Craig Kilby asked the other day about exemptions for Germans from taxes
to support the Church of England in eighteenth century Virginia and
about church attendance.

The only legal exemption from local church levies that I recall was
adopted in 1730 for the relief of "Certain German Protestants to the
Number of twelve or Fourteen Familes, now settled at a Place called
Licking Run in the Parish of Overwharton in the County of Stafford,"
Waverly K. Winfree, ed., The Laws of Virginia; Being a Suplement to
Hening's The Statutes at Large, 1700-1750 (Virginia State Library,
1971), 340-341.

Opinions varied whether the English Act of Toleration applied in
Virginia, and in practice different dissenting congregations may have
been treated differently in different areas and decades. This is an
important subject that requires further research, although it appears to
me that settled (as opposed to itinerating) ministers (at least among
the Lutherans and Presbyterians) readily obtained licenses to permit
them and their congregations to enjoy a measure of independence from the
Church of England--but not in the matter of marriages, which were legal
only if celebrated by a minister of the Church of England, and the laws
remained on the books, I think, requiring public officers to take
communion from time to time according to the service in the Book of
Common Prayer. How often that law was invoked, I don't know.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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