The Parish Boundary: A Social Phenomenon in Hanoverian England

Abstract

This paper examines aspects of the social meaning of the parish boundary in Hanoverian England. The parish touched most people's lives through its role as a form of local government and as a significant landscape feature which defined a circuit of territory to which local people may have felt an allegiance. Evidence for the social meaning of boundaries is found in acts of boundary marking and related perambulation ceremonies and through written records, sometimes involving maps. The paper draws on a contrasting range of cases from a variety of counties with different landscape and settlement types in the century or so before the local government and administrative reforms of the 1830s – a time of significant change in central-local government relations. The paper evaluates the significance of the parish as principal repository of detailed information on its own boundaries in our period, with a premium placed on local knowledge, especially of the older parishioners. It is also suggested that acts of boundary recording could enhance a sense of parish consciousness and community.