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The fortunes of the clergy

The national picture: then....
The Church of England in recent times has tended to regard the stipend of the parochial clergy not as 'pay' in the normal sense, but as a 'maintenance allowance' (though has not followed the path of some other denominations and based the stipend on individual family circumstances, such as number of children, or a partner's earnings). Indeed, it has sometimes been said that a stipend was paid so that a priest 'did not have to work' (in secular employment) and could concentrate on parochial duties. For example, in 1943 the House of Bishops gave this definition [at a time when all clergy were male]:
The stipends of the clergy have always, we imagine, been rightly regarded not as pay in the sense in which that word is understood in the world of industry today, not as reward for services rendered, so that the more valuable the service in somebody's judgement or the more hours worked, the more should be the pay, but rather as a maintenance allowance to enable the priest to live without undue financial worry, to do his work effectively in the sphere to which he is called and, if married, to maintain his wife and bring up his family in accordance with a standard which might be described as neither poverty or riches...

But given the history of huge variations in stipends in times past, this must be regarded as something of a myth; as a report on clergy stipends Generosity and Sacrifice (Church House Publishing 2001) commented, It is doubtful whether the stipends of the clergy of the Church of England have ever been paid in accordance with this definition, which reflected the socio-economic context and aspirations of its particular time.

Sources of income
In the past many priests also earned income as part-time schoolmasters or chaplains to various institutions. In rural parishes some spent time farming the glebe land that formed part of their benefices - though such land was sometimes not local, and may even have been in another diocese. Rental and tithe income, from benefice land farmed or tenanted by others, formed part of the stipend, and collecting it in many places was a nightmare, though some parsons made it a pastoral occasion, with lavish quarter-day dinners for their tenants - see, for example, James Woodforde The Diary of a Country Parson (various editions). The glebe land of some historic London parishes became highly valuable as the city expanded, and was used for urban development rather than farming; but the newer parishes such as ours did not, on the whole, have such benefits. (Since 1978 all glebe has been vested in diocesan Boards of Finance, under the Endowments and Glebe Measure 1976, and some parsonage and other sites in London are now treated as 'diocesan glebe'.)

Until well into the 20th century there were vast and anomalous differences in stipends, depending on the historic endowments of each parish. A few incumbents were paid more than their bishops (this was a point of principle at Bury parish church)!  'Plum' livings - some with tiny populations - were often in the patronage of the Crown or Oxbridge colleges, cheek-by-jowl with parishes where the incumbent and his family lived in penury. (Mr Quiverful, the Vicar of Puddingdale in Trollope's Barchester Towers, may have struggled to keep his 14 children on a stipend of £400, but in real life there were incumbents whose stipend was a fraction of this.)

Many of the new urban parishes and district churches, including most of our own, had practically no endowment towards the stipend. Instead, the incumbent relied heavily on wedding and funeral fees (which could be considerable) and  pew rents - a system objectionable in principle, and as time went on increasingly hard to collect (see below). It was a matter of pride when a new church could be opened with the announcement 'all sittings in this church are free and unappropriated'. Collections were increasingly taken at services, but these went towards maintaining church, school and other institutions rather than paying the clergy. (The exception to this was the historic Easter offering for the parson; in the 'Easter offering case' which went on appeal to the House of Lords, Cooper v Blakiston [1908] 5 TC 347 this was held to be taxable, the Lord Chancellor concluding Where a sum of money is given to an incumbent substantially in respect of his services as incumbent, it accrues to him by reason of his office. Here the sum of money was given in respect of those services. Had it been a gift of an exceptional kind, such as a testimonial, or a contribution for a specific purpose, as to provide for a holiday, or a subscription peculiarly due to the personal qualities of the particular clergyman, it might not have been a voluntary payment for services, but a mere present. Thereafter the practice went into a slow decline, as congregations found other, non-taxable, ways of showing their appreciation - though Crockfords continued to show these figures as a component of stipend. In any case, Easter offerings in the churches of this parish were modest - unlike elsewhere.)

Charges on income
There were various charges on the parson's stipend - revenues on first fruits and tenths; rates and land tax on the parsonage and other buildings and glebe land; and mortages taken out with Queen Anne's Bounty (QAB) or the Ecclesiastical Commissioners [see below]. That is why older editions of Crockfords, which listed the figures (modern ones don't) distinguish 'gross' and 'net' income: nothing to do with income tax.

Some clergy could afford to build and maintain their parsonage houses - there was a glut of building in the 19th century, with some houses of massive proportions - but many others could not, and older houses fell into disrepair: hence the system of 'dilapidations', whereby an incumbent sued his predecessor's estate (in a civil tort action) for repair work on the house. This was problematic: see this House of Lords debate from 1858. (The arrangements were 'codified' by QAB under a measure of 1871, with an assessment made in each parish, agreed by the incumbent, and a levy raised; various clergy handbooks on the subject - including by one of 'our' clergy - were published. By a measure of 1923 this process was shared with newly-created diocesan dilapidations boards: former Rector R.W. Harris supported this reform as a member of the Church Assembly. The system has been much-altered since.) When clergy retired - a rare phenomenon until the end of the 19th century - their pension arrangements became a charge on their successors: there was no national clergy pension scheme until 1907.

 Clerical residence, and the curates' lot
In earlier times some clergy had coped (or exploited the system) by being pluralists, and holding two or more benefices, paying curates to run them, out of their own stipend (unless there was local provision for this). This practice was challenged by the 1803 Residence Act, but continued for some time (see here for a nororious local example - Bryan King's cousin). The Act, and the Curates Relief Act that followed, prompted a semi-satirical document by Rowland Hill (a Free Church preacher - not the inventor of the penny post, though he was perhaps named for him) Spiritual Characteristics, represented in an account of a most curious sale of curates, by public auction, who were to be disposed of in consequence of the Clergy Residence Act in which the original design and probable consequences of that law, are laid before the public, delivered in the similitude of a dream by an old observer.

For this and other reasons, the lot of curates, 'perpetual' or otherwise, was far from easy - and there were a lot of them in the 19th century. They had no security of tenure, and many moved from one short-term post to another (sometimes a dozen or more in the course of their ministry), often on stipends of less than £100 a year, sometimes as low as £30, as they sought to get their own parishes, which for those without 'connections' could prove well-nigh impossible. See below for how this worked out locally.

Reforming the system
National attempts to remedy the extreme disparities and 'modernise' the system lasted from the early 19th century until after the Second World War. Queen Anne's Bounty was set up in 1704, redistributing revenue, initially from the first fruits and tenths which since the Reformation had been payable to the Crown, 'for the Augmentation of the Maintenance of Poor Clergy'. (First fruits and tenths were finally abolished in 1926.) The poorest parishes were discharged from these payments, and QAB applied funds selectively (though in some cases by lot!) to improve poor clergy's income, by investing in land or tithes nominated by the incumbent. Under the 'Gilbert Act' of 1777 (but not put into operation until 1811) QAB also became involved in providing low-interest or interest-free mortgages to provide and/or repair parsonages for incumbents of small livings.  In 1856 QAB took over the work of the Church Building Commissioners (founded by Parliament in 1818 to fund newly-created churches and parishes), and from 1907 they became involved with the provision of clergy pensions.

Commuting the cumbersome and unpredictable system of tithes into fixed-value annuities for a term of years (investing the proceeds for the benefice) also proved a long drawn-out process. It began in 1846, but consent of both landowner and incumbent was required, so little was achieved until an Act of 1918 removed the requirement for the latter's consent; many landowners took advantage of its favourable terms (a 50-year annuity, fixed at the current value of the tithe for six years). The scheme was revised by the 1925 Tithe Act which fixed the rent-charge at 5%, with arrangements for the liability to be extinguished within 80 years. QAB was responsible for its collection - conducting extensive surveys of parishes - until the Tithe Redemption Commission was set up. Further variations to the scheme under legislation in 1936 arranged for them to pay 3% Government stock to the tithe owners. QAB was given power to vary the rent charges of tithe-owning benefices after the next vacancy, which in some cases led to significant reduction in income. (Various other modifications followed - the 1925 Act was finally repealed in 1998.) See here for a fuller summary of issues relating to tithes.

 In 1836 Parliament established the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to reorganize dioceses, abolish surplus posts in cathedrals and assume responsibility for funding bishops and some cathedral costs, and the assets that had supported them; the income released was to be used for the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required. They had a major role in financing the rapidly-expanding urban parishes of the 19th century (see below for how this impacted locally).

QAB and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners were merged in 1948 as the Church Commissioners, charged with improving the income of clergy and working towards national consistency of provision. Many clergy continue to receive an 'augmentation' of their stipend from their funds, though the proportion has sharply declined as they are increasingly devoted to pensions. For more on these bodies, and the various pieces of legislation, see here, and in much fuller detail Geoffrey Best Temporal Pillars (Cambridge University Press 1964).

... and now
Nowadays an increasing proportion of clergy are 'self-supporting' (formerly 'non-stipendiary'), with a variety of full- or part-time jobs, well beyond the traditional clerical 'extras'. But for stipendiary clergy, stipend levels across the country are now roughly the same, and newly-ordained curates are paid almost the same as long-serving parish priests who may carry extra responsibilities, for instance as team rectors, or area deans. Urban clergy in busy and stressful parishes, perhaps with large numbers of baptisms, weddings and funerals, are paid no more than their country cousins - though rural ministry has now also become stressful, with the emergence of multi-parish posts. There remain differentials for residentiary canons, archdeacons and bishops, but they are quite modest in comparison with those of the secular world: the pay-scale is fairly flat. (Some question whether differentials should extend beyond active service: pensions are regarded as part of the 'package', deferred pay for a lifetime of service - but why do retired dignitaries need more?) But these issues apart, there is now a national scale across all (or nearly all) dioceses, each setting its stipend rates within a limited range. (London in fact is towards the bottom of this range, though housing and some other on-costs in the capital are of course higher.)

The major change in recent years is that, apart from the declining proportion of augmentation from the Commissioners described above, dioceses now meet the cost of stipends through the giving of congregations in 'parish quota' or common fund (plus some investment income) - the living rather than the departed fund the church's ministry. There are mechanisms for redistribution of historic resources between well- and poorly-endowed dioceses. Although a few parishes still have local sources of stipend income, the Central Stipends Authority (CSA) administers clergy pay and PAYE across the land.

It is thus difficult for clergy to answer the question 'who is your employer?' - is it the parish? the diocese? the Church of England (through the CSA)? God? or are they self-employed? The bureaucratically-incovenient answer is, none of these: parochial clergy, officially classed as 'atypical workers', remain, as they always have been, office holders. This principle was re-asserted in recent church legislation, creating a pattern termed 'common tenure' (which sounds ancient, but isn't), whereby a level playing field gives the same employment rights and responsibilities to all, as required by government, gradually replacing the elaborate distinctions between those with and without a 'parson's freehold'.

THE LOCAL PICTURE
Down the years, around 340 clergy, plus at least 20 licensed female workers, have served the churches and chapels and institutions that make up the present-day parish of St George-in-the-East. All the clergy have been male, apart from our current non-stipendiary priest, and almost all have drawn a stipend of some kind (even if in the case of Admiral Woods it was only £5 a year - which he rarely claimed!) Some had paid posts elsewhere - as schoolmasters, at the workhouse, with missionary societies, or (in earlier years) as part-time 'Lecturers' in other parishes. (Perhaps the most unusual generator of additional clerical income in more recent times was 'the baccy parson'.) Their financial positions demonstrate the full range of situations described above.

Some of them had 'private means'. This was particularly true up to the end of the 19th century of the incumbents at St George-in-the-East, and some of its curates (including at the mission chapels of St Saviour & St Cross, whose distinctive challenge attracted some 'well-connected' men), and the earlier lay workers; of St Mark Whitechapel; and to a lesser extent of the clergy at Christ Church, Watney Street. Several clergy were involved in court cases over family trusts: among those featuring in law reports are Gabriel Tahourdin (1743), the family of Robert Farington (1841), and Sidney Vatcher (1915), all from St George-in-the-East; Calvin Winstanley (1851-64), from Christ Church Watney Street;  and C.A.J. Smith (1867), of the Episcopal Floating Church; and there may well have been others. But the majority had no personal incomes, particularly as we entered the 20th century; see F.StJ. Corbett's difficulties as the first Rector of the parish church in this position, reporting to the Bishop in 1914, and longing to be set free from the constant demands of fundraising. After the First World War it became even more difficult - see J.C. Pringle's struggles to balance the books. In 1923 he had to borrow £800 for dilapidations payments on the Rectory, to be paid off in instalments, and also to fund personally the cover for services during his trip to India. As the table below shows, stipends fell in the inter-war period.

With regard to the poorly-endowed 'daughter churches', G.H. McGill of Christ Church and R.E. Bartlett of St Mark Whitechapel both gave evidence on the inadequacy and insecurity of East End stipends to the Ecclesiastical Commission in 1862. McGill made the point that, because in areas of severe deprivation there were many charitable calls on the personal income of the clergy, a stipend which might be adequate in a small rural parish would not suffice here - I think that there are many parishes with £200 year that are infinitely worse off in point spiritual destitution and where the clergyman is infinitely worse off than if he had £100 a year in other places. With regard to my own parish, and with regard, I am sure, to many of my brethren in the East-end of London, we should be very much better off, in a temporal point of view, if we had a curacy in the country with an income of only £100 or £120 a year. The demands upon us are very great in every way to support schools and various other charities of the sort; I believe that every year of my life my charities cost £1,500, and I have to beg it, or to give it in some way or other. Therefore I am strongly of opinion that actual income is not an absolute test of the position in which a clergyman stands; that if there is an enormous poor population he is worse off with £200 a year than if he had a small country place with £100 or £120 (question 3994). Bartlett also stressed that, while clergy could appeal to local benefactors for schools and other parish projects, they could hardly do so to secure a decent stipend for themselves (question 3443). Both argued for endowments guaranteeing £300 a year and an end to pew rents.

At these hearings, much debate turned on whether the Commissioners could make selective allocations of funds released from nearby parishes to underwrite stipends in needy areas, rather than simply putting them into the national pot. In the particular case on which McGill was quizzed, of the lucrative Finsbury prebendal estates which had 'fallen in', the funds were in fact allocated to poor parishes across the whole metropolitan area. (Compare the specific allocation to St George's and Christ Church Watney Street of endowments from voided City parishes, noted below.) Assured stipends for the 'daughter churches' thus came to be £300 - the figure that McGill had argued for.

 Curates and lay workers
At the start of the 19th century curates here were paid £70 or £80 (one of them coming from a parish where it was as low as £30). This rose to about £100 by mid-century, and about £150 by its end. The Lecturer post had been supported by voluntary contributions from the congregation (which in due course funded William Quekett at Christ Church Watney Street and Thomas Richardson at St Matthew Pell Street), but most of the Victorian curates in the 'daughter churches' were paid by a combination of private benefactions and grants from the various mission societies, often topped up from the incumbent's own stipend. For example, at Christ Church G.H.McGill received grants of £80 and £40 for his two curates, both of which he made up to £100 from his own pocket. He also attracted funds from wealthy individuals - see here for details. In the 1880s, the East London Church Fund provided £150 for one curate, and the Duke of Westminster £50 towards a second. There were periods when much-needed curates could not be afforded.

The East London Church Fund [magazine wrapper right] was one of several societies providing grants to curates and lay workers. It was set up in 1880 by Bishop Walsham How, who wrote ten years later of A church cruelly under-manned, and struggling to provide the bread of life for 700,000 people, mostly poor ... The clergy were too few, and many of them were disheartened; jaded by the overstrain against too great odds, jaded by the unlovely pressure of their surroundings; jaded sometimes by illness, somemtimes by old age. The endowments were sufficient for the incumbents in almost every case, but were not sufficient to provide assistant clergy, or lay workers, male or female. The paid church workers, therefore, like the clergy, were too few. In parish after parish the necessities of Church life were lacking or inadequately provided. In the very corner of England, where the Church needed her fullest equipment, was that equipment utterly inadequate ....
The fund was to provide 'a sufficient staff of clerical and lay workers', to enable eldery or incapacitated clergy to retire, and to enable subdivision of large parishes. (Note the bishop's view that by this date incumbents' stipend endowments were mostly sufficient.)

Some of our curates - especially the Oxbridge graduates - achieved their 'own' parishes after one or two settled curacies, but others were birds of passage, for whom their time here was but one of many poorly-paid short-term posts. For some, coming to East London was a desperate measure rather than a mission commitment. See below for those for whom the struggle was too much and as a result, here or elsewhere, went through the bankrupcy courts.

Particular churches
The information below is patchy - more research is needed - but shows some figures at various dates for each of the churches.
St George-in-the-East
date
 endowment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &c
 gross
 net
1729
 100



100
 300
1799
 [+180 - plurality]






1841
 ?



284 [8 months]
 396
1865
 ?




400
1874
 ?





280
1879
 +500 St Alphege






1908
211

149
 50
800
1929
 [St Alphege transferred to TRC -  see above]
 211

149
 10
605
1951





600
According to R.H. Hadden's East End Chronicle, when the parish was established, by Act of Parliament making the hamlet of Wapping-Stepney (within the parish of Stepney) a District Parish, the Commissioners granted £3,000, to be so invested as to produce £100 a year, clear of all deductions, from 'lands and tenements in fee simple', and the Rector was to receive another £100 a year from the churchwardens, 'to be raised by fees arising from burials: for which purpose the disposal of the burial-ground and vaults belonging to the parish are vested in the Vestry, exclusive of the Rector - an unusual arrangement? The 1711 Act provided that on default of payment, the Rector, for the more easy and speedy recovery of the aforementioned One Hundred Pounds, may apply to two or more Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex, who upon oath made of the sum or sums in arrear, may compel such defaulter by distress and sale of their goods: and if distress cannot be had to satisfy such arrears, then the succeeding Church-wardens to be responsible for the same. There was also charges against the Rector's parochial fees - £50 a year each to the Portionist of Ratcliff Stepney, and to the Portionist of Spitalfields, as compensation to them for depriving them of the Small Tithes, Easter Offerings, Garden Pennies, and Surplice Fees, plus £13 a year to the parish clerk of Stepney for his loss of fee income. The 'great tithes' were reserved to Brasenose College. ('Portionist' is the term for one of two or more beneficed clergy within a single parish, as was the case with Stepney parish before it was further sub-divided.)

So a decent, but by no means a 'prize', living (by comparison, the stipend of Stepney parish church in 1841 was £1190, and of St Mary Whitechapel £868). Herbert Mayo, the second Rector (1764-1802), had resigned a more lucrative Brasenose College living to come and work here. (For his last three years he was also the absentee Rector of an Essex parish, producing an additional £180 a year.) A house was provided, but incumbents improved and extended it at their own expense. But at least the stipend was enhanced by significant income from baptisms, weddings and (until the churchyard closed) funerals - many of which were conducted by the curates; see here for how WIlliam Quekett handed over fees for eight months of 1841-42 to the new, but short-lived, Rector. Fee income began to fall as the daughter churches became established and took many of the occasional offices. In 1879 an annual £500 increase came from the endowments of a closed City church, St Alphege London Wall.
  
Christ Church Watney Street
date
 endowment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &c
 gross
 net
1841
 -






1862
 -
180-190


270
 240
1868
 300 Finsbury prebendal estates





300
1874



106
288
1883





310
1892



160


189?
 +300 All Hallows Lombard St




468
1908


18
 140
 4
 462
1929


24
 140
468
 358
The church opened without any endowment whatsoever - only pew rents and fees. This was only possible because, es explained above, William Quekett was initially paid as curate and Lecturer of the parish church. A house was provided, but finance was precarious: for instance, he insured his life for £100 as security for the cost of the organ. (When he moved to Warrington his stipend was in excess of £1,000.) Pew rents probably discontinued when the Finsbury estates endowment was added. (G.H. McGill's stipend in his next parish, in Wales, was £700; his successor, James Maconechy, went to a parish in Paddington on as stipend of £580.) The gross stipend rose to £310 for A.L. Hunt, 'with two houses' (though that probably meant only that the Rectory was converted from two properties). In the time of Marmaduke Hare the Commissioners' endowment increased by £2000, to yield £160 rather than £106 pa. In H.C. Dimsdale's time, funds from the voidance of All Hallows, Lombard Street were added to produce a stipend of £468, ending, as his history of the parish asserts, its claim to be the poorest parish in East London.

St Matthew Pell Street
date
 endwoment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &c
 gross
 net

40



chaplaincy

1874






300
The church opened with a small endowment but no house, and the Commissioners and the Home Mission Fund each made an annual grant of £100 towards the stipend; Thomas Richadson augmented his income with a chaplaincy to one of the City warehouses and by private subscriptions. His successor, J.M. Fidler, had a stipend of what had become the standard figure for the district churches.
St John the Evangelist-in-the-East Golding Street
date
 endowment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &c
 gross
 net
1874





210
1908





300
1929



394
 6
 400
 350
J.M. Vaughan, the first incumbent, attracted funds from masonic friends. His successor, Cull Bennett, offered £130 a year for a curate.

St Mark Whitechapel
date
 endowment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &c
 gross
 net
1862
 13
60

13
 300
1878





300
1908





278
 249
R.E. Bartlett explained to the Commissioners in 1862 When I entered upon the incumbency the income from endowment was £13 a year; from fees about the same; from pew rents £60; making a total of between £80 and £90. Since then a benefaction has come in, which has raised the income to £300 a year for five years, conditional on the abolition of pew rents, which was a thing that I was very anxious to accomplish, leaving me at the end of five years, of which a year and a half has already expired, with an income of £13 from endowment and about the same from fees. I am employed meanwhile in making efforts to raise what I can towards a permanent endowment; but I find on inquiry that the property is in the hands of very small owners, almost all non resident, many of them Jews; and I am informed by persons who have known the parish much longer than I have, that I shall be very fortunate if in the course of five years I scrape together as many hundred pounds.

St Paul Dock Street
date
 endowment
 ground rent
 pew rent
 QAB
 Ecc Comm
 fees &C
 gross
 net
1874






300
???
 +St Mark

105
 472
 3
 580
 450
1951


583 Church Commissioners
 fees 6, other 2
 590
 566
The stipend rose when St Mark Whitechapel was added to the parish.
 

BANKRUPTCY
Nowadays an undischarged bankrupt cannot be ordained, or licensed to a new post, but that was not always the case.  At a time when a significant number of local traders passed through the courts, so did a handful of 'our' clergy - some of them more than once - though in every case it was before or after their time here. (This was an experience they shared with a large number of local traders, including some who served as churchwardens.) Finding a new post was not easy, which is why some of them became workhouse chaplains or sought employment outside the parochial system.

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