicongregational system possible and effective. Worship could proceed on Sundays when the minister was elsewhere in the parish because the form and content of worship were put down in black and white. Lay readers officiated in the minister’s absence. Each and every one of a parish’s congregations regularly assembled on Sundays, one led by the minister, the others by laity. The Church of England’s liturgical character, which set it apart from most other Protestant bodies, actually served to facilitate its creative adaptation to the distinctive environment of the Old Dominion. Far from being a constraint, the Prayer Book freed Virginians to experiment. If its significance has more often than not been overlooked, it can scarcely be overstated.⁴⁵

Virginia’s multicongregational parishes had various shapes and forms. Two terms—church and chapel—were used to describe both the congregations (i.e., the portion of parishioners who worshiped at a specific locality) and the buildings in which they gathered. Chapel was a diminutive of church and in common parlance signified a subordinate smaller congregation receiving less frequent visits by the parish minister. Church connoted a congregation of greater size requiring a share of the parson’s attention equal to any other church or churches in the parish. The terms also applied to the size, significance, and permanence of the buildings in which the congregations met. But to say anything more precise or specific about these terms or the relative size of buildings and congregations is impossible because usage was determined not by formula or edict but by local custom. Church and chapel thus better describe relationships than actual numbers of worshipers or the dimensions of buildings. Chapel always suggested the possibility of transition to church, and this did take place, although with no guarantee that parishioners would immediately stop calling their place of worship the chapel. Parish organization thus displayed great variety: one, two, three, or even four churches; one church and one, two, or three chapels; two or three churches and one or two chapels; and so on.

In 1724 ministers in twenty-seven of Virginia’s forty-six parishes responding to the bishop of London’s questionnaire reported serving a total of fifty-three congregations (churches and chapels).⁴⁶ Nine parishes reported a single congregation, eleven had two, six parishes had three, and one reported four congregations. This works out closely to an average of two congregations per parish. It is highly probable, then, that Virginia’s forty-six parishes included a minimum of ninety-two Anglican congregations.⁴⁷ Without benefit of a mid-century questionnaire but utilizing bits and pieces of evidence—vestry minutes, county court records, and correspondence—it is possible to update the 1724 survey. Thirty-two of Virginia’s seventy-eight parishes (41 percent) in the 1750s reported a total of 83 congregations. An average of nearly 2.6 congregations per parish, corrected for regional variations, projects a conservative estimate of a total of 190 Anglican congregations in the 1750s. This is twice the number of Virginia’s Anglican churches (96) as recorded by Edwin Gaustad in his Historical Atlas of Religion in America, a figure which in turn has been relied upon by scholars of American religion in taking measure of colonial Anglicanism.⁴⁸

Two decades later in the 1770s, reports of seventy-six of the Old Dominion’s ninety-five parishes (80 percent) identified 204 congregations. Again, the average corrected for regional variations projects a total of at least 249 Anglican congregations in Virginia on the eve of the Revolution.⁴⁹ The implications of these figures are profound for coming to terms with the size and scope of the Anglican establishment in Virginia, for grasping its strength relative to the church’s presence elsewhere in colonial British America, and for measuring Anglicanism relative to other religious allegiances throughout the colonies.

Thus the Virginia countryside was dotted with Anglican churches and chapels, far more than the parish divisions would suggest. This also means that the response to population growth and expansion was actually substantially more impressive than the formation of new parishes would indicate. When measured by the number of congregations rather than parishes, Virginians in 1750 afforded an Anglican place of worship for every 740 persons in the white population (infants and children included) and for every 1,320 persons in the total population. The equivalent numbers in 1770 were one place of worship for every 1,128 persons in the white population and for every 1,944 persons in the total population.⁵⁰

Averages, of course, tell only part of the story. The size and placement of Anglican churches hardly conformed perfectly to population change. Nonetheless, Virginia parishes coped with rapid growth and movement remarkably well through the multicongregational parish. In eighteenth-century colonial British America, one would be hard pressed to find any religious body that responded more creatively to institutional challenge than did Virginia’s traditional liturgical church.

Lay Control

A fourth feature of the parish system was lay control. On this score both tradition and scholarship have long concurred: "Power was decentralized, being located in the dense regional networks of gentry families that vied with each other at the county and parish levels. Authority was social in