User:Iluvhistory66/Sandbox/England Jurisdictions Revamp


 * Parish
 * County
 * Civil Registration District
 * Diocese
 * Rural Deanery
 * Poor Law Union
 * Hundred
 * Province
 * Division

Jurisdictions 1851: Parish County Civil Registration District Diocese Rural Deanery Poor Law Union Hundred Province Division

Check and understand the Chapman Code

Example: Derbyshire

Parish - Glossop County - Derbyshire Civil Registration District - Hayfield Diocese - Court of the Bishop of Lichfield (Episcopal Consistory) Rural Deanery - Lichfield Poor Law Union - Glossop Hundred - High Peake Province - Canterbury Division -

Jurisdictions Explained
NEW PAGE: A jurisdiction is an area governed by a system of laws. Each jurisdiction has a geographic boundary with some type of authority (i.e., manor, parish, town, county). This authority has the power to apply and enforce the laws. In England birth, marriage, death, census, and other genealogical records are organized and stored in different governmental levels such as parish, town, and county.

Ancient Parish
Parish, the smallest unit of ecclesiastical and administrative organization in England. During the 7th and 8th centuries, groups of priests organized large church areas to better serve their parishioners. Throughout the 10th and 12th centuries these large areas were divided into smaller areas by landowners who built more local churches to serve the needs of their families, tenants, and servants. These smaller territories developed into the formal parish system.

Ecclesiastical Parish
Ecclesiastical parishes originated in the Medieval period when tithes were paid by the parish inhabitants to support the Church. These units were distinguished from the Civil Parishes after 1597 with the passing of the first Poor Relief Act. This Act also led to many subordinate areas, such as chapelries, being raised to parochial rank and the creation of many new parishes.
 * Chapelry:

A subsidiary place of worship to the main parish church. A chapelry also had a role in civil government, being a subdivision of a parish, which was used as a basis for the Poor Law until the establishment of England and Wales Poor Law Records 1834-1948 in the 19th century.

Civil Parish
A civil parish is the most local unit of government in England. A parish is governed by a parish council or parish meeting, which exercises a limited number of functions that would otherwise be delivered by the local authority. There are no civil parishes in Greater London and not all of the rest of England is parished.

County
The county was the basic unit of regional mapping from the mid-16th to the mid-19th centuries. FamilySearch uses England county historic boundaries pre-1974. The records dating before 1974 are located within the information found in the historic counties. This practice better assists our patrons who are researching their ancestors before the modern time period.

Civil Registration District
A registration district in the United Kingdom is a type of administrative region which exists for the purpose of civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths and civil partnerships. It has also been used as the basis for the collation of census information. Before 1837 only churches recorded birth, marriage, and death information in England. In the early 1800s, Parliament recognized the need to keep accurate records for voting, planning, taxation, and defense purposes. Legislation was passed to create a civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths for England and Wales and. England and Wales registration began on 1 July 1837, for births, marriages, divorces and deaths. However, this new law did not have universal coverage until tougher laws were passed in 1874.

For more information see England Civil Registration.

Diocese
The diocese was the basic geographical division of the church from the earliest times. There was a continual rearrangement of dioceses before the Normans, but the system established by them in the eleventh century remained until the nineteenth century, altered only slightly in the sixteenth century. Dioceses of the Church of England Dioceses are directed by a bishop with ordinary jurisdiction, and the town in which his cathedral is located is properly called a city. On occasion, the term 'city' has been granted to other towns by royal letters patent (Cambridge and Southampton in the 20th century, for example). The 44 dioceses are divided into two Provinces, the Province of Canterbury (with 30) and the Province of York (with 14). The archbishops of Canterbury and York have pastoral oversight over the bishops within their province, along with certain other rights and responsibilities.

Rural Deanery
From the twelfth and thirteenth centuries dioceses were divided into archdeaconries, and these were in turn divided into rural deaneries.

'Rural' was used to distinguish them from the dean and chapter of the cathedral of the diocese. The system of rural deaneries was in abeyance from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century when it was revived. A few rural deaneries were directly parts of dioceses.

The word deanery comes from the Latin decanus (chief of ten). Deaneries originally comprised about ten parishes. Nowadays they are geographically-based, and may contain any number.

Poor Law Union
The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 placed the responsibility for the care of the poor in England and Wales, from 1834 onward, on Poor Law Unions. The Poor Law Unions and their workhouses took over this responsibility from the Church of England parishes. Prior to 1834 a few parishes or collections of parishes had established a few workhouses to help relieve the poor and provide indoor relief in the form of food, clothes and shelter (Bristol 1696). Both outdoor relief, in which recipients lived in their home while receiving some form of relief, and indoor relief (workhouse living) were offered, as needed, prior to 1834. From 1834 onward all relief was supposed to be given in the workhouse only.

Hundred
A hundred was the division of a shire for administrative, military and judicial purposes under the common law. Originally, when introduced by the Saxons between 613 and 1017, a hundred had enough land to sustain approximately one hundred households headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder. He was responsible for administration, justice, and supplying military troops, as well as leading its forces. The office was not hereditary, but by the 10th century the office was selected from among a few outstanding families. Within each hundred there was a meeting place where the men of the hundred discussed local issues, and judicial trials were enacted. The role of the hundred court was described in the Dooms (laws) of King Edgar. The name of the hundred was normally that of its meeting-place. In England, specifically, it has been suggested that 'hundred' referred to the amount of land sufficient to sustain one hundred families, defined as the land covered by one hundred "hides".

Hundreds were further divided. Larger or more populous hundreds were split into divisions (or in Sussex, half hundreds). All hundreds were divided into tithings, which contained ten households. Below that, the basic unit of land was called the hide, which was enough land to support one family and varied in size from 60 to 120 old acres, or 15 to 30 modern acres (6 to 12 ha) depending on the quality and fertility of the land. Compare with township.

Above the hundred was the shire under the control of a shire-reeve (or sheriff). Hundred boundaries were independent of both parish and county boundaries, although often aligned, meaning that a hundred could be split between counties (usually only a fraction), or a parish could be split between hundreds. The system of hundreds was not as stable as the system of counties being established at the time, and lists frequently differ on how many hundreds a county has. The Domesday Book contained a radically different set of hundreds than that which would later become established, in many parts of the country. The number of hundreds in each county varied wildly. Leicestershire had six (up from four at Domesday), whereas Devon, nearly three times larger, had thirty-two.

In England, the hundred was a subdivision of most shires dating back to before the Conquest until District Councils were established by the Local Government Act (1894). Each hundred had its own court of freeholders which exercised a petty civil jurisdiction. Not all shires were simply subdivided into hundreds: the wapentakes were the rough equivalent in the Danelaw counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Lincolnshire; wards performed a similar role in the northern counties of Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland as well as southern Scotland. In Yorkshire, the ridings were the larger subdivision above the wapentakes. In Kent, lathes; and in Sussex rapes were larger units made up of many hundreds.

Interactive Map
FamilySearch has an interactive map of the 1851 jurisdictions of England. This map allows the user to choose a jurisdiction (such as a county, parish, or diocese) then choose different nearby jurisdictions (like hundred, rural deanery, or province) to see where vital records were housed. A table pops up showing what years parish registers exist, the names of other associated jurisdictions, and other similar search tools.

OLD TEXT: When doing genealogical research, records will be organised by and make reference to various types of administrative units. Some knowledge of these can be useful to understand the records.

Interactive Map
FamilySearch has a very useful map of English jurisdictions as they stood in 1851. This map is interactive, allowing the user to display of map of a selected type of jurisdiction, and to click on an area and see which of the other jurisdictions it belongs to, and the years that Anglican Church Records start.

Historic counties (pre-1974)
England was divided into 40 counties, the highest traditional unit of subdivision in England. These boundaries remained roughly unchanged until reforms in 1974. Their use is preferred in genealogy to the Ceremonial Counties of post-1974.

Abbreviations (Champman codes)
For a list of England pre-1974 counties and their standard abbreviations see the articles County Abbreviations and Chapman Code, created by Dr. Colin Chapman, or go to GENUKI.

Ceremonial counties
From 1974 onwards, ceremonial counties have become an important unit of subdivision in England. England now has a two-tier system of counties and districts(sometimes boroughs or Royal Boroughs). These ceremonial counties correspond roughly to the old counties, with the exceptions that Manchester, Birmingham and London now have their own counties. These ceremonial counties do not necessarily have any administrative purposes today, for in many the County Council has been abolished and all local governance is now on managed on the district level.

Parishes
The basic unit until the late nineteenth century in England was the parish. Church Records and Censuses were generally arranged by parish, and Registration Districts for Civil Registration and Poor Law Unions for poor relief were generally created by merging several parishes together. Parishes have now been abolished in many areas, but there is a growing trend of re-establishing parishes as the very lowest level of local government.

Registration Districts
Civil Registration is based on the Registration District. These usually covered multiple parishes merged together. When searching indexes of civil registration you will need to know what registration district the birth, marriage or death you are looking for occurred in.

Their boundaries changed frequently over the years. Fortunately the website GENUKI has a database of England Registration Districts that covers at least up to 1974.

Hundreds
See England Hundreds

The Hundred is a very old subdivision of a County used in some records, notably the 1841 Census.