ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 



to a stipendiary curate, often ill-paid and poorly equipped for the cure 

 of souls. This custom was not observed only in small parishes with little 

 endowment, where there might have been a difficulty in obtaining the 

 services of an incumbent. Fortunate clergymen, commanding private or 

 ecclesiastical patronage, were in possession of most of the valuable bene- 

 fices. The total amount expended on the employment of assistant 

 curates in the ancient diocese was 3,684, nearly the whole of which 

 was found by the pluralists for the provision of substitutes in the parishes 

 which they held but could not serve. 1 When extensive tracts of country 

 were deprived of the religious ministrations and pastoral oversight of 

 resident incumbents, it cannot be wondered at that in a period of 

 political ferment and constitutional change there should be a shrinkage 

 of the church's influence and that the sects should occupy the lost 

 ground. To Cumberland people, imbued with the idea that priests work 

 at their trade for wages like other men, 2 the disinterested services of the 

 methodists appealed with such irresistible force that chapels of this 

 religious persuasion were established in every considerable village of the 

 county before 1840. 



But reform was in the air : a new era was at hand. The commis- 

 sioners appointed to consider the state of ' the established church ' with 

 reference to ecclesiastical duties and revenues made their third report in 

 1836 in which it was recommended 'that the sees of Carlisle and Sodor 

 and Man be united, and that the diocese consist of the present diocese of 

 Carlisle, of those parts of Cumberland and Westmorland which are now 

 in the diocese of Chester, of the deanery of Fumes and Cartmel in the 

 county of Lancaster, of the parish of Aldeston now in the diocese of 

 Durham, and of the Isle of Man.' 3 By subsequent legislation (6 and 7 

 Will. IV. c. 77, and I Viet. c. 30) the diocese was extended to its 

 present limits : the ecclesiastical annexation of the diocese of Sodor and 

 Man did not take place, and the parish of Alston, though in Cumberland, 

 was allowed to remain as aforetime in the diocese of Durham. Under 

 the authority of these Acts, the deanery of Coupland in Cumberland and 

 the deaneries of Furness and Cartmel, which included the whole of 

 Lancashire north of the Sands together with the portions of the 

 deaneries of Kirkby Lonsdale and Kendal within the county of West- 

 morland, that is, the old barony of Kendal, were severed from the 

 diocese of Chester and archdeaconry of Richmond and annexed to thfc 

 diocese of Carlisle, the whole addition having been formed into a new 



1 To the non-residence of the incumbent must be ascribed the decay of so many parsonage houses 

 in the diocese at this time. The commissioners returned fourteen parsonages as unfit for habitation, 

 and thirty-one benefices in which there was no parsonage at all. 



This feature of the Cumberland character struck John Wesley as he passed through Bowness on 

 Solway in 1753, and caused him to make a note of it. ' Our landlord, as he was guiding us over the Frith, 

 very innocently asked, " How much a year we got by preaching thus ? " This gave me an opportunity 

 of explaining that kind of gain which he seemed utterly a stranger to. He appeared to be quite amazed 

 and spake not one word, good or bad, till he took his leave ' (Journal, pp. 359-60). 



3 Third Re-fort of the Church Com. (1836), pp. 9, 1 1, 23. On the map of the proposed diocese at- 

 tached to the report, the archdeaconry of Carlisle is divided into only three deaneries, viz. Carlisle, 

 Alderbie or Allerdale or Alnedale, and Westmorland. 



Ill 



