AT THIS time of year, it is customary for parish churches to hold their annual general meeting — actually, two distinct meetings, usually held on the same day. The first is the Annual Meeting of Parishioners, sometimes called by the ancient title of “Easter Vestry”. Its business is now limited to the election of two churchwardens, to serve for the coming year. This is then swiftly followed by the Annual Parochial Church Meeting (APCM).
Eligibility to vote in these meetings differs. Those entitled to vote at the Annual Meeting of Parishioners (the Vestry) are lay people resident in the parish, irrespective of whether they are churchgoers, and lay people whose names are entered on the church electoral roll, irrespective of whether they are resident in the parish. Entitlement to vote at the APCM, however, is restricted to those on the electoral roll, resident or not. Nowadays, the two constituencies tend to overlap, as it is unlikely that anyone attending the Vestry would not also be eligible to vote in the APCM.
IT WAS not always thus. The Vestry, named after the place where it once met, has a long and colourful history. Of ancient origin, it was the earliest form of local government. Besides dealing with ecclesiastical matters, it dealt with bridges, boundaries, paths, vagrants, and administration of the Poor Law. From the Reformation in the 16th century until the Local Government Act of 1894, the Vestry was the only local forum, both civil and ecclesiastical.
Parish records reveal how our ancestors, as a matter of course, combined sacred and secular. In 1885, the Vestry at Holt dealt with water supply, drains, constables, maintenance of the highway, gas inspectors, widening of the street, and the dismantling of the west gallery in the church (Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church: Volume 2, 1970).
To assist it in its deliberations, the Vestry did not lack refreshment. For the year 1559-60, the churchwardens’ accounts for St Martin-in-the-Fields — then a small, rural parish — include money paid “for kracknells 6d, for figges, reasons and almonds 12d, for apples 3d, for wine 16d, for sewgar 7d, for bere and ale 4d” (Old Parish Life, edited by Justin Lovill, 2022).
HISTORICALLY, it was assumed that everyone in England belonged to the Church of England. It was, therefore, not necessary to identify their beliefs or religious affiliation. This meant that parishioners who were not Anglican, or not even Christian, and who wished to participate in local affairs, had no alternative but to resort to an Anglican forum under the chairmanship of the Church of England parson.
This unsatisfactory state of affairs could lead to trouble. In his diary, the Revd Benjamin Armstrong, Vicar of East Dereham 1850-88, records occasional riots at his Easter Vestry. On 3 March 1868, he writes: “A very large and excited Vestry on the subject of the new burial ground, at which every rate-paying dissenter in the parish was present. The dissenters were all for a cemetery . . . but the church people were mainly for an extension of the existing churchyard.”
It took three hours of vigorous debate before the Vicar steered the meeting to a compromise. He reserved his private opinions for his journal, where he records: “The Vestry took place in the Assembly Room, and so saved our beautiful chancel from the profanation of puritans and freethinkers with their hats on and that peculiar and irreverent class who never miss a Vestry, but are never seen in church at any other time” (Benjamin Armstrong, Under the Parson’s Nose, edited by Christopher Armstrong, 2012).
IN A few parishes, the Vestry had a more ecclesiastical character. In 1797, the Easter Vestry at St Peter Mancroft, Norwich, had an unusually full agenda. The meeting elected two churchwardens, two sidesmen, a pew-opener, a bellows- blower, an organist, an upper sexton, an under sexton, a clerk, four overseers of the poor, and 12 auditors. Most vestries were less active (Lovill, op. cit.).
In other parishes, there was an attempt to restrict the attendance. In 1622, a group of parishioners of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, supported by their vicar and churchwardens, petitioned the Bishop of London to allow a group of 48 “to be appointed continually to be vestrymen” to run the affairs of the parish. They were concerned about “the great confusion and disorder” of the parish meetings, and “the ignorance and weakeness in judgement” of some of the parishioners who had recently moved in. We can recognise that familiar hostility to newcomers.
A similar situation prevailed at St Andrew’s, Holborn, where the churchwardens’ accounts were passed at an annual meeting of all parishioners, but “some affairs belonging to the church are consulted upon and are ordered by the rector and churchwardens, and a selected vestry of twelve persons, grave and ancient inhabitants, men of approved honesty and discretion” (Lovill, op. cit.).
WHAT hastened the decline and eventual demise of the Vestry was the Local Government Act of 1894, which removed from the meeting all secular business. The effect can be clearly seen, for example, at Holt, where, in the past, the amount of business had required it to meet several times a year. After 1894, it met only once a year, to elect one churchwarden and to receive the vicar’s nomination of the other one (Chadwick, op. cit.).
The virtual disappearance of this ancient body did not appear to cause many ripples, and was welcomed in some quarters. In the House of Commons, the president of the Local Government Board declared: “Vestries are a decrepit survival of former days. . . They have the form but not the power of local government; they do not possess the confidence of the rural population; and they are in the main useless and obstructive”; and, he added, “They do not meet at convenient hours” (Chadwick, op. cit.).
The 1894 Act provided for an elected parish council in villages with a population of more than 300. Smaller ones were grouped. Ancient boundaries were changed. Of the 15,000 civil parishes, about one third now had different boundaries from the ecclesiastical parishes. Churchwardens ceased to have any civil function The parson was no longer chairman — nor even an ex officio member. Administration of local charities was transferred from the Vestry to the new Parish Council. Only “ecclesiastical charities” were to remain the responsibility of the Vestry, though what was an ecclesiastical charity, and what was not, led to considerable confusion. People asked why the newly created body should be called a parish, when it was not (Chadwick, op. cit.).
THE Church began to look for an ecclesiastical replacement of the now moribund Vestry. As early as 1871, Bishop Harold Browne of Ely encouraged every parish in his diocese to have its voluntary church council. In 1897, the Bishops resolved to encourage every incumbent to form a parochial church council, comprising churchwardens, sidesmen, and councillors, who should be communicants and elected by members of the C of E. It was not until 1921 that the Parochial Church Council was formally established.
Although many were glad about these developments (which allowed the Church to manage her own affairs, untrammelled by secular interference), there were others who believed that the growing separation of Church and State diminished both. The Church of England had become the Church in England: a religious denomination providing on-demand liturgical settings for weddings and funerals, and for state occasions, but otherwise of diminishing relevance in modern society.
Some lamented this decline, but others, perhaps with greater faith and clearer vision, welcomed the Church’s freedom to explore new styles of worship and ministry in a changing, albeit largely indifferent, world.
The Revd Adrian Leak is a retired priest. His most recent publication is After the Order of Melchizedek: Memoirs of an Anglican priest (Book Guild, 2022).
