The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The Church of England in Industrialising Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century. By M.F. SNAPE (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2003; pp. 228. N.p.). THIS is a significant and well-researched book which makes a timely intervention in the debate about the success or failure of the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Against those (including this reviewer) who have argued that the Anglican Church in the Georgian period was pastorally more successful and more adept in retaining popular affection than its nineteenth-century detractors claimed, Snape uses the parish of Whalley (at 161 square miles, reputedly the largest in England) to highlight instead the Church's weaknesses and failures. In so doing he makes the case that, whatever may have been true of the south of England, the Church was ineffective in the industrial north. Snape's choice of Whalley is shrewd, since a decade ago Mark Smith, in a pioneering study of Oldham and Saddleworth (parishes not that far from Whalley), argued that the Church had fared far better in industrialising Lancashire than had hitherto been assumed. Smith pointed, for instance, to the creation of chapels of ease as an indicator of the vitality of the Church and its ability to reach out to new centres of population. But Snape cautions against giving too positive a spin on the role of chapels of ease, noting that, in Whalley at least, there were still large tracts of the population not within comfortable reach of a chapel, and that in any case not all chapels were able to provide the full range of services, so that, for the crucial rites of passage, even parishioners living near a chapel had to go elsewhere for the most important services. Snape also sheds doubt on the idea that lay interest in providing funds for chapel building was motivated by altruism in providing accommodation for the poor; rather, he argues, the well-to-do contributors were more concerned to get good seats for themselves. What is particularly suggestive about Snape's analysis is that he can admit that several of the indices which historians have recently used to indicate the vitality of the Church—such as the regular and dedicated provision of Sunday services and the frequent celebration of Holy Communion—occurred in the industrialising north. Indeed, on this score, Whalley's one parish church and seventeen chapels often outstripped their southern counterparts, generally offering two services on a Sunday where many southern parishes provided just one, and having a monthly communion. But Snape argues that this kind of success nevertheless must be seen within a general picture of overall pastoral decline. While acknowledging the provision of Sunday services, he points out that, by the 1770s, clergy were frequently noting that the poor stayed away from church, sometimes using the excuse that would become more common in the Victorian period that they did not have a ‘Sunday best’. Most tellingly, however, Snape's case for the failure of Anglicanism in the industrial north goes beyond the conventional sociological explanations for what went wrong. Rather than seeing the Church's collapse as the result of simply being overwhelmed by the growth of population, urbanisation and industrialisation—explanations which proved popular among social and ecclesiastical historians in the 1970s—Snape lays the blame for the failure of Anglicanism squarely at the door of the Church itself. The Church's weaknesses, he can acknowledge, were no doubt exacerbated by industrialisation, but he is clear they would have occurred without it. At heart, the Church's problems came from within.