Faith in the town: lay religion, urbanisation and industrialisation in England, 1740-1830

Lead Research Organisation: University of Manchester
Department Name: Arts Languages and Cultures

Abstract

Religious affiliations and beliefs are increasingly seen as central to understanding contemporary global politics and society. This modern focus on faith stands in sharp contrast to our knowledge of, and interest in, lay religion in an earlier period of wide-scale transformation in England. Historians studying the period from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries often overlook faith, whilst those that do consider it tend to confine themselves to the structures and leaders of organised religion, rather than its followers. Though recent scholarship by historians of religion and the supernatural has indicated the continued importance of religious faith and other forms of belief amongst lay people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dominant interpretations of urban society continue to follow older narratives of secularisation. Most historical studies thus describe a process of religious decline between 1740 and 1830 coexisting with the advent of 'modernity'. The continued influence of this interpretive model of secularisation on social, cultural and economic historians obscures not only our understanding of the lived experience of ordinary people, but also the ways in which many of the changes that we most associate with the development of modern society were shaped. By placing lay religious belief centre-stage, this project will demonstrate the influence of faith in the formation of some of the most important interpretive categories for examining modern society, including identity, family, space and trust. This will alter our understandings of the ways in which such societies functioned and provide a broad-ranging and ambitious re-evaluation of urban historical development of interest to a wide range of academic and non-academic audiences.

Planned Impact

Schoolchildren and schoolteachers
The project findings will be used to contribute to school teaching at both primary and secondary levels through a series of interventions into religious education. This is a way of enriching the school curriculum by helping teachers and other educational providers to acquire new knowledge and by providing teaching materials that fit with recent curricula reviews. In addition, pupils will benefit as topics are made more interesting and stimulating - specifically in terms of the incorporation of the accounts of children and young people into our teaching materials, whilst the use of local case studies will act to increase the relevance and meaning of what they are studying. The proposed approach is closely linked to the PI's previous work with Historic Schools (formerly part of English Heritage) in Key Stage 3 teaching. This new project will produce a more ambitious set of lesson plans and teaching materials, aimed at teaching at Key Stage 2 (primary), KS 3 (secondary) and KS 4 (secondary, GCSE).

Providing teachers and other education providers - specifically Cathedral education teams in the case of KS2 - with high quality teaching resources that meet the changing needs of the new school curricula is an important way to improve the quality of Religious Education for children. We hope to help address some of the uncertainties identified on the part of teachers in approaches towards topics related to Christianity and to produce lesson plans and resources that encourage debate and critical enquiry. To make sure that these resources meet the needs of both teachers and their pupils, our teaching materials will be formulated in collaboration with a skilled education consultant and in collaboration with other specialists and with reference to recent pedagogic research on religious education in schools. We also expect that our inputs will assist children in understanding the role of faith communities in modern towns and cities, thus helping to promote social cohesion in line with both recent Church of England reports and the teaching of 'British values' in schools which explicitly seeks to improve the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of pupils by inculcating mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.

Family and local historians and faith groups
We will publicise our research methods and findings as the project develops in a series of blogs linked to the project website and publicised via both Facebook and a dedicated Twitter feed. Our social media outputs will be aimed at non-academic audiences interested in both local and family history and in religion. Learning more about the history of lay piety will help family and local historians better understand how people in the past understood their world, and for family historians, how the religious beliefs of their ancestors would have affected their behaviour and worldview. Such learning does not just contribute to increasing individual knowledge but has wider social benefits: as the recent RSA/HLF report on Networked Heritage (2016) has stated, 'heritage provides the roots of our identities and enriches the quality of our lives'. This also links clearly to the AHRC priority area of heritage, and specifically the value of cultural heritage in shaping identity in increasingly diverse societies. We will also aim our online outputs at faith audiences for whom we hope engaging with our research will provide similar benefits, specifically by exploring the commonalities of religious faiths. In particular we aim to support the Interfaith Network's aim of increasing understanding and cooperation between people of different faiths and broadening public awareness of the distinctive religious traditions as a means to increase community cohesion. Such ambitions are particularly timely during a period of social fracture around the issues of migration and religion.

Publications

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Brown C (2021) Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern England, ca. 1740-1830

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Brown C (2021) Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern England, ca. 1740-1830 in Cultural and Social History

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GIBSON K (2020) FAITH AND URBAN DOMESTIC SOCIABILITY IN NORTHERN ENGLAND, 1760-1835 in The Historical Journal

 
Description Faith in the Town explores the ways in which religion affected the lives of men, women and children in the increasingly urban and industrialised context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century northern England. The conventional view, and still dominant narrative, is that faith declined in towns across Britain during this period. This is seen either as a consequence, or a direct effect, of urbanisation and industrialisation, which are frequently seen as the twin roots or conduits of secularisation. A historiographical contrast has been made with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - where urban centres were at the forefront of religious activity - and with the period after 1830, when a variety of denominations attempted to 'rechristianise' the towns and cities of Victorian England and to roll back what was seen as the religious inertia of the previous hundred years. Although the success or failure of that later endeavour has been much debated by historians, contemporaries often supported an interpretation of urban religious decline during the 'long' eighteenth century, frequently suggesting that towns - and especially the 'shock cities of the industrial revolution - were inimical to faith. In this they echoed the views of the evangelical poet William Cowper who in 1785 asserted, 'God made the country, and man made the Town', suggesting that towns were unpromising soils to nurture faith, whilst the countryside provided a more favourable environment for religion. Cowper's famous lines were much quoted and debated in the century that followed, arguably reaching their most trenchant variants in the late nineteenth century with Thomas Hardy, for example, writing that 'God was palpably present in the country, and the devil has gone with the world in the town', whilst the future Bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, issued a rallying call to action in 1896 in which he proclaimed 'It is not that the Church of God has lost the great towns, it never had had them'.
The book MS that has been produced as a result of this project argues that religion remained a major part of the lived experience of urban inhabitants during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather than abandoning religion, ordinary town dwellers across the social and denominational spectrum commonly understood their relationships with their families and the world within a framework of Christian duty and virtue that they practised with a view to salvation. Urban middling and labouring individuals employed what Lauren Winner calls the 'self-conscious' incorporation of piety into everyday life. This meant that religious practice and the influence of faith was not limited to time spent in church or chapel but extended into all areas of activity and experience: the workplace, the streets and other public spaces, and the home. Towns were sites of religious vitality and incubators of religious sensibility, so that rather than being inimical to religion, they were places of opportunity for religious influence and growth. This was true despite a backdrop of unprecedented urban development that Peter Clark argues meant provincial British towns 'came into their own as a dynamic force on a European scale'. Faith in the Town explores key decades of this transformational period, encompassing almost a century of urban development between 1740 and 1830. Though most historical studies assume that urban centres witnessed a process of religious decline during these years as a symptom of 'modernity' produced by industrialisation, urbanisation and Enlightenment thinking, this interpretive model skews not only our understanding of the lived experience of townspeople, but also the ways in which many of the changes that we most associate with the development of modern society were shaped. By placing lay religious belief centre-stage, this book demonstrates that modernity and faith were not diametrically opposed but were rather inextricably bound together, so that religion was a crucial element in the formation of urban economy, society and culture during the 'long' eighteenth century and towns were places where religion could both be nourished and flourish.
The argument that this book presents sits uneasily with much of the existing historiography of religion, towns and urban society. With notable exceptions, historians studying the period from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries have tended to overlook faith, whilst those that do consider it often confine themselves to the structures and leaders of organised religion, rather than examining the majority of its adherents. This period is more commonly associated with widespread urbanisation, unprecedented economic growth, and the birth of new social structures: developments that were especially marked in towns where manufacturing and consumption were booming, but whose inhabitants also felt the destabilising effects of frequent warfare and periodic food shortages, coupled with rising taxation, intermittent financial crises and threats of popular unrest. Few historians would argue that this period did not witness dramatic changes in English society, though whether viewed as witnessing the rise of a 'polite and commercial people', the emergence of a 'society of strangers', or the beginnings of an 'age of liberty', there is little space for religion in most social, cultural and economic historical accounts of these years. This is especially true of those urban centres such as Manchester and Leeds that were fastest growing and changed most rapidly, which have been readily associated with both the industrial revolution and the rise of secular society. Influenced by Alan Gilbert's interpretive paradigm, urban historians still tend to operate within the consensus that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the birth of an increasingly secular society in which religion held less and less meaning for most inhabitants of towns and cities. They support this view either by repeating versions of the secularising narrative, or by ignoring religion altogether. When urban historians have examined religion, the focus has tended to be on church building, educational provision, with clergy, ministers and religious professionals as key players in the urban elite and middling sort, rather than on faith, belief and lay religion. But more usually, the attention for urban historians has been elsewhere - on towns as centres of consumerism, leisure, enlightenment, trade and industry.
For their part, historians of religion during this period have seldom reflected on the urban context. Whilst non-religious accounts of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries might be criticised for ignoring developments in religious history, it is also fair to say that amongst histories of religion - at least until quite recently - the religious lives and experiences of ordinary men and women after the mid eighteenth century have been largely ignored, with scholars preferring instead to concentrate on the clergy and the religious establishment. Historians of the Church of England in the years between 1740 and 1830 have rarely concentrated on towns as such; the staple form of study being the Anglican diocese or parish, and even when towns were co-terminus with parishes, the focus has been on the perspective from established churches and the clergy, and with politico-religious disputes which played out in urban politics, rather than with lay religion more broadly. Meanwhile, historians of Methodism and nonconformity have usually focussed on heroic personalities (such as the Wesleys), organisational developments, and theology and evangelical spirituality. Although more recent work has imaginatively explored the beliefs of Methodist lay women and men, and towns are noted, this is only as part of a wider picture, and the urban environment has not been the prime line of sight. Thus though there have been some important dissenting historical voices to challenge the narrative of religious decline, these have made little impact on most social, cultural and economic historical narratives. The reason for this lack of influence appears to be linked to disciplinary boundaries, and specifically the failure of historians of religion and those who focus on broadly social, cultural or economic themes to interact with one another. Whilst significant amounts of scholarship by religious historians over the past thirty years has demonstrated the continued importance of faith amongst some sectors of lay society during this period, and the revisionist interpretation of the eighteenth-century Church developed by scholars such as Mark Smith has demonstrated the vigour with which the Church of England met the challenges of urbanisation and industrialisation, the overwhelmingly secular framework of eighteenth-century social, cultural and economic history has remained largely impervious, so that as Jeremy Gregory has asserted, 'the Church, and religion more broadly, feature not at all, or only as walk-on parts'.
This book describes the ways in which faith shaped the culture, society, and commercial life of towns by focusing on the north of England - one of the regions most associated with rapid transformation between the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - and especially those urban centres characterised by significant growth and economic change, including Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Urbanisation and industrialisation occurred at a pace and on a scale here which at once bemused, horrified and excited contemporaries. Moreover, these were exactly the places in which it has been assumed that urban growth and industrialization overthrew old social structures and systems of belief. This study does not assume that the 'shock cities' of northern England and their neighbouring towns, despite their many similarities, were homogenous however. There were large economic, social and physical differences between them, and they grew and developed in a variety of ways, including the manner in which religion influenced urban life. This examination is alert to evidence of regional difference in religious practice and belief that was shaped by place and custom, rather than assuming the north of England was broadly monolithic, or that its towns were all the same. Indeed, contemporaries moving between these towns, for work or pleasure, commonly noted both the similarities, and the differences between urban centres. This study also forms an implicit contrast between town and country, which is often alluded to in our sources. Of course, in reality, the distinction was porous and permeable; many urban inhabitants moved from the countryside; and some of the wealthier urban dwellers had rural properties too. Moreover, as our study describes, some rural inhabitants came to nearby towns precisely to attend the variety of places of worship on offer, and this was particularly true for nonconformists.

This study of religion in northern English towns focuses on lay religion, sometimes referred to in other historical contexts as 'popular religion' or the 'religion of the people'. We have not ignored the clergy, ministers or pastors of our towns, recognising that they had a crucial role in advising, instructing and educating the laity on religious matters, as well as the fact that this was never a one-way process, and that urban dwellers could advise, instruct, educate (and challenge) religious professionals. But this study focuses on faith and religion from the perspective of lay men, women and children, asking what religion and faith meant to them and how it shaped and helped them to make sense of their lives. We do, of course, examine the laity in churches, chapels, and meeting houses, looking at churchgoing and church attendance as a vital aspect of lay religion, but our attention is on exploring religion in the workplace, in the home, and in social networks. In focussing on those whom Margaret Hunt calls the 'people whose bread and butter derived from activities other than expounding the Word', we have found that it was precisely among these people - merchants or manufacturers, shopkeepers or mill-workers, pedlars or servants - that faith continued to be an organising principle and ideological support for their understandings of the world in which they lived well into the nineteenth century. Though we have tried to encompass as wide a range of individuals as possible in our study, the focus on town dwellers - who were mostly members the middling sorts, labouring classes and the poor - and the nature of surviving records - which were predominately produced by those of more comfortable means - has resulted in an examination in which the middling sort are represented more than other groups, whilst the religious focus in overwhelmingly on Christianity, though we have tried to include Jewish sources where they exist. Moreover, since towns in the north of England grew exponentially during the period of our study, with urban populations multiplying by up to ten times between 1740 and 1830, the amount of source material we have located, and the number of individual experiences that they record, are also weighted towards the later half of our study's chronology.
This book examines lay piety and its impact on social, cultural and economic development using the sorts of methodological and analytical approaches, and asking the types of research questions, that are usually associated with the social history of this period. A focus on the lived experience of individuals and groups means that we have examined a range of sources not always linked to eighteenth-century English religious history. Of greatest importance to this study is a wealth of personal testimony sources produced almost entirely by lay men, women and children, drawn from the collections of fifty separate archives and libraries, and twenty-four museums and galleries, mostly in the north of England. The sources used were found in 146 separate archival collections and provide detailed insights into the lives of almost 400 individuals. These materials include diaries, correspondence, commonplace books and memoirs, and provide the empirical backbone of our study as key evidence of lay lived experience. Of course the ways in which diarists shaped the contents of journals, and the things they wrote about, were - by their very nature - both subjective and self-conscious. The same may be said of memoirs - even those that appear to have been written for private consumption. Letters, though they clearly had an assumed audience (and often one which was greater than just the addressee, since correspondence was often passed between individuals, and especially members of the same household or family), were more obviously written consciously with specific readers in mind and often with the aim of presenting the writer in the best possible light. Yet as Mark Seymour has noted, despite our need to acknowledge the discursive rules that govern seemingly private and spontaneous correspondence, 'the subjective experience must, ultimately, lie at the heart' of these sources, meaning that they provide rich insights into the nature of lay piety. This study also makes use of additional sources, most of which are even more infrequently used in producing religious history, including business records, newspapers, maps, probate inventories and pawnbroker's accounts, in addition to a variety of objects linked to the material culture of the home. Though we have not ignored records associated with churches, chapels and meeting houses and with religious organizations entirely, we have focused on those more closely related to lay activities, such as charity work, Sunday schools and financing the improvement and construction of places of worship. This means that this study is less preoccupied with the politics of church building and the numbers attending public worship, and more concerned with how churches and chapels, and the practices that they inculcated, influenced the meanings and uses of public spaces and places in towns, and how worship - both in its communal forms and in the home - helped shape ideas about family, identity and the use of time, for example. Moreover, this research explores the influence and meanings of denominational differences not in order to study the theological roots of divergences, but to examine how these affected individual and group identities, alongside those forms of identity with which social historians are more familiar, such as gender and class. The examination also considers how faith and denominational allegiances affected other areas of life, and the worlds of work and business in particular, where religion played an important part in shaping business culture, formulating networks and dealing with risk.
An additional source used in this study is the wealth of religious literature available during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which sought to offer guidance and solace, particularly for lay readers. This material has been used before in studies of lay religion, although the relationship between the authors of these texts and their readers tends to be assumed, rather than demonstrated, so that we know relatively little about the degree to which such conduct literature directly influenced the ideas, experiences and behaviour of its readers. Examining both the texts read, and individual reader reactions to them, suggests that religious literature formed a major plank of religious education amongst the laity, in addition to the instruction gained in formal places of worship, religious meetings and in Sunday schools. The main subjects of our study - those individuals who left written records of their lives and their religious faith - recorded both forms of religious inspiration and teaching, aural and textual. Diaries, in particular, are peppered with reports of sermons heard and religious services attended, with the lessons taken from them on the part of individual congregants commonly noted. Letters, in addition to diaries, also provide frequent references to a variety of religious reading and the meanings that such texts imparted to their readers, as is described in the later chapters of this book.
Drawing on this wide range of sources, this book explores how religion and faith operated in an urban context, how the town shaped faith, and faith and religion shaped the town. It examines the ways in which urban piety moulded and gave meaning to the lives and outlooks of men, women and children by approaching the study of lay piety in several different ways. Section one, which provides a broad overview of religion in towns, begins with a study of the ways in which religion and lay religious practice influenced the organisation and meanings of urban spaces and places. Chapter 1 demonstrates the importance of religion in the built environment, and in terms of civic and urban identity, and communal memory. This chapter also shows how urban outside spaces were imbued with religious meaning as town dwellers traversed the streets to attend worship, commandeered urban spaces for religious processions and the air was filled with religious sounds. Chapter 2 explores the ways in which urbanisation offered increased opportunities for religious practice and wider denominational choice. It also shows how towns offered greater agency for individuals in relation to their devotional practices and their influence over the clergy. Chapter 3 considers the complex relationship between faith and time in northern towns. It challenges older historical narratives by demonstrating that familiarity with clock time and strong time awareness were entirely compatible with faith. This chapter also shows how religion provided a conceptual framework for understanding the passage of time, and a strong motivation for spending time wisely, that deeply affected the way that individuals spent their days, and their view of the world and their place within it. Finally, chapter 3 considers the continuing importance of the Sabbath and certain Holy Days and religious festivals over the course of the long eighteenth century. The last chapter in this section, chapter 4, examines the ways in which faith was central to conceptions of status and identity, and how a greater capacity for piety could be used to construct social difference in northern towns in ways that sit uneasily within a simple class-based model of urban social hierarchy. The impact of faith also complicated understandings of hierarchies within families and between genders, whilst the spiritual family might also assume more prominence than an earthly one for both men and women, and who were held to similar standards of religious conduct that contradict established historical understandings of the interplay between gender and faith.
Section two examines lay religion in relation to work and business. Chapter 5 explores the influence of religion on individuals' understanding of the economy and their working lives. Religious ideas about profit and salvation, the need to adhere to a moral code to ensure both worldly success and heavenly rewards, and the belief that wealth was a providential gift from God were commonly expressed in individuals' accounts of their working lives. Moreover, whilst church-going was an important public act of devotion which was tied strongly to credit, work itself could be an act of piety, if practised appropriately. This chapter also shows the ways in which individuals responded to economic upheaval and uncertainty: mitigating risk where they could, and when risk was deemed uncontrollable, turning to a largely positive belief in God's interposition. The section on work and business concludes with a study of religion and work in chapter 6. This chapter suggests that though work could severely impede individuals' religious practice, work and faith were not always incompatible. Some workplaces were sites for the active promotion of religion, whilst individual workers managed to combine their labours with spiritual mediation, prayer or religious discussion. Moreover, though balancing the competing demands of work and religious practice was difficult, it may have been easier in towns than elsewhere, since urban residents found an increasing range of communal religious activities available to them at a variety of times and close by. The last section in the book turns to the household as key site of lay pious practice. Chapter 7 examines the importance of private and family worship within the household, focussing in particular on the significance of daily prayer, reading and study of religious texts, in addition to other activities that were part of household and individual domestic routines. Chapter 8 demonstrates how an examination of religious objects that were kept, and sometimes also made, in the home offers important insights into domestic lay piety that indicate the continuing importance of faith in the everyday lives of individuals and families. Finally, chapter 9 explores religious sociability within the home, suggesting that urban life arguably provided more opportunities for close and regular association with coreligionists. Combining religious and social practice was viewed by the laity of a variety of denominations as a way to sustain one's faith and provide edification that complemented and enhanced formal public worship, and provides yet more evidence of the centrality of the home to lay religious practice, and the continued vitality of urban religious life throughout the 'long' eighteenth century.
Exploitation Route We hope that the project will be taken up by scholars in allied fields, as outlined in our original bid. We also expect the schools materials to be useful for teachers.
Sectors Education,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
 
Description To provide the basis for teaching and learning materials, outlined in the 'engagement' section of this submission.
First Year Of Impact 2022
Sector Education
 
Description Creation of schools materials linked to Faith in the Town Project 
Form Of Engagement Activity Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Schools
Results and Impact Creation of online teaching and learning resources for KS2-3 children linked to the Religious Studies national curriculum.
The project team working with R.E. teacher Dr Kate Christopher and graphic designer David Caunce to produce a range of free resources for schools. The lessons are based on the amazing archive documents and objects we have found during the project, including maps, needlework samplers and the letters and diaries of children living in Northern England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Our aim is to get students asking what was it like to grow up, live and work in a growing, industrial town in this period? How did these upheavals affect daily life, and how did it change how people thought about the world and their place within it? Did it change how they thought about faith? These questions tie in to broader themes like the economic and social impact of industrialisation and the growing diversity of religious beliefs and churches in the eighteenth century.
The resources are designed for Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 pupils, and arranged around seven lessons. Each lesson contains background notes and ideas for activities, and a resource pack for pupils with images and documents. They can be taught in school or at home. The themes in the lessons are broad and flexible, and work across subject areas in R.E., History and Geography.
The resources can be found here: https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/research/projects/current/faith-in-the-town/
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022,2023
URL https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/research/projects/current/faith-in-the-town/