CHURCH LOSES INTEREST IN HOGS

Evening Star, Issue 22975, 4 June 1938, Page 21

CHURCH LOSES INTEREST IN HOGS

An historic custom will disappear, working a change in the position of the Anglican clergyman of country parishes as the result of a decision reached by the Church Assembly, which is the governing body of that denomination, says the London correspondent of the ‘ Christian Science Monitor.’ It is a decision which means that the clergy concerned are no longer to have any interest in such enterprises as that of fattening hogs. , The decision is eventually to transfer “all glebe land belonging to parochial benefices” to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, the clergy affected to be compensated by money grants from that church body. This decision was taken on February 10 at a meeting held in London, the Most I?ev. Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, presiding. Glebe land consists of a farm or farms managed by the clergyman of a parish, any profits therefrom forming part of his emoluments. The system of of great antiquity, but it is not found to work well under

modern conditions. The total acreage so held has already been reduced from 659,000 acres to 237,000, and the object aimed at by the Assembly is to make it possible for those representing the church to prevent further alienations. Dr A. W. Pickard (Cambridge), in the course of the debate, referred to the rarity of instances where a modern clergyman even knows how to fatten a hog. “ Very different,” he commented, “ from the old days when the Tithe was paid in kind and the tenth pig which went through the wicket was always afflicted by some unaccountable leanness.” This reference was to a system now abolished which was contemporaneous with the institution of glebe farms. It was one whereby the clergyman of a parish was entitled to every tenth hog and every tenth sheaf of corn taken by his parishioners into their homesteads. The Assembly’s decision, the archbishop said, meant taking a great step and leaving behind what was once a characteristic feature of the clergy of the Church of England.