English Parishes

Boundaries and Townships

The story of how English parishes were created is far from simple, but the process was accomplished to a large extent between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. The balance of social and political factors varied throughout the country and indeed varied between adjacent places, interwoven with the chance incidence of personal piety and wealth. Bishops probably took the initiative in organizing areas for pastoral care; lords of the manor sought to control their local church, its resources, and its parson; major churches and monasteries established control over large areas, which probably included other churches; and small groups of people themselves organized their own churches, priests, and parishes.

Parish boundaries were established on the basis of an older structure of townships—divisions of the countryside whereby the resources of arable fields, meadows, pastures, woods, and rough grazing lands were shared between communities. Each township had its distinguishing name and defined area and could continue to exist even after it had no inhabitants. Many were ancient, but new townships were also created by dividing old [Page 452]ones, sometimes resulting in scattered pieces of land making up a new unit. The manorial system, which combined early principles of land ownership and civil authority, was also based on them.

Holy Trinity, Much Wenlock, Shropshire, the parish church for a cluster of townships, and (on the left) the sixteenth-century market hall

Anthea Jones; used with permission.

One township coincided with one parish in much of the south of England and in fertile, arable areas of the north, although enclosure and tithe maps of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal that otherwise unknown townships existed within some parishes. But many parishes held up to six townships, and some held more than six. Such parishes were known either by the name of the township in which the parish church was situated, or by some word describing the church itself. The parish of Shipton under Wychwood in Oxfordshire included the township of that name and five others; the white church of the parish of Whitkirk in Yorkshire was located in Colton township, one of six or seven in the parish; Stoke on Trent church was in Penkhull township, and there were fourteen more townships in this Staffordshire parish. “Stoke,” indeed, was a word for an administrative center.

...