Copyright holder: Tyndale University, 3377 Bayview Ave., Toronto, Ontario, Canada M2M 3S4 Att.: Library Director, J. William Horsey Library Copyright: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Copyright license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License Citation: Faught, C. Brad. Review of Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815-1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor, by Robert Lee. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2006. (Studies in Modern British Religious History; volume 11) Anglican and Episcopal History 76, no. 3 (2007): 435-437. ***** Begin Content ****** TYNDALE UNIVERSITY 3377 Bayview Avenue Toronto, ON M2M 3S4 TEL: 416.226.6620 www.tyndale.ca Note: This Work has been made available by the authority of the copyright owner solely for the purpose of private study and research and may not be copied or reproduced except as permitted by the copyright laws of Canada without the written authority from the copyright owner. Faught, C. Brad. Review of Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815-1914: Encountering and Managing the Poor, by Robert Lee. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2006. (Studies in Modern British Religious History; volume 11) Anglican and Episcopal History 76, no. 3 (2007): 435-437. 435 BOOK REVIEWS Rural Society and the Anglican Clergy, 1815-1914: Encountering and Manag- ing the Poor. By Robert Lee. Studies in Modern British Religious His- tory. (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press, 2006, Pp. xii, 235. $80.00.) For readers of Victorian fiction, no author catches the tenor and times of the Church of England better than Anthony Trollope. In his telling, the hush of the cathedral close provided the ironic backdrop for a bustling ecclesiastical society of bishops, priests, deacons, churchwar- dens, and parishioners of all kinds. As a window into the nineteenth- century church, Trollope’s acknowledged mastery attains even greater resonance, however, when placed alongside the many and varied aca- demic studies that cover the same period. Robert Lee’s examination of the Anglican clergy and the rural poor of Norfolk following the defeat 436 ANGLICAN AND EPISCOPAL HISTORY of Napoleon in 1815 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 is an excellent addition to the large corpus of existing work that illu- mines the Trollopian world. The secularization thesis has long held sway over much of the histo- riography of the Victorian church, attempting to measure the multifari- ous impact of the Enlightenment, revolution, industrialization, and Dar- winism on nineteenth-century British religious belief and practice. Lee’s book is to be counted among their number, but with a distinct differ- ence. His aim—and it is one which he largely achieves—is to examine the Anglican clergy not as religious agents per se, but rather in their secondary secular capacity; that is, in their performance as landowners, Poor Law guardians, magistrates, and so on. Perforce, carrying out these functions meant “encountering and managing the poor,” as the subtitle of the book puts it, and it is in the changing and fraught relationship between the Anglican clergy and the poor that Lee locates his argument. The “poor” referred to by the author means essentially the laboring poor, agricultural workers of the type captured by another famous Vic- torian novelist, Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the d'Urberoilles and other books. The thread running through Lee’s book is the presumption that the clergymen of Norfolk maintained a structural authority over their pa- rishioners. The sinews of this authority were the welter of non-clerical connections that existed, although their existence depended upon the overarching authority of the religious establishment itself. These con- nections between priest and parishioner—supervising the implementa- tion of the Poor Law, for example, or sitting in judgment as the presid- ing magistrate—provided, in Lee’s view, the most direct impact upon the lives of the laboring poor. In a careful and nuanced study of 664 Norfolk parishes, Lee paints a picture of increasing tension, especially during the first half of the nineteenth century. This tension is attributed to a fundamental clash of cultures, epitomized by, but hardly limited to, the “Captain Swing” rural risings of the 1830s. He describes this cultural cleavage in the following way: “One predated living memory, was un- written, popular, and took its cues from the rough music and traditional dialogue of the moral economy; the other was alien, legalistic, elite and authoritarian” (2). As the chief agents of this externally imposed and unwelcome au- thority, Norfolk’s Anglican clergy—as a group, individual exceptions were always the rule—carried with them an enormous amount of cul- tural freight, almost all of which was rejected by the shire’s poor. As Lee suggests, “every theological nuance came loaded with political signifi- 437 BOOK REVIEWS cance,” the result of which was to undermine constantly the ability of the socially and educationally superior clergyman to enter fully into local society. At every turn, whether dispensing a too frugal charity or refusing to solemnize the marriage of a dissenting couple, Church of England clergymen reinforced the view that they were outsiders, mere interlop- ers in a world that on the whole despised them. This kind of anticleri- calism was deep-rooted and combined with the fracturing effects of industrialization, democracy, and the Victorian “crisis of faith” devas- tated the Anglican clergy by 1914. By this point, were they “well on the way to their modern position as rather awkward and shabby profession- als,” as Lee quotes the view of a fellow historian? This book offers a rather resounding and convincing “yes.” C. Brad Faught Tyndale University College, Toronto ***** This is the end of the e-text. This e-text was brought to you by Tyndale University, J. William Horsey Library - Tyndale Digital Collections *****