The clergy of the diocese of Canterbury in the seventeenth century

The traditional historiography of the English clergy, in the seventeenth century, has been in three parts, corresponding to the periods before, during and after the mid-century upheavals, with the years immediately following the Restoration often being subsumed into the eighteenth century. By contrast, in this thesis, as many as possible of the Canterbury diocesan clergy, excluding those in the peculiars, across the whole of the seventeenth century, have been identified and their characteristics analysed and tabulated. The resulting prosopography divides the clergy into two groups; cathedral and parish clergy including curates. Thematic chapters allow comparisons between cathedral and parish clergy and between these different categories of clergy present in the diocese in the three major periods of the seventeenth century and in selected years of the century. The prevalence of pluralism, defined as all clerical offices held, rather than merely offices with cure, is examined and this data is combined with the value of benefices and cathedral emoluments to estimate annual incomes. The results confirm that high incomes were restricted to the cathedral elite and a very limited number of parish clergy and that there were many poor vicars and curates, but it is suggested that this method is more robust than attempting to estimate wealth or standards of living. A dramatic reduction of the number of clergy in the diocese after the Restoration is revealed and attributed to sequestrations, ejections, and the chaos of the civil wars and Interregnum causing falling university attendances and reduced charitable giving. The will of a nonconformist, Clement Barling, provides the basis for innovative illustrations of the connections between the clergy and between them and certain of the laity and finally, it is shown that the numbers of sequestrations and ejections were probably much greater than previously estimated.