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Religious Dissent in Black Country Industrial Villages in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

Eric Hopkins
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Extract

These well-known words of Frederick Engels date from 18441 and did not go unsupported by contemporary opinion in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. In Sheffield, for example, it was generally thought in 1843 triat not one family of artisans in twenty attended church or chapel, while Horace Mann, the author of the report on the religious census of 1851, reached the melancholy conclusion that ‘the masses of our working population…are never or but seldom seen in our religious congregations’. In 1860 Lord Shaftesbury remarked that not 2 per cent of the working men in London attended church, while a modern authority, Dr K. S. Inglis, has declared that even in northern and midland towns, where social relationships were more harmonious and the range of worshippers far wider than in East London, the majority did not attend worship; popular abstinence from worship (to use his term) had become an inherited custom.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , July 1983 , pp. 411 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England, Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (eds.), Oxford 1958, 141Google Scholar.

2 Wickham, E. R., Church and People in an Industrial City, London 1957, 92Google Scholar.

3 Mann, H., Religious Worship in England and Wales, London 1854, 93Google Scholar.

4 Inglis, K. S., Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England, London 1963, 323Google Scholar.

5 Mann, op.cit., 87.

6 B. I. Coleman, The Church of England in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: a social geography (Historical Association, London 1980), Tables C and D, 40, 41.

7 See, for example, Gilbert, A. D., Religion and Society in Industrial England: church, chapel and social change, 1740–1914, London 1976Google Scholar, particularly table 3.1 and table 3.2.

8 See Everitt, A., ‘Nonconformity in country parishes’, Agricultural History Review, xviii (1970)Google Scholar, for a discussion of the possibilities of such studies.

9 Coleman, op.cit., 39.

10 Everitt, op.cit. Professor Everitt makes the same point about extra-parochial tracts and wastes in his The Pattern of Rural Dissent: the nineteenth century, Leicester 1973Google Scholar.

11 Scott, William, Stourbridge and its Vicinity, Stourbridge 1832, 94–5Google Scholar.

12 Printed Census Returns, 1831.

13 Ibid. There were 20 pits within three miles of Stourbridge town at the end of the eighteenth century: Treadway Nash, Collections for the History of Worcestershire, 2nd edn, 1799, ii. 211–12.

14 Scott, op.cit., 100.

15 A witness in 1843 referred to the back-to-back houses with walls of mud and thatched roofs, particularly on Lye Waste, where a pigstye was preferable for cleanliness and salubrity. According to this witness, ‘At Lye Waste, conveniences for the relief of nature are usually a common dunghill; in many instances they manage with less decency even than this. ‘Children’s Employment Commission, Appendix to 2nd Report (PP. 1843, xv), 80–1.

16 The information in this and succeeding paragraphs is based on Scott, Stourbridge, 44–52, 78–81, 97–9; Bentley’s Guide to Stourbridge, Birmingham 1841, 7–11Google Scholar; Goodyear, G. H., Stourbridge Old and New, Stourbridge 1908, 68–75, 86–8Google Scholar. Other local histories add little. They include Mees, J. H., The Story of 100 Years. Handbook of the Wesleyan church, Stourbridge circuit, Stourbridge 1928Google Scholar; Simpson, C., Story of the Unitarian Church, Lye, 1790–1961. West Bromwich 1961Google Scholar; and Whitley, W. T., Baptists in Stourbridge, Stourbridge 1929Google Scholar.

17 Wearmouth, R. F., Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes 1850–1900, Leicester 1955, 105Google Scholar; Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes, 12; Mayor, S., The Churches and the Labour Movement, London 1967, 15Google Scholar; Gilbert, Religion and Society, 65.

18 Mann, Religious Worship, 64.

19 Calculated from the Census Ecclesiastical Returns for the Stourbridge Union.

20 For discussion of the accuracy of the Religious Census as a whole, see K. S. Inglis, ‘Patterns of worship in 1851’, this Journal, xi (1960); Pickering, W. S. F., ‘The 1851 religious census- a useless experiment?’, British Journal of Sociology, xviii (1967)Google Scholar; Thompson, D. M., ‘The 1851 religious census: problems and possibilities’, Victorian Studies, xi (1967–8)Google Scholar.

21 By 1851 at least 200 chapels existed in the Black Country. Dudley had a chapel for every 1,514 inhabitants, and its 25 nonconformist congregations averaged 243 persons on the morning of Census Sunday: A. G. Cumberland, ‘Protestant nonconformity in the Black Country, 1662–1851’ (unpublished Birmingham M.A. thesis 1951), 113.

22 Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modem British Society 1780–1880, London 1969, 198Google Scholar.

23 Pew rents at St Thomas’s in Stourbridge, the fashionable church in the town, were as much as £17s. 6d. for the half-year in the 1830s, increasing to £117s. 6d. in the 1840s: Palfrey Collection, Scrapbook v, pew receipts. Rents in the chapels were usually much less than this, being is. a quarter at the Primitive Methodist chapel on Lye Waste in 1914.

24 Gilbert, Religion and Society, 107.

25 Scott was not the only authority to remark on this. Noake wrote of their individual way of life, their nicknames and their mud cottages: Noake, J., The Rambler, London 1854, 253–6Google Scholar; while in the 1860s the Worcestershire Chronicle refers to Lye Wasters or Lye Savages, Lord Lyttelton calling them (with somewhat greater delicacy) ‘these peculiar people’: see for example, Worcestershire Chronicle for 1 Feb. 1860 and 2 April 1861.

26 Conveyance dated 3 Feb. 1849 and held in the Circuit safe.

27 Personal observation, though the Primitive chapel in Love Lane has now been demolished, one wall having been rendered unsafe by excavations and new building nearby; a sad loss to admirers of chapel architecture.

28 The quality of preaching at the mid-century must remain unknown, though Mr Wesley Perrins, MBE, ex-MP and ex-secretary of the chainmakers’ union, who remembers local chapel life at the beginning of the present century, recalls that congregations liked ‘a bit of ranting and roaring’.

29 Figures based on a one-in-ten sample of places of birth in the enumerator books.

30 For further details of family structure, see my ‘The decline of the family work unit in Black Country nailing’, International Review of Social History, xxii (1977), pt 2Google Scholar.

31 Robertson, R., Recollections of the Lye Parish, 1866–1875, Stourbridge 1914Google Scholar, typescript in Stourbridge Public Library.

32 Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Sweating System, 3rd Report, 301, evidence of Mr Reay, PP. 1889, xiii.

33 I owe this information to Mr Wesley Perrins.

34 Ecclesiastical Returns (HO 129), Stourbridge Union.

35 Gilbert, Religion and Society, 91.

36 Robertson, Recollections; Worcestershire Chronicle, 17 July 1850; presumably the personalities of ministers would always be a factor determining the size of congregations, but not often to the extent of causing a switch of allegiance. Everitt has commented briefly on the importance of personalities in this connection: Everitt, Pattern of Rural Dissent, 12.

37 Gilbert, Religion and Society, 64.

38 In this part of the Black Country nailing was regarded as an unskilled and poorly paid occupation, equivalent to that of a labourer, except that the nailer could choose his own hours. As for apprenticeship, I have not encountered a single case of an apprentice nailer in all the enumerator books for the Stourbridge area.

39 Gilbert, Religion and Society, 87ff.

40 Kidderminster Messenger, 26 April 1839; Home Office Papers, 40/48, Disturbances.

41 Stourbridge Observer, 14 Jan. 1874.

42 See the comments of Henry Pelling on this point in his review of Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes, in Past and Present, 27 (April 1964).

43 Perkins, Modern British Society, table 4, 201, shows that estimated attendance in the 34 smaller towns between 20,000 and 30,000 population was 39–5 per cent, as compared with 27–2 per cent in towns over 100,000, and 254 per cent in London.