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The 1851 Census and Religious Change in Nineteenth-Century Yorkshire

Abstract The publication of many of the original returns of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship opens up new potentialities for research, especially when these are studied alongside other sources that illuminate variegated local patterns of religious activity. In 1851, in Yorkshire nearly two thirds of places of worship had been built or opened in the preceding half century, producing a religious climate that was highly competitive and pluralistic. The Census reveals the decline of Quakerism, the rapid growth of Roman Catholicism, and the partial recovery of the Church of England. Methodism was already entrenched almost everywhere in Yorkshire — in rural as well as urban areas — although the Wesleyan schism of 1850 led to significant short-term disruption in some districts. Case studies of the subdistricts of Huddersfield, Grassington and Easingwold illustrate the highly varied nature of local developments, contingent on factors of geography and personality. It is argued that the Census provides evidence of rechristianization, quite as much as secularization, and that long-term decline in English religious practice should neither be predated nor perceived as inevitable.