page_title: Parish (Church of England)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Parish (Church of England) / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Beating the Bounds Marker Stone, Charminster On the edge of Yalbury Park just north of Dorchester.
context_page_description: The parish with its local parish church is the basic unit of the Church of England. The parish within the Church of England structure has its roots in the Roman Catholic Church and survived the English Reformation largely untouched. Church of England parishes are currently each within one of 44 dioceses divided between the provinces of Canterbury, with thirty dioceses and York with fourteen. There are around 12,500 Church of England parishes in all.
  Each parish is administered by a parish priest who may be assisted in pastoral duties by a curate or curates, who are also ordained but not the parish priest. There are wide variations in the size of parishes and church-going populations. A parish priest may have responsibility for one parish or for two or more and some are part of a team ministry. By extension the term parish refers not only to the territorial unit but to the people of its community or congregation.
context_section_description: The introduction of Christianity and its development under Æthelberht of Kent (c. 560–616) required an organisational unit for ecclesiastical administrative purposes. From the Greek paroikia, the dwellingplace of the priest, eighth Archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus (c. 602–690) applied the ecclesiastical term parish to the Anglo-Saxon township format where already in existence. Generally the township and parish coincided but in the North some townships may have been combined and in the South, where populations were bigger, two or more parishes might be made out of one township. Townships not included in a parish were extra-parochial. There may have been much less uniformity than these general guidelines imply. Extended since the 973-975 reign of Edgar (c. 943–975) the process of parish organisation appears to have been completed during the fifty-year reign of Edward III (1312–1377).
  In general Church of England parishes owe their origin at first to the establishment of a minster church by a body of clergy. That usually large parish was soon further subdivided into the smaller parishes described above, each associated with an estate church founded by Anglo-Saxon or, later, Norman landowners using the minster foundation template and according to the authority of their nobles.  Having provided the land and usually the church building the landowner reserved the right, by ownership of the advowson, to select a parish priest subject to the bishop's approval.
  One parish may have been situated in different counties or hundreds and in many cases parishes contained in addition to its principal district several outlying portions, usually described as 'detached', intermixed with the lands in other parishes. 
  A present-day parish boundary may even correspond to that of an Anglo-Saxon estate of more than one thousand years ago but is more likely to date from the 17th century when boundaries were rearranged to fit a parish with a landowner's responsibilities and thereby avoiding potential further dispute.
  Some sparsely populated areas of England were outside any parish, i.e. extra-parochial until the 19th century, though a very few technical exceptions remain (most notably royal peculiars). The term unparished area, used for most urban areas, relates to civil parishes and not ecclesiastical parishes.
caption: A parish boundary marker commemorating the ancient custom of Beating the bounds
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