[From Home Office File HO 98/78]

Bishop Ward to Henry Goulburn 12 March 1835

Bishops Court, Isle of Mann March 12 1835

My dear Sir

As Home Minister and one of the Commissioners of Church Reform and, I am sure, a sincere friend of the Church, I beg leave to lay before you the state of the Clergy in this Diocese.

The Lords of the Isle having possessed a third of the Tithes of fourteen out of the seventeen parishes, - which has always kept the parochial Clergy in a state of poverty - sold to the Crown all that they had not previously sold to private persons to the amount of about £700.

There are three of the most extensive & populous livings in the Island - Rushen. Malew, and Lezayre - from which the Vicars do not derive one fraction of Tithe - or income of any kind from the Parish. In Malew there are 5000 souls, the parish 7 miles long, and nearly as many broad - of which the Crown carries off every fraction of Tithe great and small, allowing but about £26 a year as pension to the Vicar. The Vicar of Rushen has twelve children, a poor house, and only one acre of glebe -the Vicar of Malew eight children and seven acres of Glebe. So that had not Bp. Barrow realized a small property in the Island just after the restoration, which produces about three hundred a year, & which divided among the Vicars together with other benefactions equalizes their incomes at about £80 a year, some years to £90, the Clergy could not have existed, nor the Churches been served.

A restoration of these impropriate tithes to the poor Vicars in their labourious charges is what I most earnestly crave.

It is the only property of the kind I presume to say in the possession of the Crown - and I am sure the present Ministers of the Crown will not be disposed to retain them at the expence of a labourious & impoverished Clergy. The grant of this boon on the part of the Crown will be setting a noble example to the holders of impropriate tithe all over the Kingdom - an example & argument which cannot well be resisted.

The late Government was disposed to grant these Tithes as an endowment for our College which would in some measure have answered the purpose of the Church as it would have freed the rents of another estate of Bp. Barrow's at present applied to the College - & would have left them for the supply of the Clergy. But the Tithes would be more appropriately applied if conferred directly on the Church.

May God guide and prosper you in this and all your measures for the good of the Church & State.

Ever yours My dear Sir most fathfully W Sodor & Mann

Notes

Henry Goulburn - Home Secretary 1834-35

"Our College" is King William's College.