A Canon's Residence in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Thomas Gooch

Abstract

A well-to-do prebendary of the eighteenth century might spend a part of his time in his cathedral close, a part in his other benefices, a part in some favourite country home, a part in London seeking favour in the court which could lead to a bishopric. He might even, like Dr Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers, spend years abroad, never doing a day's duty in Barchester Close – ‘and yet there was no reason against his doing duty except a want of inclination on his own part’. Dr Stanhope was doubtless intended to represent standards of the eighteenth century surviving into the nineteenth; and there is no doubt that non-residence was widespread, pluralism common in the eighteenth century. It has often and reasonably been said that these were no novelty: their roots go back to the refoundation of secular cathedrals after the Norman Conquest; non-residence and pluralism rose and fell in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rose again to remarkable heights in the fifteenth; Thomas Wolsey set a standard of pluralism no later prelate could scale, yet the reformers – for all their squeamish phrases – made little permanent impression on these practices, which survived into the age of Trollope. But it is exceedingly difficult to find any precise evidence as to how the pluralists of any age filled their time. The interest of Thomas Gooch (1675–1754) nes precisely in this: until he became bishop of Norwich he was a canon of Chichester and of Canterbury, whose cathedral records throw some light on his residence, and Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where his periods of residence are exactly known. These three offices divided his attention. It is true that he was also archdeacon of Essex, and held other preferment besides, but such evidence as we have suggests that this involved him in only occasional duties: we have found evidence of six occasions when he held archdeacon's visitations in person.