Good and Proper Men

Publisher Description

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dioceses were large and bishops few and far between. The majority of their number were high churchmen who had strong connections with the aristocracy. They necessarily spent a good deal of their time in London attending to Parliamentary business. Bishops such as Kaye of Lincoln, Blomfield of Chester, and Monk of Gloucester were prominent members of the Ecclesiastical Commission whose concerns further kept them from their dioceses. Additionally, Kaye and Monk came from academic backgrounds. The result of all this was that bishops were rarely seen in their dioceses except perhaps for the odd visitation or round of perfunctory confirmation services and had little time to grapple with the problems of industrial society. Prompted by reforming figures such as John Bird Sumner and Samuel Wilberforce in the early Victorian years, some attempts were made to reform the role and image of the episcopate. No general widespread change was observ