CHAPTER L

EARLY PARISHES

IN ENGLAND We find that Honorius, the fifth Archbishop of Canterbury, about the year 636, was the first to ordain parishes that he might assign to every priest his particular flock. Before this the bishop and whole clergy of the diocese were as one body, living upon their endowments bestowed on the bishopric and their treasure that came from the sundry places of devotion, whither some one or other of them, at the bishop's appointment, was sent to preach the word and minister the sacrament, every clerk having his dividend for his maintenance.

From these facts it is evident that the Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland began its life in the way of the primitive English Saxon Church, as for the first half century the individual Episcopal churches in the province paid their tithes to the Lord Bishop of London. Of these there were a goodly number, the old Poplar Hill Church having been built as early as 1642, with a rector as early as 1650.

It was not, however, until after the Protestant revolution and the accession of William and Mary that the Maryland Assembly passed "an act for the service of Almighty God and the establishment of the Protestant religion in this province." By this act the counties were divided into parishes and churches ordered to be built, "such parishes as have already churches and chapels built in them excepted." Thus the Church of England became the established church of Maryland.

The province was divided into thirty parishes, of which seventeen were on the Western Shore and thirteen on the Eastern. St. Mary's, in which there had been at least one Protestant Episcopal Church since 1642, was divided into two parishes, "King William and Mary" and "King and Queen." Anne Arundel was given four St. Margaret's, Westminster, St. Anne's, St. James and All Hallow's; Baltimore County into St. Paul's, St. George's and St. John's; Charles into Port Tobacco, Durham, William and Mary, Piscataway or St. John's. Kent was given the two parishes of Kent Island and St. Paul; Talbot County, St. Peter's, St. Paul's and St. Michael's; Somerset, Stepney, Coventry, Somerset and Snow Hill; Dorchester into Dorchester and Great Choptank parishes.

It is evident from the act of 1697 that some persons who made gifts of land for the building of churches did not do so in legal form, and their heirs were not equally liberal minded. This was "an act for confirming titles of land given to the use of the churches and several chapels of ease within this province." It empowered the commissioners of the respective counties and vestrys of the parishes to take up certain parcels of land for the use of the same. All gifts or grants were to be recorded in the county courts and a copy filed in the High Court of Chancery.

Among the various good provisions for the parishes upon the establishment of the Protestant Church was that which decreed that a "Register" be appointed to make due entry of vestry proceedings, births, marriages and burials and provide books accordingly under penalty. In the year 1696 the Council upon investigation found that this regulation had been universally disregarded,

none having returned the prescribed lists, and a fine was consequently imposed.

It is to such neglect on the part of the early vestries that so little is to be known from the church records. That the established church had a struggling existence in many parishes the records of those times make evident.

Church-going was encouraged in the province, and a unique act was passed exempting persons from arrest while attending divine service. After the establishment of the Protestant Church in Maryland the absence of a bishop or commissary left an organization without a head, for under the peculiar royal rights and privileges of the Lords Baltimore the Bishop of London, who was the nominal head of the Episcopal Church in Maryland, had really no authority to remove the incumbent who had been appointed to "the living" by the Proprietary. To this life tenure on a parish is ascribed many abuses which grew up among the early clergy. With no spiritual head to fear, and with an independence furnished by the per poll tax, a rectory with glebe lands attached and few services, the life led by many of the young divines was more fitted to the fox-hunting squire than to a member of the cloth. In view of this, it is remarkable that a whole century elapsed between the establishing of the Episcopal Church in Maryland and the election of the first Bishop, one whose life was a benediction to the church, and whose ancestral motto, "The acceptable grace of God," was the watchword of his character.

CHAPTER LI

DIVERSITY IN SPELLING COLONIAL NAMES

THE uninitiated "seeker after truth" in family history through the Colonial records would soon be discouraged if he discarded all names which were spelled contrary to the modern mode. The diversity in the spelling of surnames as they appear in the official records has long been one of the most interesting phases of the absorbing study which includes the names, origin, lives and homes of the makers of Maryland.

Some names entirely lost their original form at the hands of the recording clerks in the early province, and this peculiar state of affairs made it necessary for men of landed possessions to adopt the incorrect spelling of their names to preserve their identity as the persons to whom such lands were patented. There being no rule for proper names, they were spelled phonetically in many cases and according to the way the special clerk in whose office they were recorded happened to think they were spelled. Therefore, the tracing of family lineages would be a hopeless and disappointing pursuit did not experience prove that there were as many ways to spell some names in early Maryland as there were clerks in the offices. The name of Smith, Smyth or Smythe often stood for the same persons, as did Maignard for Maynard, etc., and William De Courcy first appears on the early records as William Coursey, and so his descendants might have continued to be written had not an early one of the Mary