FACULTIES

Types of Documents

Grants of faculties were recorded in Court Act Books (which are currently with the Diocesan registry still). The supporting documentation was filed. Initially, this might be just a single document. Now the first petition is usually followed by a citation, to be publicly available to those who might object to the faculty. A surveyor or architect may well have submitted plans, and there may be supporting specifications and sales literature, and no little correspondence. A draft faculty may herald the final grant, whose faculty goes to the parish, with a copy faculty remaining with the file. In fact, these diocesan faculties should be complemented by the copies in the parish collections. The latter have not always been kept but both series should be checked. It is also worth checking surrounding parishes as, on occasion, more than one church may be included on a faculty.

Contents

All aspects of the fabric of the church and its fittings are covered, with some also dealing with the churchyard, the parsonage house and the glebe land. In particular, the subjects include: new organs, and conversions from manual to electric; pews and choir stalls, adding, removing, rearranging; reredoses, adding and removing; screens, especially memorial ones, adding and removing; the conversion of church power and lighting from gas to electric, and the subsequent maintenance of the wiring; the addition and conversion of heating; repairs to the stonework, inside and out; the erection of war memorials, especially in 1919/20, in the form of plaques, tablets, crosses, screens, and lychgates, with the addition of names after 1939/45; other memorial tablets (names have been noted); the levelling of churchyards; changes in pattern of burial from coffins to ashes; the setting aside of portions of churchyards for the burial of cremated remains or as a garden of remembrance; burials in closed churchyards and cemeteries; the redecoration of the church; repairs of war damage, especially after 1939/45, and even the rebuilding of the church on a different site; some recent ones mention repairs necessitated by vandal damage; some recent ones also have pieces of churchyard being taken for road-widening; early ones mention glebe property repairs; reservation of grave spaces; roof and guttering repairs; provision of stained glass windows, candlesticks, lecterns, communion plate, holy tables, and clocks; reordering of the church; repairs to the bells. Faculties after c1986 are still with the Diocesan Registry.

Area Covered

Faculties are present for churches that are and have been in the diocese of Canterbury. So, included are faculties for parishes in the archdeaconry of Croydon, part of Canterbury diocese until 1970, and parishes in the archdeaconry of Tonbridge which were part of Canterbury diocese at various times in the later nineteenth century. Parishes, (including cemeteries), are ordered alphabetically irrespective. At the end of the parish sequence are a few miscellaneous faculties generally dealing with the universal removal of German and Dutch war dead after WW2.

The records are filed alphabetically by parish.

For Henre Bay, St John see Henre Bay, Christ Church

DCb/E/F/Newenden, St Peter/12 (levelling of churchyard and removal of kerbstones) was transferred to DCb/E/F/Newington next Hythe, St Nicholas/72 in 2001.

These documents are currently stored off-site and delivery will take around ½ hour; if possible, advance ordering is advisable.

The records in this catalogue are an amalgamation of three distinct series of faculties. Faculties of the eighteenth century and earlier have always been with the Diocesan archive at the cathedral; a number of nineteenth century faculties were at Lambeth Palace and came to the cathedral in the 1960s. The great bulk of late nineteenth and twentieth century faculties were removed from the Diocesan Registry in Christ Church Gate to the Plumbery in the Precincts in August 1993. These last were originally filed in three series: up to 1900, in no discernible order; 1900-1910, in no discernible order; 1910-1986, by year. The decision was taken in January 1994 to sort all these three series into parish and then chronological order, and incorporate the two earlier series, to create one series.

The lists have not yet been checked against the registers still held in the Diocesan Registry. There do seem to be some gaps. In the nineteenth century these may be explained by the fact that faculty jurisdiction was not universally established and alterations may still have been carried out without recourse to formal documentation. In the twentieth century, incumbents may more knowingly have sought to avoid the system. There is also some indication that gaps occur when the format of the actual faculty changes, in the early twentieth century from a white page to a blue bundle, then in mid-century to buff bundles, and later to folders.

Background

The granting of a faculty is essentially the ecclesiastical equivalent of giving planning permission for an addition to or removal from a church and its fittings. Faculties were originally both much broader and much narrower documents. They could generally mean in the sixteenth century any licence, permission or dispensation from a bishop for an action or to hold a position. By the time such a term came to be restricted to church buildings, it was initially limited to the formal allotment of seats in churches. It then became extended to the reservation of vaults or grave spaces, and now applies to any alteration to a church's fabric or fittings. Applications for faculties are now dealt with by the Diocesan Advisory Committee by which the procedure is now quite tightly controlled and which might well refuse to grant a faculty. Disputed cases can ultimately lead to a consistory court hearing.