Tracing History Through Title Deeds: A Guide for Family and Local Historians

Abstract

to the modern clergy house of the inner city (recently portrayed as the vicarage of St Saviour’s in the Marches in the television series Rev), is no easy task, but the author’s sure grasp of the wider cultural picture enables her to interweave the greater historical narrative with what was happening at a local level in parishes across England. Deftly chosen examples of particular clergy and their houses allow valuable glimpses into the way in which the buildings’ design and use changed as the parson’s role changed. There is a welcome emphasis on the challenges that increasing and rapid urbanisation posed to a church organised on the parochial model, and the church’s attempts to meet them. Butterfield’s All Saints Margaret Street complex of church and vicarage combined on a tight urban site and the group of church, vicarage and school at St Mark’s Swindon as part of the new railway town are both well illustrated. The role of some of the leading Victorian architects, and of the Anglican Church’s significant impetus to the Gothic Revival, is also recognised. Indeed, carefully selected and well-reproduced illustrations — historical photographs, plans and documents as well as good contemporary colour photography — in a modestly priced publication is another virtue of this account. The indelible picture that emerges is of the immense variety of the parsonage in England, exploding the myth that the archetypical parsonage is the genteel residence portrayed in the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Poor clergy in very modest houses were common until the reforms of the twentieth century as the old patrician order faded, though not quickly enough to leave children of the vicarage, like the author or the present reviewer, without memories of freezing cold houses and parents struggling to cope in houses far too large to run on modest clerical stipends. As late as the 1970s my parents moved from a moderately sized vicarage (Kidlington, Oxfordshire, a medieval house with an extension by G. E. Street) to a twenty-roomed monster (Banbury, Oxfordshire, an Elizabethan front block facing the town, behind which the Victorian rector had added a vast pseudo-medieval hall range), which took the whole of my father’s salary just to pay for the oil-fired central heating in his first winter; no wonder he soon persuaded the diocese to sell up. The decline of the Anglican Church and modern patterns of ministry in radically changed circumstances meant the sale of historic parsonages, which began in earnest after the Great War (six hundred had been sold by 1930 and a further seven hundred by 1939), accelerated rapidly in the later twentieth century, with modern clergy houses now indistinguishable from their neighbours. It is much to be hoped that this book will be a spur to greater research into this neglected house type: it is not too late to quarry the rich building and architectural history the English parsonage represents, and most of them — better furnished, maintained and heated than some of us could ever dream of— are still with us.