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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 127-128



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Book Review

The Church in an Age of Danger:
Parsons and Parishioners, 1660-1740


The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660-1740. By Donald A. Spaeth. [Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 279. $64.95.)

This ground-breaking monograph deserves a wide readership. It is a substantially rewritten version of Spaeth's Brown University Ph.D. thesis of 1985 on "lay-clerical conflict and popular piety in Wiltshire villages" from the restoration of the Stuart monarchy and the Protestant Church of England in 1660 to the onset of the Evangelical Revival in the 1730's. Since then, he has undertaken more work in the archives and incorporated the insights of recent work on what used to be a dark age of English church history. His main sources remain the evidence of disputes brought before ecclesiastical courts and the Exchequer from the three hundred parishes in Wiltshire during the eight decades [End Page 127] studied. Two-thirds of these parishes experienced at least one dispute between clergy and laity: the laity accused the clergy of pastoral neglect, and scandalous or provocative behavior, and the clergy accused the laity of non-attendance at church, non-reception of communion, not maintaining the church's fabric or fittings, but above all non-payment of tithes. Over half of Wiltshire's parishes experienced at least one clerically promoted tithe suit, and over 850 defendants were cited between 1660 and 1740.

But this book is about far more than litigation in that Spaeth manages skillfully and persuasively to tease out from these and other sources a mass of new insights into the attitudes of the English clergy and the laity at this pivotal time. These insights are of much wider significance in that Spaeth is among those who reject the idea of 'confessionalization' or a 'confessional state,' in which the educated elites sought to impose a single religious identity from above, in favor of an account in which the laity at all levels--in this case, gentry, parish elite, and poor--showed a selective but strong and sincere commitment to the existing official liturgy and rites of passage, and in which the clergy were most successful when they resided in their parishes and accommodated popular views, as in the clergy's role in "Matters of life and death," which is discussed very sympathetically in Chapter 9.

The nature of his materials leads to an inevitable stress on confrontation, and Spaeth's broad conclusion is reflected in his title: the Church of England was in danger because the selfish, elitist attitudes of the clergy, their intolerance of nonconformity, and their inflexibility when faced with popular forms of religiosity, such as setting up choirs, meant that they missed a good opportunity to consolidate the hold of the established church even before the Industrial Revolution. But Spaeth's own statistics often show a disconcerting drop in prosecutions in the early eighteenth century, albeit partly due to changes in the law and gaps in the records. It also appears that in only thirty parishes (a tenth of the whole) were there persistent conflicts (p. 22), from which Spaeth draws a dozen case-studies where clashes of personality or a cluster of grievances led to serious trouble. In many other parishes, disputes were soon solved and forgotten (p. 22), and in another hundred parishes there are, for whatever reason, no recorded disputes at all. Moreover, although tithe suits were common, ten particularly litigious clerics accounted for one-third of the tithe actions brought (pp. 141, 150); and if we take out the defendants sued by nine of them (p. 144), we are left with an average of about eight defendants a year during the eighty years covered. Were the undoubted stresses in lay-clerical relations that Spaeth has identified sufficient to undermine the deep fund of good will toward the church which he also convincingly argues existed, or did parish life, as in...

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