Glebe: land granted to a member of the clergy as part of a benefice. Etymology: derives from the Middle English word ‘glebe’, which in turn came from the Old French ‘glèbe’, and ultimately from the Latin word ‘gleba’ or ‘glaeba’, meaning ‘clod of earth’ or ‘soil’.
As indicated above, glebes were parcels of land provided for members of the clergy within the parish for which they were responsible. And, in the post-Reformation period, clergymen of the Established Church were supposed to be provided with suitable residences on that land. However, for various reasons, not least lay impropriations of former church property during the upheavals of the late 16th and 17th centuries, by 1700 many parishes suffered from a want of glebe land and glebe houses alike. In consequence, they were unable to support a resident clergyman. In order to have an adequate income, some clerics came to hold a number of benefices, but only reside in one of them, leading to inevitable neglect of the others and to complaints that parishes (and parishioners) were suffering from a want of attention. In 1693 Bishop Dopping of Meath suggested one reason for widespread clerical non-residence lay in ‘the want of Gleabs in some places, and in all the decay of manse houses by the frequent Warrs in the Kingdome.’ Similarly, in 1720 Bishop Henry Downes of Elphin wrote that there was only one clerical residence within his diocese, and that was occupied by the dean. As a result, he declared, clergymen who wanted to live within their parishes, ‘generally take little Farms that they may have within themselves all Necessarys…they for ye most part want Glebes to build on, what they had of yt kind being very much swallowed up in Connaught during ye times of Rebellion & Confusion.’
By the start of the 18th century, the pitiful plight of the Established Church in Ireland, especially the poor state of its churches and clerical residences, led to the establishment by government in 1711 of the Board of First Fruits; its equivalent in England, set up seven years earlier, was known as Queen Anne’s Bounty. The board directed that the first fruits or ‘annates’ – that is the first year’s income of a clergyman occupying a new position – were paid into a fund which was then used to build or restore churches and glebe houses, as well as purchase appropriate glebe lands. During the first 70 years of its existence, the board purchased glebe lands for benefices around the country at a total cost of £3,543. In addition, it assisted the building of forty-five glebe houses with gifts of £4,080. These figures greatly increased from 1791 thanks to annual parliamentary grants. Over the following 12 years, the Board of First Fruits spent £55,600 on building 88 churches and 116 glebe houses. The sums grew larger in the decades following the Act of Union and further government grants: in total, £807,648 was provided to purchase glebe lands in 193 benefices, with the construction of 550 glebe houses, and building, rebuilding or enlargement of 697 churches. By 1832 some 829 glebe houses had been built across Ireland, but this activity came largely to a halt the following year with the passing of the Church Temporalities Act, which led to the functions and income of the Board of First Fruits being passed to a new body, the Board of Ecclesiastical Commissioners.
Today’s pictures show the former glebe house of the parish of Rathkeale, County Limerick. In his Topographical Dictionary of Ireland (1837), Samuel Lewis advised that the building had been constructed in 1819 ‘by aid of a gift of £100, and a loan of £1500 from the late Board of First Fruits.’ Furthermore, the glebe lands ran to 10 acres, half of them attached to the glebe house, the other half adjoining an earlier clerical residence closer to the centre of the town. The glebe house’s first occupant was Charles Warburton, Rector of Rathkeale, as well as Chancellor of the Diocese of Limerick (and indeed, Rector of Clonmel, County Tipperary). Warburton’s family background is curious. His paternal grandfather, Dominic Mungan (1715-1774) was a famous blind harpist from County Tyrone. The youngest of Mungan’s three sons, Terence Mongan, originally trained to become a Roman Catholic priest but appears to have converted to the Anglican faith after being appointed a chaplain of the 62nd Regiment of Foot in the British army during the American War of Independence. Changing his name to Charles Mongan, he subsequently married a well-connected New Yorker Frances Marston, with whom he had four sons. The couple and their children returned to Ireland in 1786 where Mongan, who adopted the surname Warburton by royal licence in 1792, enjoyed rapid promotion within the Established Church, serving as Dean of Ardagh and then Clonmacnoise before being appointed Bishop of Limerick in 1806. He would be translated to Cloyne in 1820, dying in office six years later. It was his third son, likewise called Charles, born in New York in 1780, who was the first resident of the new Rathkeale glebe house, a handsome square block of two storeys over basement, with a three-bay east-facing facade, the central doorcase having fan and sidelights. The property also has adjacent yards, with coach houses and stabling for eight horses, as well as a walled garden running to more than an acre. The original 19th century Ordnance Survey map shows that there were once two gate lodges, one to the north, the other to the east, but are now lost. Internally, the house conforms to what would be expected of a rural residence of the period, the most striking decorative feature being the staircase hall, divided into two parts by a screen of Ionic columns. Long since sold by the Church of Ireland, the former glebe house is privately owned and much cherished by its current proprietor.
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