This lack of consistency is quite natural and explicable. In the first place, local organization as it existed at this time was the residuum of several successive systems of custom and law, and contained survivals from the nomenclature of each. "Township" or "town" was a term belonging to a far-distant Anglo-Saxon past, and had been long obscured by the later institution of tithings and the still later manors. Secondly, the union of church and state, the mutual interpenetration of the ecclesiastical and civil systems, served to complicate the matter still further by confusing the word "parish" with terms which applied in a non-ecclesiastical sense to the same little group of people and the same tract of land.
Of all these terms, three—manor, town (or township), and parish—are the most usual. A manor was a group of inhabitants and the land they occupied (usually a single village), so far as these people were connected with and dependent upon a certain "lord of the manor," who had various rights over the people and their lands. Aside from his position as landlord, the most important of these rights was that of holding a court-baron and a court-leet and view of frank-pledge.
Various powers and activities had long gathered around these petty courts, but the whole group of manorial rights and duties of jurisdiction and administration was, in 1600, fast becoming an obsolete and insignificant institution. Yet the terms connected with it had worked themselves inseparably into local life. Courts-baron were held in but few places, and almost solely for the purpose of making land transfers; courts-leet were held only infrequently and irregularly, many lords of manors who possessed the right exercising it but once a year or less frequently; the whole system of frank-pledges had long gone into desuetude. Grants of manorial powers, "court-leet, court- baron, and view of frank-pledge," were made in several of the colonial charters; but these institutions showed little inclination to renew in America a vitality they had lost in England.
The English word town or township is the nearest equivalent to the Latin word villa or vill, which is a generic term used in the records, without very exact connotation, for one of those country villages in which the rural population of England was distributed, including the land connected with the village. Town and township meant the same thing, except when the former was applied to an urban community. Over and over again to the same locality first the term "town" and then "township" is applied; [Footnote: West Riding Sessions Rolls, passim.] and a careful search fails to find any distinction drawn between them. In the north of England the term town or township seems to have been especially familiar and frequently used as a subdivision of some of the other local units; [Footnote: Fishwick, Hist of Preston, 2.] and it was in common use everywhere as a synonym for manor or parish.
While all these terms meet us frequently in the records of the seventeenth century, the term parish, notwithstanding its ecclesiastical connotation, was, in fact, superseding all others as the most usual appellation to give to the unit of local government. Terms strictly applicable to other phases of the local organization were apt to be applied to the parish. For instance, we hear of the "constable of a parish," [Footnote: Archaeological Review, IV, 344.] although that officer was an official of a township; proprietors of "free" and "copy- hold" lands of a parish are spoken of, though those terms properly applied only to a manor; the same is true of an order for a court to be held every three weeks in certain parishes, [Footnote: Saalkeld, Reports, III., 98.] the term "court" being properly manorial. These expressions show the tendency of the time to substitute the term "parish" for more exact terms applied to the local governing body in its different aspects. It was the "parish" that was usually sued, taxed, and fined, that received property by bequest, and that was ordered by the government to perform various duties.
Our colonial forefathers, according to the locality of their origin or the particular phase of local government that applied to their new conditions, used sometimes one term, sometimes another; but in this study of English conditions the parish and the officers whose sphere of action was the parish may be taken to include all that is necessary, with the understanding that our use of the term parish is broad, in conformity with seventeenth-century usage.
The knowledge of the boundaries of the parish was kept alive by the traditional ceremony of perambulation. From time to time, usually once a year, a procession was formed which went the rounds of the outer boundary, stopping from time to time at well-marked points for various commemorative ceremonies. In pre-Reformation times the ceremony was a religious one, the priest leading and the parishioners following with cross, banners, bells, lights, and sacred emblems, successive points being blessed and sprinkled with holy water. [Footnote: Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, II, 133,134.] When religious processions were forbidden at the Reformation, this ceremony came under the condemnation of the law; and Queen Elizabeth found it necessary, in order to perpetuate the useful civil element in it, to direct by proclamation a certain form of renewal of the processions. "The people should, once in the year, at the time appointed, with the curate and substantial men of the parish, walk about the parish, and at their return to the church make their common prayers. And the curate in the said perambulation was, at certain convenient places, to admonish the people to give thanks to God in the beholding of His benefits, and for the increase and abundance of his fruits upon the face of the earth, with the saying of the one hundred and third Psalm." [Footnote: Gibson, Codex, 213.]
The custom survived in this or other forms, [Footnote: Shillingfleet, Ecclesiastical Cases, I., 244.] because there were no surveyed boundaries, and reliance had to be placed on marked stones and trees, hill-tops, watercourses, and such indications, interpreted and defined only by human tradition. In some remote districts it is still preserved. From the practice of performing the perambulation in rogation week it was often called "the rogation," and conversely rogation days were sometimes called "gang-days" [Footnote: Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, II., 133.] In the seventeenth century, as the men who afterwards practised it in New England and Virginia must have remembered, it was still a festivity. In the church-wardens' accounts for the parish of St. Clements, Ipswich, in 1638, is the item "ffor bread and beare given to the boyes when they wente the boundes of the parishe, 12s." [Footnote: East Anglian, IV., 2d series, 5.] Boys were taken as those whose life and memory would naturally be the longest, and the poorer boys were often especially included as a treat. In Chelsea, Middlesex, at a somewhat later time, a more official feast is suggested by the entry: "Spent at the perambulation dinner, 3 pounds 10s." [Footnote: Toulmin Smith, The Parish, 473.]
No material obstacle was allowed to interfere with the progress of the perambulators. They could, by law, enter all dwellings on the boundary and pass through and even break down all enclosures which lay across it. Private persons whose houses lay in the line of march of the perambulators sometimes provided food and drink for them, and this became so customary that efforts were made, though unsuccessfully, to enforce this custom by law. [Footnote: Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, II., 133.]
In describing the officers of the parish we pass from the class of country gentry, from which the sheriffs, coroners, justices of the peace, and high-constables were drawn, to a group of lower social rank. In the towns they may have been of somewhat higher or at least more varied status, but in the rural parishes the officers were of very humble position. In the invaluable description of England written by Harrison in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, from which we have had occasion to quote so frequently, the author says: "The fourth and last sort of people in England are day-labourers, poor husbandmen, and some retailers (which have no free land), copyholders, and all artificers, as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, brickmakers, masons, etc. … This fourth and last sort of people therefore have neither voice nor authority in the commonwealth, but are to be ruled and not to rule others: yet they are not altogether neglected, for … in villages they are commonly made churchwardens, sidesmen, aleconners, now and then constables, and many times enjoy the name of head boroughs." [Footnote: Harrison, Description of England (Camelot ed.), 13.]