A COUPLE are to be ordered to pay £95,000 for repairs to a 13th-century parish church because their nearby farm was formerly church land.

The House of Lords ruled yesterday that ancient laws meant that Gail and Andrew Wallbank are liable to help with the upkeep of St John the Baptist Church in Aston Cantlow, Warwickshire.

The test case affects thousands of smallholders. About 5,000 parish churches could now enforce similar orders on private individuals who own former glebe land — church land that was often rented out to bring in funds for parish maintenance. The decision relieves hundreds of Church of England congregations, already struggling to pay clergy stipends and pensions, from yet more crippling liabilities.

Mr Wallbank said: “We are pretty appalled and devastated. Everyone agrees this is a bad law but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. We will have to sell the farm to pay for it.”

The Wallbanks became liable for the repairs to the church chancel when they inherited Glebe Farm in Aston Cantlow — where Shakespeare’s parents were married — from Mrs Wallbank’s father. The land is a quarter of a mile from the church but it formerly belonged to the church as glebe land. After the Reformation, the glebe land passed into private ownership and the owner was appointed “lay rector” of the parish.

About 5,000 parishes have lay rectors, of which nearly 3,000 are private individuals. In return for their liability for chancel repairs, lay rectors were once entitled to tithes, a tenth of the value of parishioners’ labour. However, these tithes were abolished in 1936.

The penalty for refusing to pay for chancel repairs used to be excommunication, backed up by a possible committal by the High Court for contempt of the ecclesiastical court. Since 1932, parochial church councils have been entitled to sue lay rectors in civil courts.

The Lords yesterday overturned a Court of Appeal decision of two years ago, which had cleared the Wallbanks of liability to pay. The law lords ruled that parochial church councils are not public authorities, and so the Human Rights Act — with which the Wallbanks sought to fight the church’s claim — could not protect them. The Wallbanks, who also own a small sheep farm in Carno, Powys, where they live, are considering an appeal to Strasbourg.

The five law lords unanimously allowed an appeal by the Parochial Church Council for Aston Cantlow and Wilmcote with Billesley, although Lord Nicholls emphasised the need for legal reform.

The judge said: “This case concerns one of the more arcane and unsatisfactory areas of property law: the liability of a lay rector for the repair of the chancel of a church. The very language is redolent of a society long disappeared.

“The anachronistic, even capricious, nature of this ancient liability was recognised some years ago by the Law Commission. The Commission said this ‘relic of the past’ is ‘no longer acceptable.”

Lord Hope considered that while the 1932 law was “open to criticism on various grounds”, it was difficult to see how to replace it: “It is not open to us to resolve these problems judicially. All one can say is that the Human Rights Act 1998 does not provide a vehicle for doing so.”

A spokesman for the Church of England said: “We are glad that the House of Lords has decided in the parochial church council’s favour, and that it will be able to enforce payment of the cost of repairing the chancel of the ancient parish church. However, our lawyers will now need to study the judgment in detail in order to see what implications it has for the wider church.”

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