A significant proportion of the clergy were local men. In Leicestershire, between 1660 and 1760 just under half the parish clergy were natives of the county and another quarter came from adjacent counties. In 1721 more than half the clergy in the diocese of Durham were from County Durham and Northumberland, and most of the rest came from the neighbouring counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and Yorkshire. London, by contrast, acted as a magnet to many clergy who were the sons of small men in the Midlands and the North, possibly because there were fewer openings in these regions.
The great majority of the men who were subsequently ordained received their education in local grammar schools, which were mostly in towns, and provided easy access to education for the sons of the middling sort and, if their families could afford to maintain them, poor boys. Most masters, between 75 per cent and 85 per cent of whom were clergy, augmented their salaries by taking feepaying pupils, if possible as boarders. The sons of the urban elites and the sons of a few of the poorer sort were thus educated alongside the sons of the country gentry.
There were a wide range of anti-clerical writers, for example Hobbes, Bayle and Mandeville, who alleged that throughout history clergy had conspired to defraud and oppress the general populace, by dint of imposition and superstition keeping the population in such ignorance and fear that people willingly paid good money for the illusory services rendered by the priestly caste. It was claimed that true religion was inward, 'spiritual' and 'moral' . Underlying this was an assumption that supernatural revelation, as traditionally understood, was irrelevant or impossible, or a distortion of natural theology. As a consequence, it might be assumed that the outward signs of sacraments and religious observance were all ultimately dispensable. Although it is unlikely that the average country gentleman, like William Bulkeley, or even the average Member of Parliament or peer had read these works, the evidence of Bulkeley's diary, at least, suggests that in the 1730s such ideas had wide currency.
The social position of the clergy may also have brought them into disrepute and encouraged anti-clericalism. The clergy, as has been seen, were recruited predominantly from urban professional backgrounds and from the middling sort in general. In many instances their social and educational accomplishments may have been modest, on a par with those other objects of popular satire, the small country landowner and better-off farmer. Some may also have been conservative and unfashionable in their views and have been dogmatic and bigoted, or even confused, in the way they expressed ideas. It is not surprising that they should so often have been the object of the raillery of freethinkers and gentlemen-about-town. John Eachard in The Grounds and Occasion of the Contempt of the Clergy and Religion, first published in 1670, felt that scorn for the clergy was so widespread that it could safely be taken for granted. He believed that the clergy were held in contempt quite simply because of cthe Ignorance of some and the Poverty of others'.
Stillingfleet repeated this view in Ecclesiastical Cases Relating to the Rights and Duties of the Parochial Clergy, published in 1698, and Thomas Bray also grounded his appeal for clerical libraries on 'the contempt of the priestly office'. Whether such descriptions were true or false, it made the clergy objects of modest amusement or criticism among the more 'enlightened' groups who, if not opinion-formers for their contemporaries, have left the evidence by which historians have been influenced. Similarly the majority of the bishops were men of middling origins who were social interlopers in the small aristocratic House of Lords, although their numbers were sufficient to swing votes against the established views and interests of the aristocracy. It is not hard to see how a general attitude of anti-clericalism might develop among opinion-formers.
People's Attitudes towards the Christian Faith in Eighteenth Century
