عنوان

Encountering and managing the poor :

Number

TLets275275

Title Proper

Encountering and managing the poor :

General Material Designation

[Thesis]

First Statement of Responsibility

Lee, Robert James

Title Proper by Another Author

rural society and the Anglican clergy in Norfolk, 1815-1914

Subsequent Statement of Responsibility

Snell, Keith

Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.

University of Leicester

Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.

2003

Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree

Ph.D.

Body granting the degree

University of Leicester

Text preceding or following the note

2003

Text of Note

This thesis is an exploration of the relationship between Anglican clergymen and the inhabitants of Norfolk's rural parishes in the nineteenth century. It considers the potential impact clergymen could have upon a number of areas of secular life: on education as school managers, on law and order as magistrates, and on aspects of local economic, social and behavioural management as poor law guardians and charity trustees. Clergymen also negotiated a complex series of social relationships with agricultural labourers, with religious Nonconformists, with trade unionists, with tenant farmers, and with local landowners (who were often their patrons or kinsmen). The thesis examines many facets of social, religious and political dissent in the countryside, and discusses the extent to which individual clergymen - by their attitudes and actions - might exacerbate or soothe tensions within their 'spheres of influence'. The notion of clergymen as 'colonial governors' is posited. The term offers an explanation for their managerial role in local society, and elucidates the way in which the parish clergy operated as administrators rather than instigators of change. Nineteenth-century rural society also witnessed the decline of a once-vibrant popular culture, based on an affinity with nature and lived to the rhythm of calendrical custom. It is argued that popular culture was actively suppressed by parish elites and that the Church played a pivotal role in the process of suppression. The pageantry of parish entertainments, the re-casting of the law so that it acted against custom, the rise of the clergyman as antiquarian historian and amateur archaeologist, the symbolism and architecture of the restored church and the newly-built Rectory are all cited as being of iconic significance in this respect. By blending qualitative and quantitative methods, the thesis aims to build an holistic picture of the way in which two cultures encountered each other in the nineteenth-century countryside, and explains how one culture came to dominate, incorporate and manage the other.

Nineteenth century

Lee, Robert James

Snell, Keith

University of Leicester

Electronic name

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y