Page 24 - MABE GENEALOGY

The Mabe genealogy line, from England (1600’s) to the United States (1700’s), Virginia and North Carolina.

liturgical calendar of the Church of England, declaring that when two holy
days followed each other on subsequent days "betwixt the feast of the
annunciation of the blessed virgin [25 March] and St. Michael the
archangel [29 September], then only the first to be observed." This was an
obvious accommodation to the colony's tobacco culture.

Vestries gained powers much greater than their counterparts in England,
most importantly the authority to "elect and make choyce of their ministers,"
a right legislated by the General Assembly as early as 1643. In England, that
power lay with the parish patron. There, the bishop then inducted the
minister into his appointed parish, or cure, which he generally held for life
unless he committed serious moral offenses. Virginia's church government
did not function that way. Vestries frequently refused to induct their
ministers (the colonial governor would have performed the induction) and
hired their clergy on annual contracts. This practice may have originated in
the seventeenth century to help vestries protect themselves from continuing
the services of a poor minister. Certainly there were some clergy who were
not the best of men, but the number of those ministers has been routinely
overestimated.

Nonetheless, clergy from England resented the power of Virginia's vestries
and their refusal to induct ministers into their cures. The Reverend Morgan
Godwyn denounced colonial vestries as "Plebian Juntos" and "hungry
Patrons" who often preferred to hire lay readers rather than ministers
because the costs were lower. Another minister complained that clergy in
Virginia "have 12 Lay patrons [vestrymen] whom we must humour or run
the risque of Deprivation." Because elections for vestrymen only occurred
with the establishment of a new parish or the modification of an old one—
and deceased members were replaced through recommendations of the
sitting members—the powers of any particular vestry could rarely be
challenged. The conflict between vestries and clergy was not simply
between different conceptions of church government; it actually represented
the construction in Virginia of a new form of church government in which
local vestries shared authority with bishops in England. By the end of the
seventeenth century, one could argue that the church in Virginia was English
in theology and colonial in form.

In 1675, when Henry Compton became bishop of London, the see (or
office) traditionally charged with overseeing the church in the colonies, the
fortunes of Virginia's Church of England began to improve. He recruited

23