Perpetual curate
There were two particularly notable effects of this early 19th-century practice: compared to rectors and vicars of ancient parishes, perpetual curates tended to be of uncertain social standing; and also be much less likely to be adequately paid.
However, following the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century, parochial cure of souls in England became the freehold property[1] of the incumbent; whose income in the forms of tithe and glebe constituted a benefice, and who then carried the title of rector.
[3] Initially it had not been unusual for religious houses in possession of rectories also to assume the capability to collect tithe and glebe income for themselves, but this practice was banned by the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215.
From the mid-fourteenth century onwards these canons were often able to extend this hybrid status to include vicarages in their possession, petitioning for papal privileges of appropriation allowing them to take the full tithe, while serving the cure either from among their own number or from secular stipendiary priests removable at will; arrangements which corresponded to those for their chapels of ease.
[9] Over the years, the arrangement by which the impropriator acted as both patron and paymaster of a perpetual curacy proved liable to break down, especially as the original cash stipend could be reduced to a small part of its former value through inflation.
[12] One consequence of the Napoleonic Wars was a series of acts of Parliament giving bishops powers to compel absent incumbents to reside in their parishes; but it was acknowledged that this would create hardship amongst displaced assistant curates deprived of access to the more attractive cures.
Even with former ancient chapelries upgraded to perpetual curacies, there was still a gross under-provision of churches and parishes in industrial towns and cities; and a corresponding over-provision in many rural areas of the South East.
A rapid expansion of urban parish numbers was required, and it was found that the status of perpetual curate (following its re-classification as a 'benefice') provided a readily available legal template for the creation of new incumbencies.
[14] Further legislation abolished sinecure benefices and drastically restricted the permissible occasions for pluralism,[15] compelling the decoupling of long-standing joint livings (including perpetual curacies) which did not qualify as exemptions.
In simple terms, every incumbent was either a rector, vicar or perpetual curate; but while this was a fully accurate summary of the relevant law within the Church of England,[17] the creation of perpetual curacies had been an ad-hoc expedient at the dissolution of the monasteries, to provide ministers for existing worshipping congregations with the minimum of disturbance to long-standing spiritual and temporal property rights, other than the transfer of those rights out of the hands of the monks and into those of lay tenants and grantees.
The expedient remained for three centuries a relatively rare exception to the general rule of parochial provision; not least because (unlike rectories or vicarages) perpetual curacies had no corporate personality, and hence endowments could not be settled on the office rather than the individual.
[20] This could be a two-edged sword however for those perpetual curacies, a substantial number, which had by this date become effectively annexed to a neighbouring vicarage or rectory, but which the Pluralities Acts required now to be served as an independent cure; often initially with wholly inadequate endowment and no parsonage house.
Although thereafter a "beneficed clergyman",[8] unlike a rector or vicar, a nineteenth or twentieth century perpetual curate was neither instituted to receive the spiritualities nor inducted into the temporalities, admission by episcopal licence rendered both ceremonies unnecessary.
