Friday 18 March 2016

Review: Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851: BURY ST EDMUNDS

(Timmins, T.C B. (ed.), Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, Boydell, 1997)


Unitarian Chapel
Unitarian Chapel, Churchgate Street
The Returns for the nine places of worship in Bury St Edmunds form a small part of the results of a countrywide Religious Census, an official government survey of all identified places of religious worship in existence, carried out on Sunday 30 March 1851. Forms were distributed and collected by the enumerators for the ordinary population census, which was being conducted at the same time.

The early nineteenth century was a period of general anxiety over the state of religion in the country. Industrialisation and rapid urbanisation were raising fears that religious provision was failing to keep pace with the growth and changing distribution of population. At a time of political conflict and unrest, the Government was alarmed that the working population was swelling the ranks of the dissenting denominations or, even worse, losing touch with organised religion altogether.

The Government published a report on the Census results in December 1853 and it was widely analysed, abridged and republished in books, newspapers and periodicals.  The data revealed considerable regional and local differences, and, more alarmingly, the alienation of ‘labouring myriads’ from the churches. (Quoted by Timmins, Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, xiv).  It was noted “that a large portion of the people of this county [Suffolk] are habitual neglecters of religious ordinance” and that nearly two-thirds of the population of Bury St Edmunds were absent from public worship.” (Glyde, John, Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century, Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1856, 279).

In Bury St Edmunds in 1851 there were nine recorded places of worship; three Anglican churches and six nonconformist chapels.  Their situation is shown on the map below.


Map of Bury St Edmunds_central area
A
St Mary's Church
F
Northgate Independent Chapel
B
St James's Church
G
Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street)
C
St John Evangelist Church*
H
Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street)
D
Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square
I
Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street)
E
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)



It is worth noting that White’s directory of Suffolk in 1844 mentions a second Particular Baptist Chapel in Westgate Street founded in 1840 and a Primitive Methodist meeting place in Garland Street built in 1820.  Neither places are mentioned in the 1851 Census which suggests that either they had ceased to exist when the census was carried out or that the Returns are incomplete.  Timmins (1997) suggests that they were missed out by the Census Enumerators.

Bury St Edmunds consisted of two parishes: St Mary’s and St James’ and the Census recorded them separately and the results are summarised in Table 1 and 2. 

Table 1: Bury St Edmunds (Parish of St Mary) 1851 Religious Census (Total population 6,557)

Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars)
Morning
Afternoon
Evening
St Mary's Church*
1112
17.0%
651
9.9%
1014
15.5%
Wesleyan Chapel**
152
2.3%
96
1.5%
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)***
323
4.9%
288
4.4%
Unitarian Chapel#
112
1.7%
80
1.2%
Friends' Meeting House
26
0.5%
24
0.4%
TOTAL
1725
26.4%
675
10.3%
1478
22.5%
*Joint Sunday School with St James Church
**Includes scholars
***Includes scholars in morning

#Includes scholars in morning


Table 2: Bury St Edmunds (Parish of St James) 1851 Religious Census (Total population 6,668)


Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars)
Morning
Afternoon
Evening
St James's Church*
1150
17.2%
852
12.8%
283
4.2%
St John Evangelist Church**
266
4.0%
340
5.1%
Northgate Independent Chapel***
350
5.2%
308
4.6%
Particular Baptist Chapel#
602
9.0%
519
7.8%
621
9.3%
TOTAL
35.5%
25.7%
18.2%
*Includes Scholars (also from St Mary's) morning and afternoon
**Includes Scholars morning and afternoon
***Includes Scholars in morning
#Includes morning scholars

Table 3 combines the figures for the two parishes and provides a summary which is not distorted by the fact that the Sunday School scholars shared by the two main Anglican churches were presented under the St James figures

Table 3: Bury St Edmunds (Combined parishes of St Mary's and St James' 1851 Religious Census  (Population 13,225)*


Church and chapel attendance (including Sunday Scholars)
Morning
Afternoon
Evening
St Mary's Church
1112
8.4%
651
4.9%
1014
7.7%
St James's Church
1150
8.7%
852
6.4%
283
2.1%
St John Evangelist Church**
190
1.4%
340
2.6%
0.0%
Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square
152
1.1%
96
0.7%
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)
323
2.4%
288
2.2%
Northgate Independent Chapel
350
2.6%
308
2.3%
Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street)
112
0.8%
80
0.6%
Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street)
26
0.2%
24
0.2%
0.0%
Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street)
602
4.6%
519
3.9%
621
4.7%
Total
4017
30.4%
2386
18.0%
2690
20.3%
*This figure does not include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses
**Morning scholars excluded from total (190+76 scholars)

There was considerable dispute at the time over the quality of the returns to the Religious Census.  Today, historians are advised to handle the statistics carefully especially as the Returns record attendance at services rather than at churches.  Subsequently it is impossible to tell precisely how many individuals attended a place of worship on Census Sunday if it had more than one service which is the case for every church and chapel in Bury St Edmunds at this time.  To allow for this historians have come up with various ‘corrective formulas’.  Watts (1995) suggests a formula “based on totals for the best-attended services for each denomination… with the addition of a third of the total for attendances at the least well attended services”. The application of this ‘statistical correction’ for the Bury St Edmunds denominations is shown in Table 4.

Table 4: Bury St Edmunds (Combined parishes of St Mary's and St James' 1851 Religious Census) using Watts' ‘corrective’ formula


Estimated attendance
St Mary's Church
1329
10.0%
St James’s Church
1244
9.4%
St John Evangelist Church*
403
3.0%
Wesleyan Chapel (St Mary's Square
184
1.4%
Independent Chapel (Whiting St.)
419
3.2%
Northgate Independent Chapel
453
3.4%
Unitarian Chapel (Churchgate Street)
112
0.8%
Friends' Meeting House (St John's Street)
26
0.2%
Particular Baptist Chapel (Garland Street)
794
6.0%
Total
4964
37.5%



Respondents were also asked to give average attendance over a whole year.  The response from the incumbent of St Mary’s – “Number of attendants on 30th March was considered below average” – may well have been typical for most places as the weather was inclement on that day. He also had difficulty in estimating averages and states “Exact average cannot be given through want of data” which may have been a fairly common difficulty.  This did not deter other respondents who gave averages not far off the census day figures.  The exception was Cornelius Elven, the Minister of the Particular Baptist Chapel who provided rounded figures considerably in excess of those on the day: “Average – morning 700+200 scholars; afternoon 800; evening 500.”  Using our ‘corrective’ formula this would give an attendance of 8.8% of the total population rather than 6%, a significant difference. It should be noted, however, that some Anglicans looked askance at these figures and accused Dissenters of packing their services to inflate their attendance totals and of rounding up their estimates of attendees, though this may have been a mere matter of ‘sour grapes’.  

Despite these caveats about reliability and accuracy, the figures in the tables provide a snapshot of religious practice in Bury St Edmunds in the middle of the nineteenth century and presents the local historian with a useful starting point for assessing the role of religious practice in a local community within the context of regional and national trends. (See Table 5)

Table 5: Bury St Edmunds congregation sizes compared with figures for Suffolk and England & Wales


Watts' estimates of church and chapel attendance
England & Wales
Suffolk
Bury St Edmunds*

Bury St Edmunds**
Church of England
19.7%
33.0%
25.7%
22.4%
Independents

8.6%
6.3%
6.6%
Baptists

8.0%
7.2%
6.0%
Quakers

0.1%
0.2%
0.2%
Unitarians

0.3%
1.0%
0.8%
Wesleyan Methodists

2.9%
1.3%
1.4%
Primitive Methodists

2.2%


Other non-conformists

0.2%


Total non-conformists
18.6%
22.5%
16.0%
15.0%
Total attenders
40.2%
55.8%
41.7%
37.4%
*Watts based his figures on the total population of Bury St Edmunds (13,900) which include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses but who could not have attended the places of worship listed.
**These figures for Bury St Edmunds (based on a population figure of 13,225) do not include the inmates of the Gaol, the hospital, and the two workhouses.


Local historians might be interested in investigating the strength of the Anglican Church in Suffolk and in Bury St Edmunds compared with England and Wales as a whole.  It is also noticeable that attendance at church or chapel is considerably lower in Bury than in Suffolk generally. 

Contemporary social commentators, like Glyde (1856), were passionately concerned about the population's religious propensities:

“… that a large portion of the people of this county are habitual neglecters of religious ordinances. … That the main portion of these non-attendants belong to the artisan and labouring classes, the testimony of all observers will prove. On the middle class, as a body, the various forms of Protestant worship have a strong hold. Removed alike from the passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental activity of the man of letters, the rural gentry and urban trades people are, partly from earnest conviction, and partly from the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, the best attenders upon public worship.”

Glyde ventures some opinion on the reason for this neglect:

“By many it is thought that one of the principal causes of the dislike of the labouring class to religious services is the maintenance of class distinctions in our religious structures. The injustice and inconsistency of "well-to-do Christianity," with its pew rents, and cushioned enclosures, has doubtless done much to deter many of the working classes from attending public worship, and to impress them with the idea that religion is purely a middle class propriety or luxury. But still we think that much of the absenteeism is traceable to a want of disposition among the labouring class to mingle on the Sunday with those from whom, during the week days, they are separated by a broad line of demarcation.”

Nearly thirty years ago, a thorough-going survey of Protestant nonconformity in Suffolk was carried out by Clive Paine (See Dymond & Martin, eds., 1988).  He was particularly good on describing the distribution of the different dissenting denominations across the county but his statistics on the strength of nonconformity in Suffolk are open to challenge.  For example, he states:

“The 1851 census shows that an estimated 5 per cent of Suffolk’s population attended nonconformist meetings in 50 per cent of its parishes.”

If Watts’s estimate of 22.5% is correct, Paine’s 5% seems a considerable under-estimate.  Even in Suffolk’s towns where “habitual neglecters of religious ordinances” (Glyde’s words) were strongest, we get considerably higher figures:

Bury St Edmunds          16%
Mildenhall                     34%
Ipswich                         18%
Woodbridge                  27%

Moreover, Paine seems determined to under-play the importance of non-conformism generally:

“Our admiration for the dogged persistence of nonconformists should not blind us to the danger of exaggerating their actual and relative numbers, at all periods.”

He seems to base his argument on the relatively small showing of the Methodists (only 5% of the total population in Suffolk) compared with the C of E’s 33%; a ratio of about 1:7.  But when the other nonconformist denominations are included the ratio becomes more like 2:3. 

Paine also points out that over 200 Suffolk parishes contain no recorded place of dissenting worship but forgets to allow for the fact that nonconformists often walked miles on a Sunday to attend a chapel in a nearby village if there was no meeting place available in their home parish.

The total numbers of nonconformists waxed and waned but it is indisputable that their churches and chapels not only radically transformed the lives of numerous individuals and families but completely reshaped the religious landscape of the nineteenth century in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and the nation as a whole.

Bibliography

Dymond, D. & Martin, E. (eds.), An Historical Atlas of Suffolk, SCC & Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, 1988,
Glyde, John, Suffolk in the Nineteenth Century, Simpkin Marshall & Co., 1856
Rodell, Jonathan, The Rise of Methodism: a study of Bedfordshire 1736-1851, Boydell, 2014
Timmins, T.C B. (ed.), Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, Boydell, 1997
Watts, M., The Dissenters, Vol. II, Oxford, 1995