Talk:1915–1916 Church of England border polls

Welsh Church Commissioners

I have reverted an edit just made by The C of E, which I believe was mistaken. The reference I had made was to the "Welsh Church Commissioners": more formally known as "The Commissioners for Church Temporalities in Wales". They were commonly called "The Welsh Church Commissioners", and they are referred to under this title (in fact "Welsh Church Commission") in the journal article referred to in fn 5 of this article. Further reference is made to the first two Reports of the Welsh Church Commissioners in fn 4 of the Article Church in Wales (which is in fact my own edit). The Commissioners were specially appointed to deal with the disendowment of the Church in Wales, and had nothing to do with the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Their task was a difficult one as they had to deal with disentangling the "ancient" (ie pre-1662) endowments of the Church in Wales from the more recent ones. Such were the problems that they continued in existence until at least the 1940s.Ntmr (talk) 12:41, 2 June 2021 (UTC) The C of E: can you please have a look at the explanation that I have given above, and check the references. We are talking of two completely different bodies.Ntmr (talk) 12:44, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

My view is that we should avoid referring to them as the Church Commissioners to avoid confusion with the Church Commissioners who didn't come into being in the Church of England until much later. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 12:51, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

You have a point: we do not want there to be any confusion. I think I referred to them as "The Welsh Church Commissioners" which is how they are generally referred to in the historical and ecclesiastical literature on this subject ("The Commissioners for Church Temporalities in Wales" being rather a long title!)Ntmr (talk) 13:01, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Of course it would help if the Welsh Commissioners had their own page to link to. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 16:02, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

They are referred to as the "Welsh Commissioners" in the 1914, 1919, and 1945 Acts. DuncanHill (talk) 16:51, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

They are referred to as the "Welsh Church Commissioners" in the National Archives (https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_q=%22welsh+church+commissioners%22&_sd=&_ed=&_hb=), and in the various reported Court cases in which they were involved. The title is also always used in the historical and legal literature on the subject. Although they are referred to as "the Welsh Commissioners" in the Act, this has to be read in accordance with s10(2) of the WCA 1914 which provides: "The said Commissioners (in this Act referred to as "the Welsh Commissioners") shall be a body corporate, styled, " The Commissioners of Church Temporalities in Wales" with a common seal, and power to hold land for the purposes of this Act without licence in mortmain." In other words, "the Welsh Commissioners" is not the official title given to them in the Act, but an example of the shorthand conventionally used by Parliamentary Counsel: when this Act says "the Welsh Commissioners" we mean "The Commissioners for Church Temporalities in Wales". Section 9 of the 1919 Act then reads that "this Act...shall be construed as one with the Welsh Church Act 1914". This has the effect that any expression which is defined in the primary Act will have the same meaning in the later Act. It was originally intended that the Welsh Church Commissioners should just deal with disendowment, transfer the relevant assets/investments to the County Councils or to the University of Wales, and then be wound up shortly afterwards. In fact this process all turned out to be more complicated; eventually - in brief - they couldn't get rid of the burial grounds to the (lower tier) local authorities, so, having originated as Church property, they were ultimately transferred back to the Representative Body of the C in W. There is a touch of irony in this in that part of the thrust behind disestablishment and disendowment was to take away the Church's monopoly over burial grounds in some areas. It would appear that the Commissioners were wound up around 1947. I cannot trace any measure by which they were officially renamed "The Welsh Church Commissioners" so it looks as though their official title was "The Commissioners for Church Temporalities in Wales" until the end.Ntmr (talk) 19:23, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Oh I wasn't objecting to calling them the Welsh Church Commissioners, just making an observation as to what they are called in the relevant Acts. DuncanHill (talk) 19:49, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

I have now added a page for the Welsh Church Commissioners.Ntmr (talk) 16:25, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Some of the detail discussed above is now included either in Welsh Church Commissioners or Welsh Church (Temporalities) Act 1919 or in Welsh Church (Burial Grounds) Act 1945, as appropriate.Ntmr (talk) 20:46, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ntmr: thanks for all your work on this. DuncanHill (talk) 20:52, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: I seem to recall coming across the S E Downing Report many years ago in a University Library, and did not realise that it was available online. Do you have any idea of why no poll was carried out in Ellesmere (including Penley), as if it was partly in Shropshire and partly in Flint it would surely have met the criterion for being a "border parish"?Ntmr (talk) 11:09, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ntmr: Interesting - according to our article on Penley:

Penley was originally part of the parish of Ellesmere in neighbouring Shropshire, but it became a separate parish towards the end of the Commonwealth period. In early 1661, it reverted to being part of the parish of Ellesmere, after the Restoration of Charles II. In 1860, it again became a separate parish.

It was then in the English Diocese of Lichfield until 1920, when following the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church in Wales, it was transferred to the Welsh Diocese of St Asaph, where it remains.

Which implies an error in Downing, and that presumably Ellesmere was wholly in England and Penley wholly in Wales and Monmouthshire. DuncanHill (talk) 16:22, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I found this from the National Library of Wales which says that Penley as a parish, not as part of Ellesmere. DuncanHill (talk) 16:25, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: It would appear, as you say, that Ellesmere was entirely within England, so remained with Lichfield, whilst Penley was entirely in Wales, so transferred to St Asaph, but there was no need to hold a border poll in either, as neither straddled the boundary. One would expect Downing's report to be authoritative, but presumably the Welsh Commissioners looked into the matter more closely.

I suppose it is instructive that one cannot always rely even on documents which one would expect to be entirely accurate. There is a case in point in your link. One would expect the National Library of Wales to be accurate, but their booklet clearly suggests that polls were taken only in Rhydycroesau and Llansilin, whereas it is quite clear that some kind of poll was taken in all 19 parishes. The reference to the Written Answer in Hansard clearly establishes it. I think a more detailed account of the polls was to be found in the Command Papers that I cited in fn 13 to Church in Wales. My recollection is that the lack of any electoral roll made it difficult to carry out the polls everywhere. The WCCs' first attempt in 1915 produced results in 17 parishes which were so clearly in favour of remaining with the CofE that it would have been a waste of time to repeat them with a better electoral roll. But the results in Rhydycroesau and Llansilin were not so clear, so the polls were repeated when the WCCs had somehow put together a better electoral roll. I checked the Command Papers for an article that I was writing when I could not make sense of the brief account of the border polls (it may even have been a footnote) in PMH Bell's book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Disestablishment-Ireland-Church-Historical-Society/dp/0281023360, which is generally a very well respected source. I do not have access to the text of command papers at present, though I hope to have it soon. I'll check, but I would be pleasantly surprised if it shed light on the Ellesmere / Penley conundrum.

On a broader point, I find it surprising that so many parishes straddled the civil border. I don't know exactly when civil parishes and ecclesiastical parish boundaries began to diverge. At one time the ecclesiastical parish was of course also the parish for civil administration purposes. By the early to mid 19th century, a town might be a single civil parish, but divided into several ecclesiastical parishes. With some small boroughs the parish boundary extended outside the borough boundary. I suspect in rural areas it was less common for there to be a divergence between ecclesiastical and civil parishes. From 1994 onwards there were Rural District Councils, usually comprising more than one parish. Did that mean that part of eg Old Radnor Parish was in Herefordshire, and was part of a Rural District Council within Herefordshire, whilst the remainder of Old Radnor was in Radnorshire, and formed part of one of the Rural District Councils within Radnorshire? I think I have heard of RDCs straddling county boundaries before there was some rationalisation in the 1930s, but it seems odd to us that they could straddle the England-Wales border. I don't see how it would have worked. But perhaps the point to bear in mind is that, until disestablishment, if an RDC could straddle a county boundary, there was no reason why it should not straddle the England-Wales border. Wales and England formed one legal entity. It is said that until the Welsh Sunday Closing Act 1881 there was no legislation that applied only to Wales (I can think of only one or two more by the end of the 19th century). The Wikipedia article on the England-Wales border does not address these points. Delving into this is raising as many questions as it is answering!Ntmr (talk) 21:54, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I now have access to the Command Papers and have included further details of the second Border Polls in LLansilin and Rhydycroesau. (There is no reference there to Ellesmere / Penley).Ntmr (talk) 19:09, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Ntmr (talk) 21:54, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

@Ntmr: You'll probably find the Counties (Detached Parts) Act 1844 of interest. It really was only in Victorian times that any kind of rationality began to be applied to administrative boundaries. I recall reading in the notes to a set of old census returns how the word "county" had at least 5 different meanings in England and Wales that could be applied to the interpretation of the results. As well as parishes having detached parts, which could be in different counties, there were also extra-parochial areas which weren't in any parish. It's a fascinating, and terribly complicated, history and I have to say I don't know of a really good work addressing it. DuncanHill (talk) 23:51, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: I have come across detached parts before, but did not realise that "county" could have so many meanings. In my own part of the world part of Wokingham was in the county of Wiltshire: possibly connected with the former Palace of the Bishop of Salisbury in Sonning. There is a list of rural districts from 1896 to the 1930s on Wikipedia which includes a few which extended over two counties, but they seem to have been re-aligned in the 1930s. These cross-county RDCs must go back to the old Poor Law Unions. At they stood apart from local government generally, it would not greatly matter if they did not follow the county boundaries. But the Unions often became the basis for the RDC boundaries. I shall have to see if GENUKI can shed any light on this. One might assume that extra-parochial areas are a thing of the past, but I have a booklet issued by the old Glamorgan County Council in the 1960s which shows a small area of the Gower as "common" to six adjacent parishes. It is not clear whether this area is still not included in any Community: I can't see any reference to it in: https://ldbc.gov.wales/sites/ldbc/files/review/090703swanseapropen.pdf.Ntmr (talk) 16:49, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill: I have come across the likely answer to my own question about parishes which straddled the border. The civil parishes which corresponded to the 19 border parishes would already have been split so that they did not cross the border by virtue of orders made under s 36 of the Local Government Act 1894. I have now noted this in the Article. I am certain that even prior to that date civil and ecclesiastical parishes sometimes diverged. This would probably have first arisen when orders were made setting up new parishes in urban areas "for ecclesiastical purposes only". I suspect that this began early in the 19th century, but can point to no reference.Ntmr (talk) 17:41, 5 August 2021 (UTC)

"Fact" on main page of 2016-09-24: who gave women the right to vote?

The fact that appeared on the Wikipedia main page on 24 September 2016 was unfortunately inaccurate. The right of female parishioners to vote was given by the Welsh Church Commissioners, not by the Church of England. Perhaps more accurately, it was given by Parliament, as in passing the Welsh Church Act 1914, it required in s 9 the Welsh Commissioners to ascertain the wishes of the relevant "parishioners". The Welsh Commissioners then had to decide whether that included female parishioners or not.Ntmr (talk) 20:57, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

redirect (or renaming?)

It is fairly unusual for two consecutive years to be shown in the form "1915-1916" rather than "1915-16". As the entries relating to all the border parishes do or could direct to this page, would a redirection be appropriate?

Renaming the page might be more appropriate, though I am unsure of the conventions around this. Do we in fact use the form "1915-16" only when a single 12 month period for a certain purposes extends over two calendar years? I am thinking of eg a tax year, an organisation's financial year, or an academic year. If so then "1915-1916" might indeed be more accurate, as the polls occurred in two different years, and over twelve months separated them.Ntmr (talk) 16:27, 20 June 2021 (UTC)