Parish-Church Cathedrals, 1836–1931: Some Problems and their Solution

Abstract

Traditionally scholars distinguish English Anglican cathedrals of ‘old’ foundation and those of ‘new’, but since Henry VIII a further category has arisen comprising those established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve newly created dioceses. These are often referred to as parish-church cathedrals because they mostly remained parish churches even after their elevation. Their new status raised various architectual and organisational problems, and this essay concentrates on the latter, illustrating them with select examples. These problems deserve examination because there is little recent literature on them and some passing references may tend to mislead.

Two events define the period. In 1836 the first modern parish-church cathedral was created at Ripon. In 1931 the Cathedrals Measure provided for revision of all cathedral statutes within general guidelines, the outcome of a commission of enquiry which Church Assembly had launched in 1924 and which had reported in 1927. Moreover by 1931, albeit then unperceived, an era had ended in another respect because after a surge of creations in the 1920s, no more new bishoprics have been erected in England by the Anglican Church (despite various plans), though some territorial adjustments have been made between dioceses, notably the transfer of Croydon from Canterbury to Southwark. Throughout much of this period popular odium surrounded cathedral establishments, a residue from radical attack in the 1830s and 1840s upon all ecclesiastical corporations whose wealth, admittedly often maladministered, critics had hoped to appropriate to other uses, whose neglect of duties had become scandalous, and whose quirky and outmoded ways Trollope gently satirised in his Barchester novels. The period saw a piecemeal and relatively unco-ordinated response to the problems which creation of these cathedrals involved, and that Church Assembly commission explicitly deplored the ‘anomalous and confused’ situation which had arisen.