Parish and Belonging: Community Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700-1950.

Parish and Belonging: Community Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700-1950. By K. D. M. Snell (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiv plus 541pp. $110).

Although the English parish has intrigued historians since the Webbs first dealt with it a century ago, each has approached the topic in his/her own way. (1) In the 1990s, David Eastwood treated it in the context of eighteenth and early nineteenth century state formation; while Norman Pounds, quite as much with regard to its religious as secular aspects, undertook a sweeping study of the parish from Augustine to Victoria. (2) It is safe to say that neither the Webbs nor their successors through Eastwood and Pounds treated the subject quite so ingeniously as Keith Snell has in Parish and Belonging.

For Snell the role played by the parish in the lives of its inhabitants is key: he focuses on the bond between person and place, an attachment which he labels one of 'belonging.' However difficult it may be to grasp this very subjective ideal, Snell calls it the essential ingredient that makes intelligible the various parochial parish themes treated here--the culture of local xenophobia (ch.2); settlement law and the notion of entitlement (3); marriage (ch. 4); parish outdoor relief and the new poor law of 1834 (ch. 5); parish overseers and the new poor law (ch. 6); the new parishes established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (ch. 7); and gravestones and belonging (ch. 8).

Snell argues that only when a sterile local administrative and legal structure is infused with such cultural and social components as 'belonging' and 'local attachment' will parish governance make sense to the modern reader.

The inhabitants of eighteenth and early nineteenth century parishes, enduring an economy of scarcity and poverty, husbanded their meager properties and viewed with suspicion a stranger who seemed likely to lay claim on or deplete the community's resources. Snell's essay on xenophobia clearly captures this phenomenon. In so doing the 'belonging' equation is actually reversed. Lacking community attachment, the stranger was perceived as an interloper, pauper or not, who availed himself of parish entitlements without having paid poor rates, tithed the church, or even labored in repairing roads and bridges. This xenophobia tied in with parish settlement laws, which limited relief to those who were legally of the parish. Succinctly put, those denied the rights of settlement by law because they did not belong, had no claim to entitlements.

In the context of marriage Snell regards the phrase 'of this parish' a crucial clue to the coupling of belonging and endogamy and exogamy. A dim view was taken of those who married outside their parish--that is, exogamously. Xenophobia and entitlements played here, too. The same was true of the poor laws, a topic on which Snell possesses considerable expertise; it is, therefore, not surprising that he devotes to it extraordinary space, a chapter on the new poor law of 1834 and another on the overseers and guardians who administered it. He perceives continuity or coexistence after 1834 between the old and new laws; meanwhile, the overseer's office lasted as late as 1927. This commentary on the post-1834 poor law amply justifies incorporation here despite its having been an oft-studied piece of legislation. The chapter on new parishes, and of course new building, this reader found to be one of the most informative and refreshing in the book. The accelerated division of the parish into its respective ecclesiastical and civil roles, moreover, associates these nineteenth-century happenings to the Oxford Movement. Finally, Snell discovers belonging and local attachment in the graveyard, indeed, on the gravestones. As with marriage the key words of belonging are 'of' or 'from this parish'.

Snell's narrative exhibits great insight and imagination, drawing a parish portrait quite distinct from those undertaken by others. As the author freely admits, the presentation here merely previews the subject: the potential yield from his methodology of belonging seems almost endless. It could elucidate enclosures, turnpikes, fen drainage, local charities, education, canal building, occupations, professions, and provide an analysis of parish citizenry. The latter immediately evokes notions of its application to class, arts and literature (a Snell speciality), recognition (plaques, monuments, church windows), community status, comradery, parochialism and cosmopolitanism (the country attorney bounding between the countryside and London), and no doubt more tidbits elicited from the parish chest. Again, ticking off what might have been in no way detracts from this work; rather it enhances it and challenges further exploration into the matter.

This work contains an excellent select bibliography and both persons and places indices. Snell, Professor of Rural and Cultural History at the University of Leicester, is co-founder and editor of the journal Rural History: Economy, Society, Culture.

Albert J. Schmidt

The George Washington University & Quinnipiac University College of Law

ENDNOTES

1. S. & B. Webb, The Parish and the County (London, 1906).

2. Governing Rural England: Tradition and Transformation: Tradition and Transformation in Local Government 1780-1840 (Oxford, 1994) and Government and Community in the English Provinces 1700-1870 (London & New York, 1997) and N. J. G. Pounds A History of the English Parish (Cambridge, 2000).