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.ÿþministers were allowed to collect fees.In 1748, revision of the laws, for example, specified the fol-lowing fees: marriage by license, 20s; marriage by banns, 5s; publishing banns of marriage, 1s 6d; andfuneral sermon, 40s.Hening, 6:84.The General Assembly, not parish vestries, set the rates, and theparsons collected the sums directly from the persons involved.Given the disparate circumstancesof Virginia s parishes, fees were a source of varying and fluctuating income.No record survives ofthe fees collected by any parson in any given year or years.In1772 Thomas Jefferson paid William Coutts £5 for officiating at his marriage to Martha WaylesSkelton.James A.Bear Jr.and Lucia C.Stanton, eds., Jefferson s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with LegalRecords and Miscellany, 1767 1826, 2 vols., Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Second Series (Princeton, N.J.,1997),1:285.George Washington in1773 paid Lee Massey £2.5.3 for his attendance at the funeral ofMartha Washington s daughter.Abbot et al., Washington Papers, Colonial, 9:373.On rare occasions, ves-tries made presents to their parson.St.Peter s Parish vestry in 1742 awarded £10 to David Mossom.St.Peter s Parish Vestry Book, 29 September 1742, 273.15.Bruce, Institutional History, 1:164.16.Hening, 2:30; Bruce, Institutional History, 1:165.17.Bruce, Institutional History, 1:165.18.Hening, 3:152 53.19.JHB, 30 April 1695, 3:16.20.Ibid., 30 October 1696, 99; Bruce, Institutional History.1:168.21.Canon law forbade manual labor by Anglican clergymen.Certainly some perhaps manyparsons actively managed their glebe farms while leaving the manual work to hired servants andslaves.Others likely employed overseers.Joan Gundersen and Gwen Gampel offer evidence of glebemanagement by parsons wives: Robert Carter.thought nothing of asking the Rev.ThomasSmith at church whether Mrs.Smith had 450 bushels of wheat for sale. Joan R.Gundersen andGwen Victor Gampel, Married Women s Legal Status in Eighteenth-Century New York and Vir-ginia, WMQ 3d ser., 39 (1987): 131.22.Hening, 4:204 8.23.Ibid., 6:89.Kingston Parish in 1759, for example, ordered That a well built Quarter TwentyFeet long & sixteen feet wide; and a corn House Sixteen Feet long & twelve Feet wide be built at theGlebe. C.G.Chamberlayne, ed., The Vestry Book of Kingston Parish, Mathews County, Virginia (until May 1,1791, Gloucester County) (Richmond, Va., 1929), 5 November 1759, 69.24.Of the thirty-seven parishes for which some portion of eighteenth-century vestry minutessurvive, all but three provided glebes and mansion houses during most of the period covered in therecords.And for the three others (Tillotson, Fairfax, and Elizabeth River), the accounts are ambigu-ous.The extant vestry minutes for Tillotson Parish are too sparse to draw any conclusion.TillotsonParish Vestry Minutes, 1771 96.While several efforts of the Fairfax vestry to purchase a glebe fellthrough, the vestry in 1773 authorized the construction of a handsome brick mansion house.FairfaxParish Vestry Minutes, 24 July 1769, 27 May 1770, 17 September 1770, 25 November 1771, 15 March1773.Following sale of an outworn glebe in 1739, Elizabeth River Parish paid its parson a bonus.By1749 the parish was also hiring out its slaves Davy, Soll, Ishmaell, Sarah, and Nell and in thefollowing year it undertook the construction of a mansion house presumably within the town ofNorfolk.Elizabeth River Vestry Minutes, 1749 61, 3, 5, 7.There were occasions elsewhere betweenthe sale of old glebe land and the purchase of new, or early in the formation of a new parish, whenthe parsons were without a glebe and were paid a compensatory sum.But these were clearly excep-tions to the rule.The norm was a glebe fitted out in appropriate fashion.Nineteen other parisheswhose vestry books have long since disappeared received assembly permission during the eighteenthcentury to dispose of glebe lands.At the least, this establishes the fact that the majority of all par-ishes possessed glebes during a portion, if not the entirety, of their existence.Further, there is everyreason to think that what was true of the fifty-six parishes thus identified was true of the remainingeighteenth-century parishes.25.Christ Church (Lancaster), Hungars, and Lunenburg Parishes possessed glebes of 1,000 acresor more.Otto Lohrenz, An Analysis of the Life and Career of the Reverend David Currie, LancasterCounty, Virginia, 1743 1791, AEH 61 (1992): 143; Hening, 5:390 91, 8:204.Cumberland and Antrim.352 notes to pages 50 51
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