England Jurisdictions and Gazetteers - International Institute

Civil and Ecclesiastical Jurisdictions
To understand the names of places and jurisdictions in genealogical research it is necessary to have a little background on the system of government, both civil and ecclesiastical. Prior to 1066 the Anglo-Saxons had developed a fairly democratic system based on the village or township. In many places villages formed a single township, but in areas covering mountains and other unproductive terrain villages were large and subdivided into townships for local government. Each franklin or freeholder lived in his own homestead on the produce of his own land and cattle, a group of these homesteads forming a village or township. There were plenty of people below this status of course.

The government of the village was conducted by the franklins assembled at the village-moot, presided over by the village or town reeve. The hundred was a group of 100-120 townships which managed its affairs at the hundred-moot, presided over by the hundred-elder. Hundreds were further gathered into shires, consisting of a few to a few dozen hundreds. Some of these correspond to modern counties, some to portions of modern counties. The king and the witan, his council, appointed the ealdorman (president) of the shire-moot. The kingdom was in turn made up of the shires and ruled jointly by the king and the witan. The latter was a group of ‘wise men’ consisting of the ealdormen, the bishops, the king’s thanes (chosen warriors), and the king’s adult sons. It had considerable power, being able to settle major disputes, confirm the appointment of ealdormen, make and amend laws, decide questions relating to war and peace, and even elect or depose the king.

The king lead the army in war and had great power, but this was limited by having to have the approval of the witan to levy taxes, alter the laws or grant land. The witan could elect a deceased king’s eldest son as the new ruler, or if he was too young or considered incapable, then one of the king’s brothers could be chosen.

This relatively democratic system was swept away by the Normans who imposed the Feudal system whereby the king held all the land, which he gave to followers in return for certain services and taxes. Power was thus highly concentrated in the king until Magna Charta in 1215, which gave back many liberties to the freemen.

As Christianity was established from the 9th century onwards, local lords founded churches to serve their estates, and the boundaries of the parishes thus established naturally followed those of the estates. Many of these ecclesiastical parishes were co-terminous with civil ones, but boundaries were equally likely to be somewhat different. The majority of England’s mediaeval parishes were formed by 1200. Mother churches were built in each ecclesiastical parish, and as the population grew daughter chapels were established to care for the needs of the sometimes many subsidiary townships, especially in the north of England. Each tended to have its own register thus the family historian searching in such an area, knowing the parish but not the township, often faces a huge task. Large scale maps can identify farms, hamlets, roads and conveniently situated chapels.

The church early on acquired great power over the lives of our ancestors, as it became the seat of much of the law concerning their everyday lives. Marriage and the legitimacy of children, right of burial, probate of wills, inheritance and matrimonial disputes, morals, licences to practice many occupations, and much else was regulated by ecclesiastical courts. The family historian thus needs to understand the ecclesiastical system as well as the civil one.

Church of England parishes were grouped into deaneries headed by rural deans, then into archdeaconries run by archdeacons, and subsequently into bishoprics presided over by a bishop. These three geographical jurisdictions did not necessarily conform to civil county boundaries, neither were they always composed of contiguous parishes. There were also dozens of peculiar parishes with their own peculiar courts. It is essential to know in what chain of ecclesiastical jurisdictions your ancestors’ parishes lay in order to make full use of the existing records. Humphery-Smith (1995) and Gibson (1994) are excellent resources and should be consulted for geographical details.

Bishoprics were further organized into two provinces, York andCanterbury, presided over by their respective archbishops, the archbishop of Canterbury being the senior to whose court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, all disputes would ultimately be referred. In 1534 Henry VIII decided to renounce papal supremacy and, after a chequered history for a few years after his death, the Church of England was consolidated by Elizabeth I in 1559. The oldest parish registers, which the genealogist has as his primary material, date from this era. The Tudor governments gave the responsibilities for the poor, the highways and for petty law and order to civil parishes. There were Petty Sessions at the local level, and essions for each county and county borough, all managed by Justices of the Peace.

The Victorian era brought a lessening of church control over people’s lives. Thus in the 1830s came new legislation on poverty and the institution of Poor Law Unions of parishes which supported their own destitute citizens, and introduced union workhouses for the care of the most desperate cases. Civil Registration commenced in 1837, utilizing the recently instituted Poor Law Union boundaries as the basis for the Registration Districts. An examination of these Registration Districts and the county boundaries shows that nearly 10 percent of places are, or have been, in a Registration District nominally in a different county from the usual civil one (Christensen, unpublished data based on Gibson and Youngs).

In 1858 the church relinquished control of probate and many others matters when all 365 of its courts were swept away and replaced by unitary civil ones. So more and more documentation of our ancestors became civil rather than ecclesiastical, and thus came under the civil jurisdictional boundaries. In 1894 the Local Government Act realigned the population into some 14,000 more sensibly arranged civil parishes, and elected parish councils took charge of them. (Hey). Other terms relating to villages are:


 * Closed villages where all the land was owned by a squire or small group of landowners, and from which poor immigrants were excluded in order to keep the poor rates (taxes) to a minimum. These villages were usually rather neat in appearance and did not have nonconformist chapels unless the local squire was himself a religious dissenter.,br&gt;


 * Estate villages were often built by great landowners in the 18th and 19th centuries. These may have been completely designed in one style, especially Tudor or Jacobean, in an aesthetically pleasing manner out of sight of the ‘great house,’ and the old village pulled down to ‘improve the view.’ They are particularly common in Northamptonshire.


 * Open villages were not dominated by a few local landowners, thus control of migration in and out, building and social and religious preferences were not apparent. Such parishes were often crowded with large numbers of the poor, and often industrial. labourers might live here and walk to work on farms in a neighbouring closed parish.

Hierarchy of Jurisdictions
Some statistics calculated from Phillimore’s Atlas (Humphery-Smith 1995) are useful to start this section. The counties refer to those present before the 1974 re-organization and thus normally used for genealogical purposes. The parishes are the ancient ecclesiastical ones present in 1832 before the Victorian population explosion, the development of the railways and large scale movement to the cities.


 * Number of counties There were 40 in England, 12 in Wales, and 33 in Scotland, making a total of 87.


 * Number of ancient parishes in England 11, 405, the greatest number being in Yorkshire (847), Norfolk (754) and Lincolnshire (649), and the smallest numbers in Rutland (56), Westmorland (77), Durham (102), and Huntingdonshire (109).


 * Number of ancient parishes in Wales 894 with just under one half of these beginning with Llan- (‘church’).


 * Number of ancient parishes in Scotland 891 Total number of ancient parishes in England, Wales and Scotland 13,190.


 * Parish Registers of England extant from 1538 About 800 out of 11,405 which is 7 percent.

The Anglo-Saxon charters, and the later Domesday Book created by William I, assess estates by the numbers of hides (Finn, Morris). Originally a hide was the amount of land needed for the support of one household, the acreage of which varied somewhat according to the productivity of the land. A large and important estate of a hundred hides would likely be an early administrative unit. These formed the basis for the divisions of counties across much of England called hundreds which feature in county administration from the 10th well into the 20th centuries. In some counties in the Danelaw, (those north eastern counties settled by Vikings), the corresponding unit was called a wapentake. In the four northern counties of England the division were called wards, and East Ward and West Ward in Westmorland, as well as Castle Ward in Northumberland survived as names of civil registration districts.

Some counties have intermediate-size groupings of hundreds called divisions (Hampshire, Lincolnshire), lathes (Kent),rapes (Sussex), or ridings (Yorkshire). There are also somewhat independent groupings called liberties (some towns), sokes (in the Danelaw), and shires (in the northern counties). [It should be noted that nowadays the term shire means a whole county].

All these county divisions had names and in many instances it was the name of the meeting place of the men of that hundred, typically on a boundary or neutral zone between two or more estates. Note that many contain the old words for burial places, trees and other boundary markers. Some were later renamed after an important manor within the area. Many of the Poor Law Districts and the later Registration Districts bear the names of the old hundreds. The parishes in each hundred in England can be found in Lewis’ A Topographical Dictionary of England (1831) and for Wales in Rowlands and Rowlands’ The Surnames of Wales for Family Historians and Others. It is necessary to know in which hundred a parish lies in order to access many older civil records.

Gazetteers and Maps
One of the hallmarks of a good researcher is their diligence in finding out as much as possible about the place in which their ancestor lived. They know and have access to a range of gazetteers and maps of different time periods and different types. The chart below compares the kinds of information found in different gazetteers. Note that Smith has extracted information from Lewis’ A Topographical Dictionary of England (1831) but was published in 1987. It is quite apparent from this comparison that one needs to consult a range of gazetteers for different information.

Chart: Comparison of Information Found in Four Gazetteers

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