Chapter THREE: Making Bricks Without Straw

The colony of Virginia, after the protective and guiding influence of the Virginia Company was taken away, found itself in an almost impossible situation so far as religious organization was concerned. The leaders of colonial life realized all the more clearly as time passed that King Charles I, who succeeded his father King James I in 1625, was not the least interested in the religious welfare of the colony. America was entirely outside the bounds of any diocese or province in England, and consequently there was no bishop of a diocese, or archbishop of a province with any personal responsibility for the guidance or help of the parishes which were being organized in the colony. The Church in Virginia was left to itself to live or to die. It believed, according to the teachings of the Church, that bishops were necessary for the ordination of men to the ministry and for the performance of the spiritual rite of confirmation, whereby alone under the law of the Church of England baptized Christians could be admitted to the sacrament of the Holy Communion. A bishop was also necessary for the organization and leadership of a diocese, which was the governing body to which every parish and congregation must belong. But no bishop was ever sent by the Church of England to Virginia or to any other part of America throughout the entire colonial period.

The lack of a bishop left the Anglican Church, which was the Established Church of the whole colony, unable to organize for the enactment of its own laws or the management of its own affairs. There being no diocesan organization the clergymen in charge of parishes had no ecclesiastical authority over them. That fact tended to have the effect of making each incumbent clergyman a virtually free lance with no responsibility to an ecclesiastical superior nor community of fellowship with other clergymen in the colony. This condition continued until near the end of the century.

The General Assembly of Virginia followed the example of the Parliament of England and asserted legislative authority by laws for the temporal government of the Church. It divided the occupied territory of the colony into parishes and it established new parishes as settlement extended steadily to the westward. Because of this fact there was never any section which was not part of a parish, and the usual rule when a new county was to be created was to establish a new parish covering the territory of the proposed county before the county was created. Church buildings might be far apart in new parishes, but no section of Virginia in which English people were settling was without the established forms of religious worship.

The General Assembly enacted laws directing the election of laymen in every parish as the governing body of the parish in temporal affairs. That group was called the "Vestry." It had authority to buy land for churches, churchyards and glebe farms, to erect church buildings and to build glebe-houses as residences for ministers. It was also charged with the care of the poor and the destitute sick, and orphaned children within the parish, with the duty of providing new homes for these children in responsible families. The money to pay for the land, the buildings, the care of the sick and needy, the salary of the minister, and other parish needs was collected from the parishioners through an annual "tithe" of so many pounds of tobacco per poll. The vestry upon occasion also had certain civil duties not within the scope of religious organization.

The setting up of a vestry of laymen as temporal head of the Church in a parish or congregation was first developed in Virginia. It was extended later to other colonies as the Anglican Church spread through them all, and it came over into the life of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. Great as the value of the vestry has been to the whole Episcopal Church, the vestry in Virginia was of still greater value, for by its extension to other colonies and states it has given one of its most distinctive features to the Church of today.

In England, with the exception of some few parishes formed within the past century or so, no parish has the right to elect its own rector. The rector is usually appointed by some institution or individual vested with that authority which is called "the advowson of a parish."

Moreover, no diocese in the Established Church of England has the power to select its own bishop. The King as temporal head of the Church appoints the bishops of all dioceses, and that power is exercised for the King by his prime minister. And during the colonial period in America the Governor of every colony other than Virginia and Pennsylvania appointed the rector of every Anglican parish and inducted him into office.

In Virginia the vestries of the parishes fought Governor after Governor until they won the right for the vestry itself to choose the minister to serve in its parish. That right has extended throughout the Episcopal Church today and has gone further so that today the laity of the Church have the right to representation in all diocesan conventions and councils, and in the general convention of the Church. Thus the laity have their part in every election of a clergyman to become the bishop of a diocese.

In the seventeenth century the General Assembly also put into effect in Virginia the constitutions and canons of the province of Canterbury "as far as they can be put into effect in this country." The General Assembly thereby made the "doctrine, discipline and worship" of the Anglican Church of England that of the Church in Virginia as far as it could be done without a bishop.

That was as far as the General Assembly could go. Throughout all the seventeenth century the Established Church of Virginia consisted of a group of parishes without connection with each other and without central spiritual authority. There was therefore no actual power of discipline, either of clergymen or laymen.

The situation was made all the more difficult because there was no sure way to secure ministers. When a parish became vacant some layman in the parish would have to write to his business agent in England, or to some friend or relative there and ask that he find a clergyman who would come to Virginia. Parishes, when they became vacant, remained vacant as a rule for a year or more; sometimes very much more. The vestries early adopted the custom of appointing godly laymen as readers whose duty it was to assist the minister by leading the congregation in the responses in the Church service, and in raising tunes for the singing of metrical version of the Psalms. Later, when it was found desirable to erect chapels of ease in populous parishes, enough readers were appointed in every parish to permit one of them to hold morning service each Sunday in each place of worship throughout the parish, while the minister went his usual round of service in each church or chapel upon regular schedule. Except in remote chapels the custom was to have service each Sunday in every church or chapel.

The reader was authorized to conduct morning and evening prayer and to read a printed sermon, or a "homily." He could not celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion. Rather frequently, and especially during the era of the Commonwealth and the reign of Charles II, several adjoining parishes would be vacant at the same time; and at one time about the end of the Commonwealth period the statement was made that there were only some ten clergymen in Virginia to serve fifty parishes. Under such circumstances the reader was called upon to perform many duties. He might baptize a dying child, conduct a funeral, or perform a marriage ceremony.

There was also in those early days no way of screening out unworthy men who appeared occasionally as clergymen in the colony; men who perhaps had been forced out of parishes in England because of immorality or drunkenness; and occasionally men with forged credentials. Such men were occasionally appointed to parishes by vestries who had no way of learning their true status; and if the man was thenceforth morally decent and had no great fault except occasional drunkenness, he would be allowed to stay on because of the need of a priest to celebrate the sacraments.

The vestries protected their parishes from unworthy clergymen by the uncanonical appointment of a minister as incumbent of a parish for a year at a time, rather than present him canonically to the Governor of the colony for induction into the rectorship of the parish. Under the law of England, and under the law of the Church of England, no rector could be forced out of a parish after induction except after an ecclesiastical trial by the bishop or his commissary.

In 1656 John Hammond published a pamphlet entitled _Leah and Rachel_, extolling the attractiveness of Virginia and Maryland as places of residence at that time. He described vividly the difficulties which the older colony had suffered in the earlier years of Charles I. He wrote:

They then began to provide and send home for Gospel
ministers, and largely contributed for their maintenance.
But Virginia savouring not handsomely in England, very few
of good conversation would adventure thither, (as thinking
it a place wherein surely the fear of God was not), yet many
came, such as wore black coats, and could babble in a
pulpet, roare in a tavern, exact from their parishioners,
and rather by their dissolutenesse destroy than feed their
flocks.

Loath was the country to be wholly without teachers, and
therefore rather retain these than to be destitute; yet
still endeavours for better in their places, which were
obtained, and these wolves in sheeps cloathing, by their
Assemblies questioned, silenced, and some forced to depart
the country.

Another problem which the Church faced in Virginia resulted from the character of the immigrants who came to the colony. It is a well established fact that the men who came in three ships to Jamestown in 1607 were from various strata of society in England. They all entered James River on equality of opportunity and of danger. Some at least had come from the higher classes of society; younger sons, perhaps, or relatives of stockholders in the London Company, attracted to Virginia because of the newness of the adventure and the spice of danger; sons of professional men and men of business, intrigued by a new business life and opportunity; men from the laboring classes and the peasantry of rural sections. But it is extremely doubtful that the Jamestown settlement, after its tragic first years, continued very long to be attractive to young men seeking adventure only. Many of the families of today who boast of their generations of ancestry in Virginia descend from or married into the families of the men and women who came to the colony in these earliest years of settlement, and have ancestors buried among the unknown dead of the Jamestown cemetery and churchyard.

There were three sources from which the settlers came; and these sources were more or less in effect throughout the whole of Virginia's first century. First and foremost in numbers and importance were the sons of small farmers and tenant farmers, and younger sons of the laboring classes and small merchants. No matter how large the population may be, always there are positions of employment with a normal wage; but when the younger sons of a mechanic or other working man grow to maturity where there is only one wage-producing employment available to the family, the younger sons must seek a living from other sources. Farms cannot be reduced below the number of acres required to support one family. When that has been done and there are several sons, one of them must inherit the farm and the others must seek a living elsewhere.

The broad acres of Virginia and its equable climate attracted thousands of such younger sons, and also others who had not been successful and sought opportunity in a new land. The settlers came from every section of England, and from the bleak hills of Scotland; from Wales and also from Ireland. The English were mostly from the Anglican parishes of the Established Church. The Scottish new-comers were accustomed to membership in the Established Church of Scotland and they found little difficulty in living within the Established Church of Virginia. Indeed there is no recorded effort to establish a Presbyterian congregation in Virginia until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. So friendly was the feeling between the Anglicans and the Scottish Presbyterians in the Norfolk section that Rev. James Porter of Presbyterian ordination was the incumbent minister of the Anglican Lynnhaven Parish prior to 1676 and until his death in 1683.

A second source, certainly in the early years, was the rapidly increasing population of the cities and towns of England. It is of record that in the days of the London Company one town appropriated funds sufficient to pay the expenses to Virginia of a large number of its unemployed, and probably the same thing was done by other towns for their unemployed. Doubtless a little "pressure" was applied in the case of young men who had no occupation and no visible means of support. And shanghaiing, to use a modern term, was not unknown.

A third source from which settlers came developed from the custom which grew up in England of sending to Virginia, and later to all the colonies, persons who had been convicted of law-breaking. At that time there were some hundred felonies in the English code of jurisprudence for which the sentence of death by hanging could be imposed. These felonies included such offenses as stealing a pig or anything of greater value than a shilling. The ruling classes of England had long realized that punishments were too severe for offenses which today would be misdemeanors; and in the fifteenth century an effort had been made to mitigate the severity of punishment by an amendment of the law of "benefit of clergy." This law was a law of Parliament which had come down from earlier ages of the Church. Under that law an ecclesiastical person, either priest or monk, who was charged with a felony could not be tried by a civil court but was delivered up to the bishop of his diocese for trial in an ecclesiastical court.

By the end of the sixteenth century Parliament had amended the benefit of clergy law so that every free male who could read and write, upon conviction of a first offense of felony might plead "benefit of clergy", and upon showing that he could read a verse of Scripture, have the penalty remitted. He was then burned in the hand with a hot iron so that the scar thereby made would be evidence against him if he should plead benefit of clergy a second time.

The benefit of clergy law was early written into the Virginia code and continued in that code until after the Revolution. Harsh as was the law it showed a real effort to ameliorate still harsher laws, and it saved the lives in England and America of many thousands of first offenders. The first verse of the fifty-first Psalm was so frequently presented to be read by some convicted man or boy that it became known as the "neck verse" because it saved a life; and many a kindly official taught a 'teen-age boy that verse so that he could "read" it when it was presented to him.

One of the earliest records of the General Court of Virginia contains the following entry under date January 4, 1628/29:

William Reade, aged thirteen or fourteen years, convicted of
manslaughter, when the verdict was read, and William Reade
asked what he had to say for himself, that he ought not to
die, demanded his clergy, whereupon he was delivered to the
Ordinary.

There were many such instances. In Virginia the Governor was the Ordinary and as such had authority to accept the boy's plea, have him read the "neck verse," and thereby permit him to go free "after the burning."

The severity of the laws influenced the courts in many parts of England to permit or sentence an offender to escape death by going to one of the American colonies, and it became the custom to sentence convicted criminals to serve for a period of years in an American colony as an indentured servant. A great number of such "convicts" were sent to Virginia because of the constant demand there for indentured servants to cultivate the fields and for other duties.

Many of the convicts became useful citizens of the colony after their terms of servitude ended; but many did not reform and in time became such a menace that for a period after 1670 the General Assembly forbade that any more convicts be brought into the colony.

It can be seen therefore that from the beginning the population of Virginia grew by immigration from various sources and that not all who came to the colony were of the best type. The New England colonies had the advantage that their immigrants came in large part from dissenters from the Established Church of England. They came for "conscience sake," however, and with their concept of theocratic government the New England colonists could make it difficult indeed for immigrants they did not welcome. After Roger Williams had been exiled to Rhode Island and a few Quakers had been hanged on Boston Common, it was made clear to Baptists and Quakers, to Anglicans and to witches that Virginia was a more favorable climate for them than Massachusetts.

In contrast to New England, Virginia was founded and developed as a cross-section of the whole life of the British Isles, with its evil as well as its good; with ideals of freedom of thought which made no attempt to control a man's conscience; and with an ever growing concept of self-government and human freedom as already developed during nearly a thousand years and set out by the common law and the statute law of the race. Virginia was not founded upon any theocratic concept of government under the influence of a priestly class.

The life and community consciousness that developed in Virginia into the distinctive customs and ways of a well organized and firmly established commonwealth were necessarily different from those of the colonies in New England because of the differing conditions under which men lived. In the township system of New England a village normally became the township center and the people lived near enough to each other to enable them to meet frequently; to work and play together; to transact business; and to gossip of neighborhood affairs. In Virginia it was otherwise. In Virginia families lived on separate farms and each farm was of necessity a community within itself. Life was geared to the basic fact that tobacco was the money crop, and also was the real source of the financial strength and stability of the colony. Each family required a farm of sufficient acreage to raise tobacco as well as food-stuff and cattle; and throughout the whole colonial period the genius of Virginian life opposed the development of towns of greater population than was required for a shipping point and a warehouse, for the storing and grading of tobacco, and for a few agents of English and Scottish merchants.