The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects by Sedley Lynch Ware
page 56 of 135 (41%)
page 56 of 135 (41%)
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embroideries, hangings, images, chalices, pyxes and other church
furnishings and ornaments condemned as superstitious by the Anglican church, brought some income to the wardens of most parishes during the first years of Elizabeth. Examples will be found in all the accounts. Now and then, too, a parish would make a large sum from the sale of the wood or other products of parish lands.[302] A fairly common item in city parishes especially were fees paid for licences to eat flesh during Lent and on other legal fast days.[303] When an Elizabethan parish undertook some work on a great scale, such as the rebuilding of its church, or of the church steeple; or, again, when it had suffered great losses by fire or flood, it solicited through _Begging Proctors_ the _Contributions of Outsiders_, sometimes from all parts of England.[304] To terminate our enumeration of means of raising money, or of contributions of all sorts on which the wardens could count (as apart from rates, properly so-called), we might mention _Fixed Contributions_, of money or of labor, issuing out of certain tenements; and _Annual Payments to Mother Churches_. Certain lands or houses, generally abutting on the church grounds, had fixed upon them the obligation to repair a certain portion of the churchyard enclosure, Tenement X, so many feet of fence, Tenement Y, such a portion of brick or stone wall, and so forth.[305] Sometimes also certain houses or lands are spoken of as yielding so much a year for the repair of the church and the support of the poor.[306] Incidentally we might mention--though hardly connected with parish finance--certain payments for church repair, etc., claimed of old by some cathedral churches from the parishes of the diocese. |
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