25 November 2020

The Most Popular Anglican Church Names in England and Wales

A database in development is The Churchwardens' Accounts of England and Wales. It lists over 13,600 parishes for which about 2,500 have surviving churchwarden accounts, typically going back to the early 18th century, either original documents or transcripts. I've yet to explore the data, looking at that for Kirklinton, Cumberland is on my to-do list as it's where my earliest known Reid ancestor was a Churchwarden for part of the time records are available.

Below is a list of the top 20 most frequent names across England and Wales. St Mary has almost double the next most frequent. There's a lot of double counting for cases where a parish has more than one entry. That shouldn't have much impact on the relative frequency.

How do you think the church name was chosen? I'm imagining St Mary may have been favoured prior to the Reformation. Did All Saints get selected as a compromise? Were saints associated with fishing or sailing more common in coastal parishes? As the names likely go back hundreds of years the way the choice was made is likely lost to history. 

ParishCount
St Mary2100
All Saints1074
St Peter813
St Michael625
St Andrew551
St John the Baptist400
St James346
St Nicholas341
Holy Trinity307
SS Peter & Paul227
St Margaret224
St Giles163
St John147
St Bartholomew140
St Martin139
St Leonard136
St George128
St Laurence121
St Mary Magdalen117
St Helen114

It would be interesting to look at regional variation. St Mary remains the most frequent in Norfolk, which has the most parishes. In Cornwall, St Michael is the most frequent along with several that occur in no other county. 

No comments:

Post a Comment