|
|
Religion
Religion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Yorkshire and beyond
|
|
Dates
are in red.
Hyperlinks
to other pages are in dark
blue.
Headlines
are in brown.
References
and citations are in turquoise.
Contextual
history is in purple.
This webpage about the Redcar has the following section headings:
- The Farndales of Religion
- Making sense of the world
- Religion in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries
- Church of England
- Catholic Church
- Ther Methodists
- Primitive Methodism
- Temperance
See also the
historical context of the evolution of the
Church.
The Farndales and Religion
William
Farndale (FAR00435)
was a goods porter, who by 1881 was a Methodist local preacher on the railways.
He led Primitive Methodist Camp Meetings. By 1887 he had moved to Manchester
and became a town missionary in Macclesfield.
William’s son
was Dr William Edward Farndale (FAR00576)
who entered the Primitive Methodist ministry in 1904. He led circuits in
London, Oldham, Chester-le-Street, Birkenhead and Grimsby before he became
President of the Primitive Methodist Conference in 1947. He was particularly
interested in rural methodism and led a “Back to the Soil” campaign.
The Methodism in
Cleveland, The Methodist Recorder 17 April 1902 described local methodism and the prominent
role of Charles Farndale (FAR00341)‘s
family: … For very
many years services have been held in the spacious farm kitchen of Mr C
Farndale, Kilton lodge, which was also that of his father before him.
Methodism in the neighbourhood and the cause of righteousness generally owes
much to the high Christian character and active interest in all good works
displayed by this devoted Methodist family. Here the preachers have always
found a hearty welcome and ministers and others who know the circuit spent
under this hospitable roof.
When his son George
Farndale (FAR00540)
retired from farming in 1940, the Daily Gazette for Middlesbrough, 8 March 1940 reported: For over a century the Farndale
family have been associated with the Loftus and Staithes Wesleyan Circuit, a
connection which is soon to be severed by the removal of Mr George Farndale
from Kilton Lodge to Saltburn. A member of the third generation
of the well known family, Mr Farndale has been a circuit official for over 20
years, and a steward for seven. His grand father was a local preacher in
the circuit for a number of years, and the late Charles Farndale
upheld the family tradition by serving for the major period of his life as
circuit official and steward. In the outlying districts of the circuit Mr
George Farndale has worked equally hard, and stands as Trustee for many of
the circuit chapels.
Making sense of the World
As our
ancestors devoted every hour to grunt and sweat under a weary life,
religion helped them to make sense of the world. They faced the dread of poverty and daily worries about survival. Inevitably
they would have hoped for something better, but would have dreaded what might
happen next. William Shakespeare, Hamlet: For
who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud
man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of
office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself
might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and
sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The
undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the
will And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us
all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast
of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their
currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.
Hamlet’s
soliloquy recognised the worries of the unknown might makes us rather bear
those ills we have and plough on with life.
Religion in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries
People in the
middle ages believed that, after death, the soul spent a certain length of time
in Purgatory and that the prayers of the living hastened the soul’s passage to
Paradise.
Rich people
built almshouses where poor people were cared for. In return, those who relied
on this charity had to attend daily Catholic masses, religious services where
they said prayers especially for their benefactors.
There were many
people in medieval England who, while not having the wealth of the landed
gentry to pay for such chantries, had become relatively rich through trade and
they formed religious guilds to ensure a less painful progress to Heaven. The
amount paid to the Skelton priest is recorded for 1527: “St Mary Gild – Robert
Westland, husbandman of the parish of All Saints: 13s 4d”
The seventeenth century
The Act of Uniformity 1662 prescribed the form of
public prayers, administration of sacraments, and other rites of the
Established Church of England and “for preventing mischiefs and dangers that
may arise by certain persons called Quakers, and others refusing to take oaths.”
The Act declared it “altogether unlawful and contrary to the word of God”
to refuse to take an oath, or to persuade another person to refuse to do so. It
further made it “an offense for more than five persons, commonly called
Quakers. to assemble in any place under pretense of joining in a religious
worship not authorized by the laws of this realm.”
Nineteenth Century
Victorian
Britain was a highly religious society. The most reads books were the Bible and
Pilgrim’s Progress.
The 1851
census:
·
A
relatively high 5.3M people neglected religious services, 29% of the
population.
·
But
7.3M attended church, 41% of the population.
·
Morte
than half of the attendances were to Nonconformist chapels.
There had been
an explosion of New Dissent groups, particularly methodists from the 1770s.
The Old Dissent
– Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers
The New Dissent
– Methodists
The Church of
England remained the largest religious body, withy 85% of marriages in 1851
being in churches. The Church of England continued to play a key role in
information, education, welfare, judicial and local government issues.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
459 to 464).
Twentieth century
The inter war
years saw a gradual decline in institutional religion, especially
nonconformity.
Religious belief were challenged by new
geological, archaeological and astronomical discoveries.
Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830 to
1833).
Robert
Chambers’
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844)
Charles
Darwin’s
On the Origin of
Species by Natural Selection
was largely written after the HMS Beagle voyage in the 1830s, under Malthus’
influence but publication was delayed until 1859.
Samuel Smiles’ Self Help.
These all had implications for theories
of divine creation and led to a clash with the Church at a meeting of the
British Association of Oxford in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley, defending Darwin and “Soapy
Sam” Wilberforce,
son of the anti slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. The
Evangelical literal interpretation of the Bible was particularly threatened.
See the Kirkdale cave discoveries.
There was a religious response by
building churches and chapels at scale, with networks of charities, sports
clubs and Bible study groups.
Church of England
Our Pew at the Church, Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, Chapter 2
Here is our pew in the church. What a
high-backed pew! With a window near it, out of which our house can be seen, and
IS seen many times during the morning’s service, by Peggotty, who likes to make
herself as sure as she can that it’s not being robbed, or is not in flames. But
though Peggotty’s eye wanders, she is much offended if mine does, and frowns to
me, as I stand upon the seat, that I am to look at the clergyman. But I can’t
always look at him—I know him without that white thing on, and I am afraid of
his wondering why I stare so, and perhaps stopping the service to inquire—and
what am I to do?
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: If the Lark Rise people had been asked
their religion, the answer of nine out of ten would have been 'Church of
England', for practically all of them were christened, married, and buried
as such, although, in adult life, few went to church between the baptisms of
their offspring. Every Sunday, morning and afternoon, the two cracked,
flat-toned bells at the church in the mother village called the faithful
to worship. Ding-dong, Ding-dong, Ding-dong, they went, and, when they
heard them, the hamlet churchgoers hurried across fields and over stiles, for
the Parish Clerk was always threatening to lock the church door when the bells
stopped and those outside might stop outside for all he cared. The interior was
almost as bare as a barn, with its grey, roughcast walls, plain-glass windows,
and flagstone floor.
The Parish
Clerk
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: The Parish Clerk at the back to
keep order. 'Clerk Tom', as he was called, was an important man in the
parish. Not only did he dig the graves, record the banns of
marriage, take the chill off the water for winter baptisms, and stoke the
coke stove which stood in the nave at the end of his seat; but he also took an
active and official part in the services. It was his duty to lead the
congregation in the responses and to intone the 'Amens'. The psalms were
not sung or chanted, but read, verse and verse about, by the Rector and people,
and in these especially Tom's voice so drowned the subdued murmur of his
fellow worshippers that it sounded like a duet between him and the clergyman.
Sermons
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: Mr. Ellison in the pulpit was the
Mr. Ellison of the Scripture lessons, plus a white surplice. To him, his
congregation were but children of a larger growth, and he preached as he
taught. Another favourite subject was the supreme rightness of the social order
as it then existed. God, in His infinite wisdom, had appointed a place for
every man, woman, and child on this earth and it was their bounden duty to
remain contentedly in their niches.
Rector’s
visits
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: The Rector visited each cottage in
turn, working his way conscientiously round the hamlet from door to door, so
that by the end of the year he had called upon everybody. When he tapped
with his gold-headed cane at a cottage door there would come a sound of
scuffling within, as unseemly objects were hustled out of sight, for
the whisper would have gone round that he had been seen getting over the stile
and his knock would have been recognized. The women received him with
respectful tolerance. A chair was dusted with an apron and the doing of
housework or cooking was suspended while his hostess, seated uncomfortably on
the edge of one of her own chairs, waited for him to open the conversation.
When the weather had been discussed, the health of the inmates and absent
children inquired about, and the progress of the pig and the prospect of the
allotment crops, there came an awkward pause, during which both
racked their brains to find something to talk about. There was nothing. The
Rector never mentioned religion. That was looked upon in the parish as one of
his chief virtues, but it limited the possible topics of conversation. Apart
from his autocratic ideas, he was a kindly man, and he had come to pay a
friendly call, hoping, no doubt, to get to know and to understand his
parishioners better. But the gulf between them was too wide; neither he nor his
hostess could bridge it. The kindly inquiries made and answered, they had
nothing more to say to each other, and, after much 'ah-ing' and 'er-ing', he
would rise from his seat, and be shown out with alacrity.
Catholic Church
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: The Catholic minority at the inn
was treated with respect, for a landlord could do no wrong, especially
the landlord of a free house where such excellent beer was on tap. On
Catholicism at large, the Lark Rise people looked with contemptuous
intolerance, for they regarded it as a kind of heathenism, and what excuse
could there be for that in a Christian country? When, early in life, the end
house children asked what Roman Catholics were, they were told they were 'folks
as prays to images', and further inquiries elicited the information that they
also worshipped the Pope, a bad old man, some said in league with the Devil.
Their genuflexions in church and their 'playin' wi' beads' were described as 'monkey
tricks'.
The Methodists
The Enlightenment which
emerged after the Glorious Revolution was also a time of religious revival.
This new evangelicalism was profoundly different from the Puritanism that
dominated the Civil War period.
It emerged from the Oxford
undergraduates in the 1730s, particularly John Welsey and George Whitefield.
Wesley wrote more prolifically than anyone else in the eighteenth century. He
was influenced by Locke’s
philosophy to develop a practical
method (hence methodism) of piety. It grew out of the forces of the
Enlightenment. It also grew within the existing Church and found impetus in
areas of rapid change, including rural areas of the north of England and Wales,
especially in industrial towns. It attracted miners, sailors and soldiers and
others. This is why there was an emphasis on travelling preachers who gave open
air services. It also had a strong women’s movement as it gave a unique for the
time important role to women. Singing was an important part of methodism. The
Wesley brothers (John and Charles) produced 30 hymn books and composed well
known hymns including Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
Methodism was not suppressed
by the Church. It was both subversive and conservative.
From the 1750s the north,
Wales and the Scottish borders boomed in population and many became integrated
into non conformist sects, especially methodism. John Wesley’s flexible
approach thrived on socio economic change,. An autonomous religious movement
grew around chapels, Sunday schools.
Mainstream methodists
attracted hard working and prosperous businessmen who were now able to vote.
In the Victorian era, Non
conformist, generally Liberal religion thrived in the north, the south west and
the industrial Midlands. It tended to be less agricultural and it formed a peripheral
nationalism with a distinct character.
The non conformists opposed
the public subsidy of church schools under the Education Act 1870 as they
worried that future generations would be brought up Tory and Anglican.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
286 to 287, 460 to 463).
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XIV, To Church on Sunday: The Methodists were a class apart. Provided
they did not attempt to convert others, religion in them was tolerated.
Every Sunday evening they held a service in one of their cottages, and,
whenever she could obtain permission at home, it was Laura's delight to attend.
This was not because the service appealed to her; she really preferred
the church service; but because Sunday evening at home was a trying time,
with the whole family huddled round the fire and Father reading and no one
allowed to speak and barely to move. The first thing that would have struck any
one less accustomed to the place was its marvellous cleanliness. The
cottage walls were whitewashed and always fresh and clean. The man of the house
stood in the doorway to welcome each arrival with a handshake and a whispered
'God bless you!' If the visiting preacher happened to be late, which he
often was with a long distance to cover on foot, the host would give out a hymn
from Sankey and Moody's Hymn-Book, Sometimes a brother or a sister would
stand up to 'testify', and then the children opened their eyes and ears,
for a misspent youth was the conventional prelude to conversion and who
knew what exciting transgressions might not be revealed. Most of them did
not amount to much. One would say that before he 'found the Lord' he had been
'a regular beastly drunkard'; but it turned out that he had only taken a pint
too much once or twice at a village feast. One man, especially, claimed that
pre-eminence. 'I wer' the chief of sinners,' he would cry; 'a real bad lot,
a Devil's disciple. Cursing and swearing, drinking and drabbing, there were
nothing bad as I didn't do. Why, would you believe it, in my sinful pride, I
sinned against the Holy Ghost. Aye, that I did,' and the awed silence would be
broken by the groans and 'God have mercy's of his hearers while he looked round
to observe the effect of his confession before relating how he 'came to the
Lord'. But the chief interest centred in the travelling preacher, especially if
he were a stranger who had not been there before. Then there was the elderly
man who chose for his text: 'I will sweep them off the face of the earth with
the besom of destruction', and proceeded to take each word of his text as a
heading. 'I will sweep them off the face of the earth. I will sweep them off
the face of the earth. I will sweep them off the face of the earth', and so on.
Methodism, as known and practised there, was a poor people's religion,
simple and crude.
In our time
podcast on John Wesley.
The Methodists
offered something people wanted that was not offered by the Anglican Church.
The new preachers showed a passion for the souls and many who responded felt a
strong sense of sin.
Primitive Methodism
Also known as ‘Ranters’, for their enthusiastic preaching,
‘Primitive’ Methodists were so called because they wanted a return to an
earlier, purer form of Methodism, as founded by John Wesley, based on the early
church. In 1932 Primitive Methodists joined with Wesleyan and United Methodists
to form the Methodist Church.
In the early decades of the nineteenth century there was a growing
body of opinion among the Wesleyans that their religion was moving in
directions which were a distortion, even a betrayal, of what John Wesley’s
teachings.
A Methodist preacher called Hugh Bourne became the catalyst for a
breakaway, to form the Primitive Methodists. Their badge of 'primitive' was
used to stress their belief that they were the true guardians of the original,
or primitive, form of Methodism.
The nineteenth century
working class movement known as Primitive Methodism, originated in the
Potteries, where an open air ‘camp’ meeting was held at Mow Cop in 1807,
igniting a passion for the ‘love of God’ which quickly spread across the
Midlands. By the end of the century there were over 200,000 members.
The sorts of issues which divided the Primitives and the Wesleyans
might be summarised:
|
Methodists |
Primitive Methodists |
|
Developed a high doctrine of the Pastoral Office to justify
leadership being in the hands of the ministers. |
Focused attention on the role of lay people. |
|
Were open to cultural enrichment from the Anglican tradition and
more ornate buildings. |
Stressed simplicity in their chapels and their worship. |
|
Were involved with more affluent and influential urban classes. |
Concentrated their mission on the rural poor. |
|
Were nervous of direct political engagement. |
Stressed the political implications of their Christian
discipleship. |
In the context of the
growing democratisation and sense of dislocation caused by the Industrial
Revolution, Primitive Methodism appealed primarily to miners and mill hands,
farm labourers, and workers in developing factory towns. In rural areas,
Primitive Methodists often came into conflict with the Squire and Anglican
clergy, who saw them as a threat to the established order.
The conviction that God’s
love was for all, led to a concern for social justice, and many Primitive
Methodists became involved in politics, as trade unionist leaders, Chartists,
and later as Labour MPs.
George Edwards, who
championed the cause of farm labourers in Norfolk, is typical of the early
trade union leaders who developed their passion and leadership skills through
the Primitive Methodist Chapels. He started his working life at the age of six,
he was illiterate until he became involved in Primitive Methodism and he
embarked on a journey of self-education, as he recounts in From Crow Scaring
to Parliament.
By the end of the 19th century these two streams of Methodism realised
they had more in common than they might have supposed. So conversations began
which led to their being the two principal partners in the union to form the
present-day Methodist Church in 1932.
In 1865 the Skelton Primitive Methodist Church
was built on Green Road. The Primitive Methodists in Skelton had previously
been meeting in local rooms. The movement was by then 50 years old. It was
started by a person called Hugh Bourne, who was born in 1772 at Stoke. He built
his own church 1811 and sent out evangelists. Within thirty years he had
100,000 followers and 1,000 churches. They were popularly known as the
“Ranters”. “Primitive” to them meant, original, getting back to the real
beginnings of whatever they believed in. John Thomas Wharton of Skelton Castle,
being a strong adherent to the Anglican Church, disapproved of them. At first
he refused to let them have the land on which to build their own Chapel. He
finally relented and sold it to them at a high price. A newspaper of the time
reported that one of the Primitive Church members made 30,000 bricks for the
structure, working after his normal daily stint at work. His employer provided
the clay and means of leading them to the site.
Quakers and Unitarians
Smaller sects like to Quakers and Unitarians were adopted by urban
and business elites. The Quakers included Cadbury, Fry, Rowntree, Barclay,
Lloyd, Swan and Hunter, Price and Waterhouse,
Evangelism
Evangelism created charities and philanthropic lobby groups.
Temperance and social
influence
The non
conformist conscience extended to political action and law enforcement to
promote its moral code. William Wilberforce’s influence extended beyond anti
slavery to animal protection and religious education. The John Keble’s Oxford
Movement in the 1820s was a High Church revolt against Anglicanism.
Religious life
in Britain thus became complex, ranging from Roman Catholics (relative to whom
discrimination was largely degraded in 1791 and 1829 reforms) to Mormons.
Halifax had 7
religious buildings in 1801 and 99 in 1901.
By 1901 England
had 34,000 religious buildings, one for every 1,000. Most seats in churches
belonged to specific people or families, so there was an air of exclusivity to
membership.
The temperance
movement obtained regulation of access to drink and alcohol consumption
declined from the 1870s.
Drink was seen
to be at the heart of moral, social and economic problems. In the 1850s
reformers campaigned against beer and ale houses as the direct causes of
crimes. Places of popular entertainment were targeted. Temperance built up a
large organised following focused around churches, chapels and Sunday school.
However drinking culture was also central to social life and there were only
really local successes in the control of drink, although there was a general
decline in drinking in the second half of the nineteenth century. Temperance
measures never came close to those in Wales and US. (Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 502).
There is an In
Our Time podcast on the
Temperance Movement.
Charles
Dickens, Hard Times:
Coketown, to
which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; …
You saw
nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion
built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had
done—they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but
this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of
it. The solitary exception was the New
Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in
four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.
All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe
characters of black and white. The jail
might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the
town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that
appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material
aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and
the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man
were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the
cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in
the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be,
world without end, Amen.
A town so
sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course got on well? Why no, not quite well. No?
Dear me!
No. Coketown did not come out of its own
furnaces, in all respects like gold that had stood the fire. First, the perplexing mystery of the place
was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations? Because, whoever did, the labouring people
did not. It was very strange to walk
through the streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous
jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away from
their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of their own
streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel
going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of concern. Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed
this, because there was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members
were to be heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly
petitioning for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by
main force. Then came the Teetotal
Society, who complained that these same people would get drunk, and
showed in tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea
parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal), would induce them
to forego their custom of getting drunk.
Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular statements,
showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium. Then came the experienced chaplain of the
jail, with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular
statements, and showing that the same people would resort to low haunts, hidden
from the public eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and
mayhap joined in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and
committed for eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever
shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was
perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top moral
specimen. Then came Mr. Gradgrind and
Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking through
Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more
tabular statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated
by cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short, it
was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad lot
altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were never thankful
for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen; that they never knew
what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and
insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and yet
were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable.
In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:
There was an
old woman, and what do you think?
She lived
upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and
drink were the whole of her diet,
And yet this
old woman would NEVER be quiet.