Temporal Pillars de Geoffrey Best

Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne's Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the Church of England

Geoffrey Best

The histories of Queen Anne's Bounty, created in 1704, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, established in 1836, run so closely together, and their functions, until their amalgamation in 1948 as the Church Commissioners, were so similar, that it would be impossible to study them separately. In this account of their foundation and growth, which was originally published in 1964, Dr Best shows how much they had to do with the great changes in the administration and political relations of the Church of England, which transformed the Church from the virtually medieval institution it was in the early eighteenth century, to the recognizably modern one it had become by the end of the nineteenth. Although Dr Best's book is primarily a study of two ecclesiastical bodies and of the Church reform movement, it is also an important and unusual contribution to English social and political history.

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Preface; Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. The Origins and Establishment of Queen Anne's Bounty: 1. The condition of the clergy in the late seventeenth century; 2. First fruits and tenths; 3. 'The Governors of the Bounty of Queen Anne for the Augmentation of the Maintenance of the Poor Clergy' incorporated; Part II: The Church, the Law, and the Laity in the Eighteenth Century; Part III. Queen Anne's Bounty in the Eighteenth Century: 1. Starting troubles, 1704–17; 2. Two steps forward, one step back; 3. The men and the means; Part IV: Church, State, and Society, 1770–1840; Part V: The Third Church Reform Movement and the Bounty's Part in it; Part VI: The Crisis of Church Reform, 1820–35; Part VII: The Foundation of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, 1835–40; Part VIII. The Time of Troubles: 1. The common fund and its application; 2. The Episcopal fund; 3. Estates and leases; 4. Secretarial and constitutional difficulties; Part IX. The High Victorian Years: 1. The revised constitution; 2. The fight for survival, 1856–63; 3. Augmentations: bishops, deans and parish clergy; 4. Queen Anne's Bounty in the later nineteenth century; 5. Estates and management; Part X. The Commissioners and the Bounty in the Modern Church of England 1880–1948: 1. The last of tithe; 2. Housing and estates; 3. The church's business; 4. Conclusion; Appendices; Bibliography; Index; Maps; Tables.