Parish boundaries (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Saturday, January 18, 2014, 20:58 (3956 days ago) @ fozzy

Hi Fozzy,
I stand to be corrected but I think the meaning of Parish is the area around and under the jurisdiction of THE Parish Church, presumably always in a Church of England sense as far as we're concerned. Thus (apart from perhaps Private Chapels in a grand country house ?) there are no other Churches/Chapels within that Parish at the time the Church was inaugurated and it's boundaries created. Hence Westbury Parish is "under" Westbury On Severn Church of St Mary..., as you say.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=15769

Where the Parish Records quote a particular "Chapel" (why not called a "Church" I've always wondered ?) then I've always presumed this meant that particular CoE Church. Don't forget the PRs we see on this website were initially written in a record book wholly about, belonging to and housed within the relevant Church/Chapel; each Record wouldn't need to mention which Church the event occurred in as it was probably written on the book's cover and always "obvious" to the people involved.

Sometimes a PR will mention another "lesser" religion as a memo, such as "Forest of Dean Bible Christians", presumably a case of the official English Church being asked to recognise/endorse an earlier ceremony performed by one of the other religious movements that were once prominent in the Forest including up on the Plump, especially in the days before CoE Churches were built within the Forest.

Re your ancestors returning to Westbury Church from the Plump, please advise about when this was happening ?. In early times as per my original reply there were no C of E Churches within the Forest including areas such as Plump Hill, so you can understand why they might want to return to what was presumably their "home" Church. This might especially happen if they have relatives living there, perhaps older less mobile ones ?. One branch of my family, like many Foresters, moved to South Wales in the late 1800s, yet they always had their Newport-born children Baptised "back home" at Longhope Church. Again, until the early 1800s or so, the likes of Westbury and to a lesser extent Littledean and Abenhall were the main centres of population, their people living off the fertile land of the Severn vale. However this was always very hard work for little reward, so it's easy to see why younger members of a family might move up Littldean and Plump Hills towards the central Forest when the "new" mines, quarries, etc started needing more and more men.

Hope this helps, J