Chapter 2

ARCHEPISCOPAL AND EPISCOPAL RECORDS

The role of the church in our ancestors’ lives up until the nineteenth century is difficult to overestimate and was on a scale unthinkable to most now living in more secular times. Much of this power in educational and legal affairs was transferred to the state in the nineteenth century. We shall examine the higher echelons of the church in this chapter; the lower levels will be dealt with in the next.

With the reintroduction of Christianity to England in 597, the Church established itself slowly across the country. England was divided into two provinces with a total of seventeen dioceses. These were the province of York with four dioceses, which included the northern counties of Northumberland, Durham, Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Cheshire and Nottinghamshire. The larger province, was that of Canterbury, which included the remainder of the country. Each was headed by an archbishop and that of Canterbury was the senior of the two. Neither was head of the church in England; up to the Henrican reformation of the sixteenth century this was the Pope, then the monarch thereafter when church and state fused and changed from Catholic to Protestant.

Beneath the level of the province was the diocese, which was headed by a bishop. Diocese was not the same as county. Thus the diocese of Durham included Northumberland as well as Durham, and the diocese of Carlisle consisted of Cumberland and Westmorland. At the Reformation, six more dioceses were created but one, Westminster, only lasted a few years; a more permanent one was Chester, created in 1542 out of part of the diocese of Lichfield and it included Lancashire, Cheshire and part of Westmorland. Dioceses varied considerably in size and income. Durham was one of the richest in the eighteenth century, Carlisle and Rochester two of the poorest. Archbishops and bishops sat in the House of Lords and were important territorial and political figures with access to the monarch, as well as being key figures in the ecclesiastical world. They were appointed by the monarch, though the government took an increasing interest especially from the eighteenth century.

The next tier of administration was the archdeaconry; there were a number of these in each diocese, totalling fifty-eight in the country in the Middle Ages, and this number varied enormously with Lincoln possessing eight, York five and Carlisle one. Archdeacons had to inspect the parishes in order to ensure that they were well run. Provinces, dioceses and archdeaconries all ran their own religious courts. The lowest level was the parish.