- Source: Archdeacon of St Albans
The Archdeacon of St Albans is an ecclesiastical post in the Church of England Diocese of St Albans in the Province of Canterbury.
History
Before the Dissolution of the Monasteries and Henrican reforms of the 16th century, there were Archdeacons of St Albans from within the Abbey. Registers list archdeacons starting in 1420, but this old "abbey archdeaconry" is supposed to have been created in the reign of Henry III (13th century).
The "diocesan archdeaconry" was newly constituted from St Albans Abbey's parishes in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire in 1550; it remained a part of the Diocese of London until 1845, when it and was transferred to the diocese of Rochester, at which point its boundaries were made to coincide with those of Hertfordshire. Thirty years later, the archdeaconries of Essex, of Colchester, and of St Albans were taken from the Rochester diocese to create the Diocese of St Albans in 1878. Shortly after the two Essex archdeaconries were erected into the Diocese of Chelmsford in 1914, the St Albans diocese received the ancient county archdeaconry of Bedford from the Diocese of Ely; there has once again been a third archdeaconry since the split on 1 January 1997 of the Hertford archdeaconry from the Archdeaconry of St Albans.
List of archdeacons
References
Sources
Madden, Bandinel et al. (1st ed.) & Nichols (2nd ed.). Collectanea Topographica & Genealogica, Vol. VII p. 302
Hardy & Le Neve: Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae: or a calendar of the principal..., Volume 2. pp. 344–345
Horn, Joyce M. (1969), Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857, vol. 1, pp. 14–16
Horn, Joyce M. (1974), Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857, vol. 3, p. 59
External links
Records of the Archdeaconry of St Alban's (National Archives)