king each incumbent clergyman a virtually free lance with
no responsibility to an ecclesiastical superior nor community of
fellowship with other clergymen in the colony. This condition continued
until near the end of the century.

The General Assembly of Virginia followed the example of the Parliament
of England and asserted legislative authority by laws for the temporal
government of the Church. It divided the occupied territory of the
colony into parishes and it established new parishes as settlement
extended steadily to the westward. Because of this fact there was never
any section which was not part of a parish, and the usual rule when a
new county was to be created was to establish a new parish covering the
territory of the proposed county before the county was created. Church
buildings might be far apart in new parishes, but no section of
Virginia in which English people were settling was without the
established forms of religious worship.

The General Assembly enacted laws directing the election of laymen in
every parish as the governing body of the parish in temporal affairs.
That group was called the "Vestry." It had authority to buy land for
churches, churchyards and glebe farms, to erect church buildings and to
build glebe-houses as residences for ministers. It was also charged
with the care of the poor and the destitute sick, and orphaned children
within the parish, with the duty of providing new homes for these
children in responsible families. The money to pay for the land, the
buildings, the care of the sick and needy, the salary of the minister,
and other parish needs was collected from the parishioners through an
annual "tithe" of so many pounds of tobacco per poll. The vestry upon
occasion also had certain civil duties not within the scope of
religious organization.

The setting up of a vestry of laymen as temporal head of the Church in
a parish or congregation was first developed in Virginia. It was
extended later to other colonies as the Anglican Church spread through
them all, and it came over into the life of the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the United States. Great as the value of the vestry has been
to the whole Episcopal Church, the vestry in Virginia was of still
greater value, for by its extension to other colonies and states it has
given one of its most distinctive features to the Church of today.

In England, with the exception of some few parishes formed within the
past century or so,