A major trend in the recent historiography of medieval and renaissance Italy has been towards the reassertion of the fundamental importance of the countryside and of agriculture. This is not so much to deny the unique position occupied by the cities in Italian life as to remind us of some essential features of those cities and of the men who ruled them. Towns were more typically market centres for their localities than entrepôts of long-distance commerce; while many members of both the higher and the lower urban social strata carried with them throughout life a status ultimately derived from the status they or their forebears occupied or had occupied in rural life. Conversely, the members of, say, the Florentine urban patriciate around the year 1400 were almost to a man landlords in the surrounding countryside. They were also of course the men who made the laws, levied taxation and generally controlled the government of the countryside as of the town. At every level of life we have to postulate an intimacy of relations between town and country which the conditions of modern urban life can make it an effort even to imagine.

‘The German Reformation was an urban event.’—so A. G. Dickens wrote in his valuable and instructive book The German nation and Martin Luther (1974). In some directions this judgment may need qualification; nevertheless, it contains an essential element of truth. On any reckoning, put in a negative form, its truth is undeniable: the occurrence and the success of the reformation in Germany are inconceivable except in terms of the importance, and of the specific form, which urban life had attained in Germany at the end of the middle ages. No towns, no reformation; of this assertion we may be certain.

When, after the abrupt changes in religion in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary, Elizabethan protestants set about consolidating the protestant reformation they looked upon towns as one of the chief agencies for the conversion of the countryside. From the first moment of his appointment as lord president of the council in the north in 1572 that enthusiastic layman, the third earl of Huntingdon, made this assumption a guiding principle of his governorship. ‘I do all I can to get good preachers planted in the market towns of this country’, he told William Chaderton, bishop of Chester in 1584, adding with a characteristic note of realism, ‘in which somewhat is already done, but much remaineth to be done.’ Huntingdon’s close associate and fellow worker in the north, archbishop Grindal, had earlier informed the queen in similar terms that ‘the continual preaching of God’s word in Halifax’ in the 1560s had been responsible for the town’s stalwart loyalty to the crown during the Rebellion of the Earls. Yet both Grindal and Huntingdon knew very well from personal experience that towns in general and northern towns in particular had not by any means all accorded an automatic or unqualified welcome to protestantism. A comparison between York and Hull demonstrates forcefully how two towns in close geographical proximity could differ very considerably in their initial acceptance of protestantism and in the readiness of their ruling élites to further the propagation of protestant doctrines among the townspeople at large.

The church has always experienced great difficulty in ministering to those dwelling in the remotest parts of its parishes. In this paper I shall look briefly at how the sixteenth century church coped with the problem, and attempt to answer two questions: what facilities for worship were available in outlying districts, and what was the impact of the reformation changes upon them?

Chapels abounded in England on the eve of the reformation. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that wherever he lived a parishioner could, without an unreasonably arduous journey, reach a place where mass was sung or said. Quite apart from matters of spiritual and moral discipline, it was important for very practical reasons that he should be able to get quickly to church. Disaster could take hold in villages and townships if the entire population had set off on a long hike to a remote parish church and was unlikely to return for some hours. Moreover, the length of the hike determined the extent of the diversion of labour from other pursuits, notably in the fields at harvest time: indeed, this was to influence government rulings on the number of saints’ days to be observed by the laity.

Factionalism in the local communities of Stuart England is a many-sided subject which has hardly been investigated. I am concerned in this paper primarily widi die religious ingredient in local factionalism and in particular with a series of incidents of sustained hostility between clergy and laity, most of which occurred in the decade before the civil war. In every case conflict arose because clergymen were more or less assertively at odds either with deeply embedded custom and tradition or with strongly held views among the laity of their town or village. The intention is to consider die patterns of conflict that lie behind these incidents and to relate these patterns to the structures of rural and urban communities.

Although Thomas Fuller, the church historian, spent the first year of the civil war in London, where he articulated from the pulpit a political point of view consonant with that of the parliamentary peace party, there can be little doubt that his allegiance was with the king in that struggle. In the late summer of 1643 Fuller left London for the royalist capital at Oxford and before the end of the year entered the service of Lord Hopton as a chaplain in the royal army. During the latter stages of the civil war he resided in Exeter, where he served as chaplain to the infant princess Henrietta Anne, and where he enjoyed close relations with members of the court circle there. Fuller left the royalist community in Exeter only when the city itself surrendered in 1646, two months before the fall of Oxford. Because of these activities and because of a series of plainspoken books and pamphlets during the years of religious and political conflict, Fuller was widely known as an adherent of the royalist cause, albeit never as militant or as uncritical a partisan as many others in the king’s camp.

The church of England in the eighteenth century has been bitterly criticised by succeeding generations for what the high Victorian church of England regarded as two cardinal sins, firstly non-residence of the clergy on their cures and secondly, and consequently, lack of pastoral care. However, generalisations are misleading and especially these generalisations which are largely based on the evidence of opponents of the established church in the early nineteenth century and on standards of pastoral care of one man to one parish, however small the parish, that were only achieved for a period of sixty or seventy years during the later nineteenth century. How misleading these generalisations are becomes apparent when the evidence for non residence and for standards of pastoral care is examined more closely. The object of this paper is to demonstrate that from the evidence of one particular county a clear pattern of clerical residence emerges that is not entirely incompatible with contemporary expectations of pastoral care.

In 1715 the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty promoted a bill in parliament ‘for making more effectual her late Majesty’s gracious intentions for augmenting the maintenance of the poor clergy’. Section four of this statute declared that the bounty had been ‘intended to extend not only to parsons and vicars who come in by presentation or collation, institution and induction; but likewise to such ministers who come in by donation, or are only stipendiary preachers or curates’.

The theme of this paper is an attempt to establish when the town emerged as a focal point for religious activity for a set district in the nineteenth century. I have some hesitations in setting about the task, for we are dealing here with attitudes, with what die French call l’histoire des mentalités, and it is not at all clear that all the evidence exists. I propose, however, to use three examples—circuit records from the Louth area of Lincolnshire, diaries (again from Lincolnshire), and a rather briefer case-study of Saint Mary’s church, Nottingham. Apart from the last, it may be agreed that these particular instances are not typical of Victorian England—that the towns are small and not industrialised, unlike Bradford or Bristol; and that the area is large and diversified unlike a county like Leicestershire where almost all roads lead to the county town. Nevertheless, both the enquiry and the range of evidence can be justified; and the conclusion—that the town emerged as a focal point for religious activities later than for other more secular functions—may be applicable to other areas.

When leading churchmen and statesmen cast around for ways of restoring the health of English society at the end of the eighteenth century, the theme to which they constantly returned was the renewal of the parish. The parish was the basic social unit in church and state, small enough to be conceived in terms of personal relationships. On the principle that, if you look after the pennies, the pounds will look after themselves, it seemed obvious that if you could make the parish a healthy harmonious unit, then die life of the nation as a whole would become healthy and harmonious. Ideally the parish was a large family, with the squire as its father and the incumbent as its spiritual father. Southey wrote in the Quarterly Review in 1820:

Thomas Chamberlain, vicar of St Thomas’s Oxford for fifty years (1842–92), has fallen into undeserved obscurity. Except for a very brief memoir, written by Algernon Barrington Simeon just after his death, and a section in Thomas Squires’ history of the parish which is largely based on it, there is no account of his life and work. Yet in many ways his was the model tractarian parish. The Ecclesiologist acknowledged it as ‘an example of correct ritualism’ whilst a local evangelical regarded it as ‘the headquarters of the ultra devotees of the Pusey party’. The restoration and furnishing of the parish church were the epitome of tractarian ambitions. Chamberlain himself, with his energy and reserve, was regarded as an archetypal parish priest. Felicia Skene, ‘a person of strong feelings and decided opinions—, so admired him that she not only came to live in the parish to work for him, but also used him as the basis for her portrait of the dedicated clergyman, Mr Chesterfield, in one of her novels, S. Albans’s, or the Prisoners of Hope. Even lais sartorial habits were imitated, a sure sign of the regard in which he was held. One young man, about to be ordained to a title at St Alban’s, Holborn, wrote to his sister that he had been to Oxford to be measured by a certain tailor for his first clerical suit. ‘He makes things for Mr Chamberlain and his curates, so I think I am pretty sure of having mine correct.’

Over the last two decades historians of the Victorian church have been paying an increasing amount of attention to the various forms of statistical evidence which are available for the period. There are in fact three major categories of such evidence. Firstly there are the membership figures and other statistics published by churches and meant for external consumption; many of these have now been brought together in a useful compendium. Then there are the returns of the first (and last) national religious census, held in 1851, and of various local censuses, especially those taken for several large and medium-sized towns in 1881; these were also made public either in summary or detail depending on the nature of the census. Finally there are the statistics compiled by churches at various levels purely for their own use, but now open to public inspection in record offices: Anglican visitation returns and service registers, those records of nonconformist churches that yield such valuable information about membership and communicant figures and the numbers of Sunday scholars. Not all of these statistics have been used with an equal degree of enthusiasm, and very few studies have made effective use of all three. The aim of this paper is to look in some detail at the uses to which they have been put so far and to indicate some other uses to which they might be put in the future.

Disraeli’s romantic novel Sybil deliberately and vividly contrasts the two nations of its subtitle. Only Egremont, the aristocratic hero, attempts to cross the impassible gulf between them when, in the guise of Mr Franklin, he lives for a while in Mowe-dale alongside the catholic Gerards. Ironically he has only two contacts with the poor. He visits an honest handloom weaver in the company of Mr St Lys, the saintly tractarian vicar of Mowbray, and a model factory set in a garden village, the creation of a paternalistic aristocrat. It is left to the Owenite Stephen Morley, rather than the admirer of the ancient catholic faith, to penetrate the hideous mining area from which the hell-cats eventually emerge to burn Mowbray castle. Here the absence of religion is made explicit in the description of Wodgate where ‘no church . . . has yet raised its spire . . . and even the conventicle scarcely dares show its humble front in some obscure corner.’ So, unrestrained by established religion and hardly touched by dissent, the brutalised colliers and ironworkers are suited to the violent, plundering role they fulfil in the final chapters of the book. They form a dark contrast to the noble and restrained workforce of aristocratic Mowbray a little further north.

The late nineteenth-century city posed problems for English nonconformists. The country was rapidly being urbanised. By 1881 over one third of the people lived in cities with a population of more than one hundred thousand. The most urbanised areas gave rise to the greatest worry of all the churches: large numbers there were failing to attend services. The religious census of 1851 had already shown that the largest towns were the places where there were the fewest worshippers, although nonconformists gained some crumbs of comfort from the knowledge that nonconformist attendances were greater than those of the church of England. Unofficial surveys in the 1880S revealed no improvement. Instead, although few were immediately conscious of it, in that decade the membership of all the main evangelical nonconformist denominations began to fall relative to population. And it was always the same social group that was most conspicuously unreached: the lower working classes, the bottom of the social pyramid. In poor neighbourhoods church attendance was lowest. In Bethnal Green at the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, only 6.8% of the adult population attended chapel, and only 13.3% went to any place of worship. Consequently nonconformists, like Anglicans, were troubled by the weakness of their appeal.

Studies of nineteenth-century urban religion have often been conducted with very little reference to the surrounding countryside. Even Obelkevich in his stimulating study of rural religion in Lincolnshire suggested that there, ‘In the Church of England, though the ideal and model of the village parish church continued to inspire town churchmen, towns and villages largely remained in separate compartments. Only through Methodism did the towns have much effect on village religious life. . . . The circuit, the key unit of Methodist organization, brought preachers and people from towns and villages into regular contact with each other and made it possible for the financial and human resources of the town chapels to contribute to the life of the outlying village chapels’. But the methodist exception is significant, not so much in a denominational sense (although the methodist form of organisation was in theory the best for this purpose) but because it is an example of a situation in which the money and men available in any one particular place were not sufficient to carry out what the church concerned wished to do there. It was therefore necessary to tap the resources of other places to help. In large towns such as Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, and in some of the smaller industrial towns as well, the necessary resources often had to be found within the town or not at all; and to that extent the study of urban religion on its own is understandable. But in many parts of the country rural evangelism was felt to be as urgent a priority as urban evangelism. The church of England sought to overcome the consequences of rural neglect; and all nonconformists, not only methodists, attempted to involve town members in the life of country chapels. Thus in less exclusively industrial parts of the country than Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the Black Country, a genuine conflict of priorities between town and countryside could arise.

At the beginning of this century Glasgow was romantic. It was a successful city, and it was growing rapidly. The 1901 census had shown that Scottish cities were growing faster than English, and Glasgow had increased by fifteen per cent in ten years.

Much of this increase came from England, and from urban England at that. The bishop of Glasgow and Galloway said of his flock in 1901, ‘I can never find a west of Scotland man who is a hereditary episcopalian. The church seems to have been wiped away just as a man wipes a dish, and turns it upside down’. Instead they had migrants who ‘have come bringing no money with them, requiring us to provide religious ministrations for them. We have done our best.’ It was estimated that there were fifty thousand episcopalians and Anglicans in Glasgow, of whom only fourteen thousand were known to the clergy. In 1894 a census of four areas rated episcopalians at six per cent of die population, and another census in Govan at ten per cent. In a famous speech to the representative church council of 1901, Anthony Mitchell admitted ‘a feeling of dejection’ at the size of the problem, though he added that nowhere else would missionary work find ‘a readier return’. The bishop substantiated this, saying that Glasgow people were ‘not hostile to religion . . . many of them are thirsting after it’, as shown by the crowds attracted by street preachers. The rural dioceses in Scotland were asked to support the work as their migrants were in Glasgow, though in fact these were probably not a significant number.

Over ten years ago Brian Harrison drew attention to certain inadequately explored areas ‘where Marx’s classes still make their appearance but are overlain by the more lasting dichotomies of traditionalist versus radical, provincial versus Londoner, town-dweller versus countryman, intellectual versus the mass, Anglican versus Nonconformist, male versus female’. This paper does not isolate the urban-rural dichotomy which for most of the twentieth century has chiefly acquired a separate social significance only in and through the romantic speculations of intellectuals, but assumes its importance as one of several factors in interaction with each other which have divided and sometimes united societies and segments of societies along horizontal rather than vertical lines. Two areas which demand that complex analysis, sensitive to social and cultural cross-pressures, proposed by Harrison, are leisure (an area in which he has himself practised with distinction what he has preached) and secularisation. This paper considers one aspect of each of these, namely drink and disestablishment, as they impinged upon each other in a very specific episode in 1915.