10. St. George s Parish (Spotsylvania) Vestry Minutes, 1726 45, 1746 1817; Spotsylvania County
Court Order Books 1724 30, 1730 38, 1738 49.
11. Ibid.
12. St. Patrick s Parish Vestry Minutes, 1755 74; Prince Edward County Court Order Book No. 1,
1754 58; No. 2, 1759 65.
13. Southam Parish Vestry Minutes, 1745 86; Cumberland County Court Order Books 1752 58;
1758 62. For Henrico Parish and Henrico County between1752 and1761, the combined rates averaged
32 pounds; Albemarle Parish and Sussex County between 1754 and 1763 averaged only 22 pounds.
14. A component of Edmund Morgan s explanation for Virginia s eighteenth-century political
and social stability was a deliberate reduction in the tax burden. This great planter gentry strategy,
along with their fostering of racial fears, as a large African slave labor force was introduced into
the colony, supposedly served to co-opt the support and allegiance of the entire white population
and soften or eliminate class divisions in a society with great wealth differentials. But Morgan s
sample of parishes and counties is unrepresentative (he chooses a few older Tidewater units), and the
time periods examined fail to reflect significant rate increases even in these well-established areas.
The rate per tithable in Essex, an old Tidewater county not unlike those sampled by Morgan, went
from 10 pounds in 1726 to 14½ in 1727 and then to 53 in 1728 and dropped the following year to 19.
Essex County Court Order Book 1725 28, 52, 192, 206; Order Book 1729 35, 36, 110. In the Northern
Neck county of Richmond, rates jumped from 6¾ pounds in 1720 to 79 pounds in 1721. Richmond
County Order Book No. 8, 213; Order Book No. 9, 26. One of the parishes cited by Morgan Christ
Church (Middlesex) illustrates the problem in evidence. Morgan indicates a decline in the Christ
Church average annual levy from 41 pounds in the 1690s to 31 pounds in the 1740s. These figures
check out, but the implication of a decline in annual rates across the period is not true. In the 1710s
the average annual rate was a whopping 60 pounds; twice (in 1710 and 1711), the annual levy topped
100 pounds per tithable. Christ Church obviously was undertaking substantial church construction
during the period. C. G. Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Christ Church Parish, Middlesex County,
Virginia, 1663 1767 (Richmond, Va., 1927); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The
Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), 346. More significant, Morgan does not take into account
the heavy expenses incurred in the formation of new parishes and counties.
chapter five
1. Seventeenth-century salary provisions for Virginia parsons can be traced through Laws, 1:124,
159, 2:478 79; Hening, 2:29, 44; 3:67; EJC,1 September1693,1:295. Bruce concludes that the General
Assembly was unwavering in its determination to provide Anglican clergy with a generous salary and
that Virginia s stipend by the end of the seventeenth century matched that of the average incum-
bent in English parishes. Philip Alexander Bruce, Institutional History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century:
An Inquiry into the Religious, Moral, Educational, Legal, Military, and Political Condition of the People Based on Origi-
nal and Contemporaneous Records, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1910), 1:145 59. Ministerial income in
England is succinctly described by William Gibson:   The tithe in eighteenth-century England and
Wales was still the principal source of clerical incomes together with farming the glebe, surplice
fees and Easter offerings. Tithes, literally a tenth of a parishioner s income, were levied on all the
produce of a parish. The rector, or the lay improprietor, was entitled to the great and small tithes,
vicars were entitled only to the small tithes. (Great tithes being those of corn, hay and wood, small
tithes being those of wool, livestock and garden produce.) By the eighteenth century custom had
developed many local variations in the nature and collection of tithes. Tithes by1700 were no longer
payable on personal income, only on crops and increases in farm animals, and in many places a modus
deimandi, or a commutation to a fixed money payment, had taken place.  William Gibson, Church,
State and Society, 1760 1850 [New York, 1994], 28.
From his mid-nineteenth-century vantage point, Anthony Trollope had much to say about the
inequities in English clerical salaries:   Our present arrangement of parochial incomes is beloved as
.
notes to pages 46 48 349