(Timmins, T.C B. (ed.), Suffolk Returns from the Census of Religious Worship, 1851, Boydell, 1997)
 |
| Unitarian Chapel, Churchgate Street |
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.
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)*
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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
