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York County
Bruton Parish (part)
Yorke Parish
Cope D'Oyley
Hampton Parish
Stephen Fouace
Charles Parish
James Slater

James Blair, Commissary to the Bishop of London

Peregrine Cony, Chaplain to the Governor.

It will be noted that the above list reports fifty-one parishes, or
after deducting three which appear as partly in two counties, a total
of forty-eight parishes. These covered the whole territory in which
English settlers lived. The incumbent clergymen total thirty-five but
some five or six of the parishes for which no incumbent was named were
very small in extent or population, and looked to the minister of an
adjoining parish for services and sacraments. Probably this list
includes five or six parishes which were vacant. Because of the great
length of time required to secure clergymen from England this fact is
evidence of the growing strength and organization of the Church under
the influence of the Commissary.

Most of the clergymen who came to Virginia were graduates of the
English and Scottish universities, and brought an element and influence
of education and culture to the growing life of the Colony. Dr. Philip
Alexander Bruce, in his notable _Institutional History of Virginia in
the Seventeenth Century_, makes the following statement:

If we consider as a body the ministers who performed the various duties
of their calling in Virginia during the Seventeenth Century, there is
no reason to think they fell below the standard of conscientiousness
governing the conduct of the English clergyman in the same age. The
early history of the New World was adorned by no nobler group of
divines than the group which gives so much distinction from the point
of view of character and achievement to the years in which the
foundation of the colony at Jamestown was being permanently laid.

From the middle of the century to the end as from the beginning to the
middle, a large proportion of the clergymen were not only graduates of
English universities, but also men of more or less distinguished social
connections in England. Outside the great towns in England, or the
wealthiest and most populous of the English rural parishes, there was
in the course of the century, perhaps no single English living filled
by a succession of clergymen superior to this body of men, (i.e.,
incumbents at Jamestown) in combined learning, talents, piety, and
devotion to duty. And yet there is no reason