Queen Anne’s Bounty

Purpose of the Bounty

Queen Anne’s Bounty for the Augmentation of the Maintenance of Poor Clergy was established in 1704 with the aim of tackling the most extreme examples of poverty among the beneficed clergy of the Church of England. The Church of England leadership wanted to strengthen their resources in response to the challenges of nonconformism and Roman Catholicism. It was widely felt that clerical poverty was a significant impediment to the church’s activity and therefore aimed to:

give the clergy increased social respect, and therefore improve their means of doing good;
prevent clergy having to take on other work, whether agricultural or educational, to supplement their earnings;
prevent clergy living in parishes away from their responsibilities;
prevent clergy holding multiple livings.

Queen Anne’s Bounty is often referred to as Q.A.B. The Deopham vicars benefited from this fund (as is mentioned in many of the Directories and other references to clergy income) as a result of a gift by the Rev Henry Rix and the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury.

Queen Anne painted by Michael Dahl, 1705

In 1703, Queen Anne ordered that the poorest livings should be exempted from having to pay tithe¹ taxes to the government, and then in 1707/8 they were further exempted from another tax called “first-fruits”². The definition of “the poorest livings” for these purposes was those that were worth less than £50, initially determined according to an out of date 1535 valuation known as the King’s Books (K.B.). Deopham was valued at £5. 7s. 11d. More significantly, the payments made by the clergy not exempted would be used to further increase the income of poor clergy, whereas since the time of Henry VIII they had been claimed by the crown.

The governors of the Queen Anne’s Bounty became the recipients of a large income stream from the taxes paid by the better off clergy and additionally from gifts – most controversially from the Colston family in Bristol (who had made much of their wealth from slave trading; it was Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol that was famously toppled in 2020).

The awards to poor clergy were known as augmentations, the first of which were made in 1714. It took 10 years from inception until the first awards were made because on the one hand the collection of the tithes and first-fruits had become very haphazard resulting in many arrears, and then on the other hand various monarchs had mad commitments against this income stream which took a long time to unravel.
These augmentations were in the form of capital sums to purchase land which in turn would give the poorer clergy an improved income. From 1777 the fund could make loans and from 1803 it could make contributions to the building and repair of vicarages.
Despite success in alleviating much of the problem of clergy poverty, the fund’s income exceeded its distributions. As a result it made a number of investments which from a financial point of view were generally successful. During the years 1708-93, almost 30% of the fund’s income was received from investments linked to the South Sea Company. The South Sea Company was designed from the outset as a slaving company. It shipped enslaved human beings across the Atlantic in terrible conditions. The company operated as a slaver for several decades during the first half of the 18th century. Its investors were well aware of this. The practice of slavery was abolished in 1833, with the Slavery Abolition Act. This made both the purchase and ownership of enslaved people illegal in the British Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape.
The investments in the South Sea Company had been disposed of by 1831. The administration of the Queen Anne’s Bounty was merged into the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1948 with the creation of a new body called the Church Commissioners.

The Deopham Augmentation

Gifts to the Q.A.B. funds (benefactions) were often matched to a specific parish. To this end, Rev. Henry Rix made a donation for the benefit of the Deopham parish. This is ironic since one of the fund’s objectives was to stop the need for clergy to take on multiple parishes, and to live outside a parish for which they were responsible: Rev. Rix lived in Colton for which he was the parish priest as well as being the incumbent of Deopham.
According to the memorandum written at the front of the church register, Rev. Henry Rix first made his proposal to the Governors of Queen Ann’s Bounty in July 1716.
This proposal is recorded in the QAB ledger (the blanked-out sections were added later – see below):-

In his memorandum at the front of the Deopham Parish Register, the Rev. Henry Rix shows the full breakdown of the £200 donation:-

			£	s	p
Dean & Chapter of Canterbury	George Stanhope	Dean	10	0	0
	John Max de L’Anglo	Prebend	5	0	0
	George Thorp	Prebend	5	0	0
	Charles Elstob	Prebend	5	0	0
	Thomas Green	Prebend	5	0	0
	Henry James	Prebend	5	0	0
	Ralph Blomer	Prebend	5	0	0
	Elias Sydall	Prebend	5	0	0
	William Whitfield	Prebend	5	0	0
	Edward Tennison	Prebend	5	0	0
	Edward Finch	Prebend	5	0	0
	John Grandorge	Prebend	5	0	0
	William Higdon	Prebend	5	0	0
	Sub total		70	0	0
Colton	Captain John Brown		5	0	0
Norwich	Dr Thomas Tanner	Chancellor of Norwich	2	2	0
	John More	Principal Register	1	1	6
	Sub total		78	3	6
	Henry Rix	Vicar	121	16	6
Grand total			200	0	0

George Stanhope
by
Michael Vandergucht
line engraving,
published 1706
National Portrait Gallery, D31458

The following receipt in the QAB ledger approximates to Henry Rix’s statement that the funds were handed over to the QAB in Candlemas 1718:-

The 1716 ledger entry was then updated (areas outlined below) on 29^th December 1718 to indicate that augmentation had taken place:-

A note has also been added that the value of the living was £19:9:10 per annum. This was well within the qualifying threshold of less than £50 to receive QAB augmentations.³

The reason that the Rev. Henry Rix would have made a donation to the Bounty rather than making it directly to the parish is that the Bounty doubled all benefactions up to the value of £200. This means that when he made a donation of £200, the parish was able to buy land to the value of £400.³ At the time Deopham benefited from this benefaction, the Bounty made all augmentations in the form of land purchases from which the incumbent would be the direct beneficiary.⁴

The Shipdham Land

The Rev. John Wells made up a table of his sources of income in 1737. In this he complains about the problems of maintaining a cottage on the Shipdham land, and proposes that it be demolished.

An 1820 terrier held by Deopham Church shows approximately 23 acres made up 8 plots in the occupation of the Rev. Charles Lucas Edridge:

Name of plot	Acres-Roods-Perches	Abutting upon …	1845 Tithe Ref (based on correspondence of acreage)
–	3-0-6	Land of William Butcher East upon Land of Miss Bullock & William Butcher respectively West upon the Kings Highway North, and upon Pound Green South	609
–	1-0-37	Land of John Vassar East upon Harts Lane West upon Land of Benjamin Gayton North upon Land of John Vassar and one of the Town Allotments South	732
Beestons Barn	5-0-0 “more or less”	Land of John Vassar East upon Harts Lane West upon Star Hill Lane North Land of Miss Bullock South	–
–	1-2-31	Harts Lane East the next described piece West upon Land of Miss Bullock & Benjamin Gayton respectively North and Land of Miss Bullock South	–
–	6-0-0	The last described Piece and Land of Miss Bullock East upon the Rectory Land West upon Land of Miss Bullock and upon the next described piece North and upon the Rectory Land in a small Part upon Land of Miss Bullock South	–
–	4-0-10	Land of Miss Bullock East and West upon Pound Green Lane North and upon the last described Piece South	622
Deopham Meadow	2-1-14	Land of Hatch Esq^r Land of Miss Bullock West upon Land of Hatch North upon Land of Miss Bullock South	401
–	0-2-27	Market Street Common abutting upon Land late of Booker in part and the Remainder upon Land belonging to Shipdham Church East upon the Drift-Way West upon Land of William Large North and upon Land of John Vassar South	771
Total	24-0-5 [allowing for the “more-or-less” of the 5 acres, this could well be 23 acres in total]

Another Deopham Terrier, dated 1894, shows the same list of pieces as above – albeit that some of the adjacent landowners had changed in the interim.

According to the 1836 White’s Directory, this benefaction was “all laid out in land at Shipdham”.

The 1845 Tithe Map for Shipdham shows that the Deopham lands were by then laid out in 7 plots occupied by John Butcher:

Tithe plot no	Name of plot	Acres-Roods-Perches
401	Town Pasture	2-1-14
609	Long Pightle	3-0-6
622	Four Acres	4-0-10
629	Seven Acres	1-2-31
728	Beeston Barn Field	4-2-37
732	Allotment	1-0-37
771	Allotment	0-2-27
	Total	23-3-2

Kelly’s 1908 Directory refers again to the benefaction received from lands in Shipdham.

In 1923 the Shipdham lands were sold and the proceeds invested in government 4% loan stock.

The Crockford’s entry for the Rev. William Clark shows that in 1939 the income from the Queen Anne’s Bounty was still an identifiable element of the incumbent’s remuneration.

QAB land in Deopham for other parishes

There is information here about land in Deopham used to augment the income of vicarages outside Deopham.

Footnotes

This form of Tithes were the sums that the incumbent had to pay every year (including the first year of appointment). These were collected by the Exchequer. ↩︎
First-fruits was a sum that had to be paid by an incumbent upon taking up a new appointment. These were collected by the bishops. ↩︎
Rule 4 of the Governors’ terms of operation read:
That in order to encourage Benefactions from others, and thereby the sooner to compleat the Good that was intended by our Bounty, the Governors may give the said Sum of £200 to Cures not exceeding £50 per Annum, where any Persons will give the same, or greater Sum, or Value in Lands or Tythes. ↩︎
Rule 1 of the Governors’ terms read:
That the Augmentations to be made by the said Corporation, shall be by the way of Purchase, and not by the way of Pension. ↩︎

Sources

https://www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance/church-commissioners-england/who-we-are/church-commissioners-links
Lambeth Palace Library Archives.
The Guardian newspaper of 7/6/2020 reporting the toppling of the Colton statue.
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, eds Cross and Livingstone.
Alan Savidge, The Foundation and Early Years of Queen Anne’s Bounty
Christopher Hodgson An account of the augmentation of small livings

Date	Change
17/2/24	Revised footnotes
8/12/23	1845 Shipdham Tithe and 1820 Deopham Terrier
5/9/23	QAB land in Deopham to augment Witton
22/6/23	Added sale of Shipdham lands
30/1/23	Published