Vicar (Anglicanism)

Parish churches in England originated as the personal property of (predominantly lay) patrons, who had the right to appoint and dismiss the parish priest, to receive an entrance fee on appointment, and to charge an annual rent thereafter.[2] By the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century, almost all these rights were extinguished for lay patrons, who were able to retain the sole residual power to nominate the rector to a benefice, and many lay notables thereupon gave up parish churches into the ownership of religious houses, which were less inhibited by canon law from extracting fees and rents from rectors, and which could moreover petition for exemption from most such laws by papal dispensation.[3] Around 40% of rectories in England passed into monastic possession. Initially it had not been unusual for religious houses in possession of rectories also to assume the capability to collect tithe and glebe income for themselves, but this practice was banned by the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215. Thereafter, over the medieval period, monasteries and priories continually sought papal exemption from the Council's decrees, so as to be able to appropriate the income of rectoral benefices to their own use. However, from the 13th century onwards, English diocesan bishops successfully established the principle that only the glebe and greater tithes could be appropriated by monastic patrons in this manner; sufficient lesser tithes had to remain within the parochial benefice to ensure a competent living, the incumbent of which thenceforward carried the title of vicar.[4] By 1535, of 8,838 rectories in England, 3,307 had thus been appropriated with vicarages,[5] but at this late date, a small sub-set of vicarages in monastic ownership were not being served by beneficed clergy at all. In almost all such instances, these were parish churches in the ownership of houses of Augustinian or Premonstratensian canons, orders whose rules required them to provide parochial worship within their conventual churches, for the most part as chapels of ease of a more distant parish church. From the mid-14th century onwards, the canons were able to exploit their hybrid status to justify petitions for papal privileges of appropriation, allowing them to fill vicarages in their possession either from among their own number, or from secular stipendiary priests removable at will, arrangements which corresponded to those for their chapels of ease.[6]

Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the rectors and vicars of parishes formerly in monastic possession continued in post, their sources of income unaffected. Rectors received both greater and lesser tithes, vicars the lesser tithes only. Lay grantees of monastic lands also took over the monasteries' rights of nomination to monastic rectories. For monastic vicarages, the right to the greater tithes and to nominate a vicar also generally passed into the hands of lay owners, known as impropriators. Perpetual curates were appointed to the unbeneficed parishes and chapels of ease formerly in the possession of the canons. These received no tithe income, and originally impropriators were required to provide a fixed stipend, although generally the function of paymaster was eventually taken over by the diocese. If, in later years, a newly created parish was carved out of a larger rectoral or vicarial parish, the incumbent would be legally a perpetual curate, but would commonly be styled "vicar" in common use.

An Act of Parliament of 1868 permitted perpetual curates to style themselves vicars and the term parson rapidly lost popularity. The conjunction of this change with near-contemporaneous church reforms aimed at reducing the disparities of income among clergy meant that the distinction between the grades of clergy became progressively less relevant and remarked upon. Popularly, any member of the clergy is often referred to as a vicar, even when they do not legally hold such a post. In the past a similar situation led to all clergy being popularly referred to as parsons.

Most parishes in England and Wales retain the historical title for their parish priest—rector or vicar—with vicar being more common in the urban areas, because of an expansion of new parishes being created in the Victorian years, and the incumbents being styled 'vicar' after 1868. The distinction between the titles is now only historical. In the late 20th century, a shortage of clergy and the disparity of workload between parish clergy led to the development of a number of new forms of parish ministry.

In Wales prior to Disestablishment, most parishes in the southern dioceses (St. Davids and Llandaff) were vicarages subject to lay patronage, whereas in the north rectors predominated, largely nominated by the bishops of Bangor and St Asaph.

In many other Anglican Communion provinces, the distinction between a vicar and a rector is different. In the Church of Ireland and the Scottish Episcopal Church, most parish priests are rectors. In the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, a vicar is a priest in charge of a mission, meaning a congregation supported by its diocese instead of being a self-sustaining parish which is headed by a rector.

In early 17th-century Ulster every church had a vicar and a parson instead of a co-arb and an erenagh. The vicar, like the co-arb, was always in orders. He said the mass ('serveth the cure') and received a share of the tithes. The parson, like the erenagh, had a major portion of the tithes, maintained the church and provided hospitality.

As he was not usually in clerical orders, his responsibilities were mainly temporal. However, there were differences in the divisions of the tithes between various dioceses in Tyrone. In the Diocese of Clogher, the vicar and the parson shared the tithes equally between them; in the Diocese of Derry, church income came from both tithes and the rental of church lands ('temporalities'). The vicar and the parson each received one third of the tithes and paid an annual tribute to the bishop.

In places where there was no parson, the erenagh continued to receive two thirds of the income in kind from the church lands, and delivered the balance, after defraying maintenance, to the bishop in cash as a yearly rental. In other places, the parson, the vicar and the erenagh shared the costs of church repairs equally between them. In the Diocese of Armagh the parson received two-thirds of the tithes and the vicar one third. The archbishop and the erenagh impropriated no part thereof, presumably because they received the entire income from the termon lands. The division of responsibilities between vicar and parson seems to derive from a much earlier precedent established in the old Celtic Church of St Columcille.

The image of the parish vicar is a popular one in British culture. A popular British television series on BBC depicts a fictional woman vicar humorously in The Vicar of Dibley, and the story of The Vicar of Bray appears as a song and otherwise. Rev., another popular sitcom on BBC Two, explores the struggles of a former rural vicar as he copes with the demands of running an inner-city church. The Vicar is a character in the comedy ‘’Keeping Up Appearances’’.

• Anglican ministry
• Church of England § Structure