An old book in the Registry at Windsor (without date) contains this entry:—
The curacy of Willenhall is endowed with land to the value of £35. The lords of Stow Heath have, in the last two vacancies, usurped upon the Dean and Chapter, and have nominated to it.
Shaw, the county historian, writing in 1798, after stating that whoever holds the Curacy of Willenhall must have a licence from the Dean of Wolverhampton, proceeds to say:—
There has been lately a serious contest between the Marquis of Stafford and the inhabitants about the nomination of a curate.
The gift of the living (says the same authority), or nomination of the minister or curate, is in the principal inhabitants that have lands of inheritance here. He is to be approved of by the lords of the manor, and admonished by them when he does amiss; and if he does not amend in half a year, they may turn him out and nominate another.
This practice is believed to have existed in Willenhall since the time of James I.
The power of the parishioners to elect their own clergymen, though not common, exists in various parts of the country; as at Hayfield and Chapel-in-le-Frith, both in Derbyshire; and in this more immediate locality at St. John’s Deritend, Birmingham, and at Bilston and Bloxwich, nearer still.
In London the only example where the elective principle is employed in the choice of a parish priest is presented by Clerkenwell. But wheresoever a vacancy of the kind has to be filled by popular election, with all the accessories incidental to the turmoil of Parliamentary electioneering, all the bitterness of party strife, the parish is inevitably divided into two or more factions; while the clergyman upon whom the lot eventually falls must for a long time afterwards be regarded as the nominee of one of them, rather than the spiritual director of the whole body of the people. He succeeds to his high office as a victor in a great parochial struggle
which cannot fail to leave behind it those feelings of rancour so harmful in matters sacred.
The only remedy for this state of things seems to be the voluntary surrender of their privilege by the parishioners; or the provisions of a special Act of Parliament.
As to the soundness of the general principle of a people being consulted in the choice of their spiritual pastor, there can scarcely be two opinions. But where the danger lurks in a case like that of Willenhall is the assumption of our English law—an assumption quite unwarranted in any country where freedom of conscience exists, and with us one of the penalties for maintaining an established State Church—that every parishioner is a Churchman.