The 1851 Religious Census of Britain

If you have never heard of the 1851 Religious Census of Britain, read on! The following is an article that I originally wrote for the short-lived Your Family History magazine in the UK, in 2012. I have slightly updated it to take into account an additional find subsequent to its publication, and to update some links.

The 1851 Religious Census of Britain

The decennial census returns from 1841–1921 are some of the most useful records to help with our genealogical research, providing a once-in-a-decade snapshot of our ancestors’ lives, offering information about their occupations, birthplaces, and in many cases, their very existence. Although the census was first in fact recorded in 1801, we concentrate on using the records from 1841 onwards for the simple reason that these were the first to actually name every member of a household in the land, whilst the pre-1841 returns instead tend to be statistical in nature only. From 1801 to 1851 the censuses were initially carried out across Britain by the Home Office, before responsibility for the gathering of the records in Scotland was devolved to the new General Register Office for Scotland, established in 1854. The 1851 census is therefore the last census that was carried out across the length and breadth of Britain by the same legal authority.

What many people do not realise, however, is that 1851 also had one other distinguishing feature, in that there were in fact two other very separate census enumerations carried across the island on the same weekend as the regular decennial census. The first was an educational census, which enumerated details relating to all of the schools in Britain, including Sunday schools. The second was the Census of Accommodation and Attendance at Worship, better known as the 1851 Religious Census of Britain. 

The purpose of the Religious Census was to ascertain exactly what the religious provision for the country was, and indeed needed to be, at a period following some extraordinary recent developments. For one thing, Roman Catholicism had only relatively recently been granted a degree of toleration as a religion in Britain, via the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act. The reasons for slowly liberalising the discriminatory rules against Catholicism had been many throughout the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On the one hand, Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, had become an integral part of the United Kingdom in 1801. On the other, the threat of a Jacobite restoration – and therefore of Catholicism becoming the state religion once more – had long since passed with the death in 1766 of the ‘Old Pretender’, James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of the deposed Stuart king James VII and II.

Whilst emancipation had finally granted toleration towards Catholicism, a far more pressing development by the middle of the 19th century had dramatically changed the numbers of Catholics residing in Britain – the Irish Famine. From 1845 the discovery of blight in the potato crops of Ireland and Scotland had soon caused death, hardship and hunger that had led to a dramatic migration of peoples across the British Isles. 

Thousands of Catholic refugees in particular had crossed the Irish Sea to the ports of Glasgow, Liverpool and London, desperate for food and a chance of survival, the authorities in their home land having failed to deal with the situation in anything like a humane and civil manner.

The migration of Irish Catholics to Britain was not the only major religious upheaval, however. Whilst the established church of Ireland, England and Wales was the Anglican Church, in Scotland this was not the case, with the Presbyterian based Church of Scotland (‘the Kirk’) the official church of the country. In 1843 a major ecclesiastical crisis transformed Scottish religious affairs for the next 80 years. At the annual General Assembly in Edinburgh, a long festering dispute between two wings of the Kirk, known as the Moderates and the Evangelicals, finally led to a massive schism, which came to be known as the ‘Great Disruption’. One third of the Kirk’s ministers walked out and established a new body, the Free Church of Scotland, the new institution being free from the constrictions of the law of ‘patronage’ (the right of landowners to decide who the ministers should be within what was supposed to be a democratic form of church worship).  

Britain in 1851 was therefore, in an ecclesiastical sense, in chaos, and a true picture was desired by the Westminster Parliament as to the rapidly changing religious make-up of the country. As with the decennial census, schedule forms were distributed to every church, chapel and religious establishment across the land, with a request that they be filled in on Sunday 30 March 1851, and then collected again by the local census officer. Unlike the regular census, however, the government did not seek to record the names of each and every person attending a service, but rather to gain a statistical overview on the numbers attending a service. The census was also completely voluntary.

The information requested on each census form included the name and description of the church or chapel, where it was located (the parish, superintendent registrar’s district, etc), when it was first consecrated, and under what circumstances it was first established – for example, was it the original parish church, or perhaps built as an additional facility? If a church was built after 1 January 1800, additional information was sought, such as who erected the building and at what cost. The questions then asked included on what basis a church was endowed financially, the number of spaces that were available within for worship (including ‘free’ and ‘other’ sittings), and an estimate of the numbers who had attended service at the church on census day, at the services in the morning, afternoon and evening. A follow up question also asked for an estimate of the average numbers attending in the 12 months preceding.

Whilst most churches in England and Wales did return the form, many thought the questions to be somewhat intrusive. Of the almost 34,500 forms distributed in England and Wales, not all were returned completed, or indeed at all. In Scotland, the return rate was particularly low, with the recently split Kirk still picking up the pieces following the Disruption.

Surviving census schedules from the religious census for England and Wales can be consulted at many County Record Offices across both countries, but they have also been digitised and made available to download for free via The National Archives’ Digital Microfilm project at https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/free-online-records-digital-microfilm/, or more directly at http://tinyurl.com/d75dtdy, arranged by county (below). In some cases surviving copies of the educational census are included alongside them. 

The situation for the Scottish returns, unfortunately, is bleaker. Not only did many churches refuse to return the schedules, but those that were returned have largely not survived, although I have found two examples that have from Morayshire, concerning Speymouth Parish Church and Gartmouth Preaching Station (below: NRS CH2/839/20/1B) - see https://scotlandsgreateststory.wordpress.com/2015/12/20/1851-religious-census-of-scotland-surviving-returns/. 

Fortunately, the records were gathered for a reason, and in 1854 reports were produced on the statistics generated, not only for England and Wales, but also for Scotland. The Scottish report is available online via HistPop at http://www4.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/PageBrowser2?ResourceType=Census&ResourceType=Legislation&ResourceType=Essays&ResourceType=Registrar%20General&ResourceType=TNA&SearchTerms=1851%20religious&simple=yes&path=Results&active=yes&titlepos=0&mno=34&pageseq=1.

Although the report consists mainly of various statistical tables, the results will provide a real eye opener for those seeking to carry out their research exclusively through online resources such as ScotlandsPeople (www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk) and FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org). Of the churches that did make a return, some 904 were Church of Scotland, and a further 104 Roman Catholic. There were, however, some 427 United Presbyterian Churches, 824 Free Church congregations, 112 Episcopal Church returns, 168 independent congregations and 100 Baptist churches, with many other smaller groups. ScotlandsPeople mainly holds pre-1855 records from the Church of Scotland and Roman Catholic churches, and some dissenter congregation records, but not all! If you cannot find a baptism before civil registration commenced in 1855, a look at the county-by-county returns on the Religious Census Report can list the strengths of each religious denomination present at that time, which may help to provide some useful context. (For the existence of denominations in each parish, consult the slightly earlier returns of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland at https://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/home).

 The Religious Census recorded on March 30th 1851 was a one-off project, never to be repeated. If you have so far only consulted the regular 1851 decennial census, there may well be further useful information waiting to be unlocked from its findings with regards to your family history. 

Chris

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