Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne's Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and the Church of England

by Geoffrey Best

The histories of Queen Anne's Bounty, created in 1704, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, established in 1836, run so closely together, and their functions, until their amalgamation in 1948 as the Church Commissioners, were so similar, that it would be impossible to study them separately. In this account of their foundation and growth, which was originally published in 1964, Dr Best shows how much they had to do with the great changes in the administration and political relations of the Church of England, which transformed the Church from the virtually medieval institution it was in the early eighteenth century, to the recognizably modern one it had become by the end of the nineteenth. Although Dr Best's book is primarily a study of two ecclesiastical bodies and of the Church reform movement, it is also an important and unusual contribution to English social and political history.

600 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 2010

About the author

An historian of 19th and 20th century Britain, Geoffrey Francis Andrew Best was Emeritus Fellow of the British Academy, a former Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Professor of History at Edinburgh, Dean of European Studies at Sussex, Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics, and Senior Member of St Antony's College, Oxford.