ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the 'physical' factors that may have been responsible for churchgoing decline. For a considerable period scholars were broadly convinced by various theories of secularization, and while this was the case, evidence of churchgoing decline seemed to need little further explanation. Church of England clergy returns to the Archbishop provide an exceptionally long run of average Sunday attendance estimates from 1865 through to 1969. The centre of York, like the City of London, had a profusion of Church of England churches in the early nineteenth century that had little relation to population needs. In 1764, the Church of England dominated York. Catholics already had a convent in one parish and an active church, with a congregation of about 170, in the parish of St Michael le Belfrey. The rural dean of York's report of 1845 marks a very similar crucial point of transition in the Church of England to Bishop Sumner's Charges in Chester.
