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Updated: June 21, 2025
The demagogues throughout a country, the orators of town-councils and vestries, and the lecturers of mechanics' institutes present, doubtless in most cases unconsciously, the ready and fit machinery for the party or the individual that aspires to establish a tyranny. Duly graduating in corruption, the leaders of the mob become the oppressors of the people.
The hundreds and tythings were represented by their own officers, and had their hundred-courts and courts-leet, which exercised a trifling criminal jurisdiction, but were chiefly assemblies answering to our grand juries and parish vestries. All householders were members of them, and every man thus became responsible for keeping the king's peace."
I am satisfied beyond a doubt, that the project of turning a great empire into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and of governing it in the spirit of a parochial administration, is senseless and absurd, in any mode or with any qualifications.
I am sure much might be done with a spade, here and there, in the neighbourhood of old Cromwell House. Accursed be the obduracy of vestries! Be not I, but they, blamed for any error, obscurity or omission in my brief excursus. The period of 1880 and of the two successive years should ever be memorable, for it marks a great change in the constitution of English society.
It is then that he is an absolute human being and a genuine individual. The debates of schoolboys, their discussions what they shall do, and how it shall be done, are anticipations of the scenes of maturer life. They are the dawnings of committees, and vestries, and hundred-courts, and ward-motes, and folk-motes, and parliaments.
The parish institutions introduced from England included educational beginnings; every minister had a school, and it was the duty of the vestry to see that all poor children could read and write. The county courts supervised the vestries and held a yearly "orphans' court," which looked after the material and educational welfare of all orphans.
In the country they were kept up only 'in a few old-fashioned town churches. How much they had dwindled away in London becomes evident from a comparison between the list of services enumerated in the 'Pietas Londinensis, published in 1714, and a book entitled 'London Parishes: an Account of the Churches, Vicars, Vestries, &c., published in 1824.
Henslow it was would come to the vestries and fine 'em, but I don't believe he did: for one thing I fancy he'd read the wrong lesson for the first time in his life, and knew it.
The dark vestries and registries into which I have peeped, and the little hemmed-in churchyards that have echoed to my feet, have left impressions on my memory as distinct and quaint as any it has in that way received. In all those dusty registers that the worms are eating, there is not a line but made some hearts leap, or some tears flow, in their day.
It has been universal, ready and potential in every place, so that the happy country village and field alike has been all grass, with mere exceptions. And all this the grass does in spite of the ill-treatment it suffers at the hands, and mowing-machines, and vestries of man. His ideal of grass is growth that shall never be allowed to come to its flower and completion. He proves this in his lawns.
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