The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial AspectsWare, Sedley Lynch
History
The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects
Ware, Sedley Lynch
Church of England -- Finance; England -- Church history -- 16th century; Parishes -- Great Britain
As the parishioners were always eager to turn an honest penny for
their own benefit, no possible source of receipts was neglected. If,
for instance, any part of the church or the church premises might,
temporarily or permanently, be rented out without drawing upon the
community the censure of the ordinary, the parishioners were happy to
do so. Owners of structures of any kind encroaching upon the
churchyard, or other church land, were promptly made to pay for the
privilege.[301] Occasionally parishes derived more or less large sums
from the sale of parish valuables. The sale of costly vestments,
embroideries, hangings, images, chalices, pyxes and other church
furnishings and ornaments condemned as superstitious by the Anglican
church, brought some income to the wardens of most parishes during the
first years of Elizabeth. Examples will be found in all the accounts.
Now and then, too, a parish would make a large sum from the sale of
the wood or other products of parish lands.[302] A fairly common item
in city parishes especially were fees paid for licences to eat flesh
during Lent and on other legal fast days.[303]
When an Elizabethan parish undertook some work on a great scale, such
as the rebuilding of its church, or of the church steeple; or, again,
when it had suffered great losses by fire or flood, it solicited
through _Begging Proctors_ the _Contributions of Outsiders_, sometimes
from all parts of England.[304]
To terminate our enumeration of means of raising money, or of
contributions of all sorts on which the wardens could count (as apart
from rates, properly so-called), we might mention _Fixed
Contributions_, of money or of labor, issuing out of certain
tenements; and _Annual Payments to Mother Churches_. Certain lands or
houses, generally abutting on the church grounds, had fixed upon them
the obligation to repair a certain portion of the churchyard
enclosure, Tenement X, so many feet of fence, Tenement Y, such a
portion of brick or stone wall, and so forth.[305]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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