The loss of the original Act of Endow ment is supplied by prescription ; i. e. if the vicar has enjoyed any particular tithes or other fruits by constant usage, the law will presume that he was legally endowed with them.
If the impropriator, either by design or mistake, presents the vicar to the par sonage, the vicarage will be dissolved, and the person presented will be entitled to all the ecclesiastical dues as rector.
It is to be observed that the statute 4 Henry IV. c. 12, did not extend to ap propriations made before the first of Richard II. Hence it happens that in some appropriated churches no vicar has ever been endowed. In this case the officiating minister is appointed by the impropriator, and is called a perpetual curate. He enters upon his official duties by virtue of the bishop's licence only, without institution or induction. It ap pears, moreover, from Dr. Burn (Eccles.
tit. " Curate"), that there were some benefices which, being granted for the purpose of supporting the hospitality of the monasteries (in menses monachorum), and not appropriated in the common form, escaped the operation of the statute of Henry V. In this case, according to the same author, the benefices were served by temporary curates belonging to the religious houses, and sent out as occasion required ; and sometimes the liberty of not appointing a perpetual vicar was granted by dispensation, in benefices not annexed to tables of the monasteries. When such appropriations, together with the charge of providing for the cure, were transferred (after the dissolution of monasteries) from spiritual societies to single lay persons (who, being incapable of serving them themselves, were obliged to nominate a person to the bishop for his licence to serve the cure), the curate by this means became so far perpetual as not to be removable at the pleasure of the impropriator, but only for such causes as would occasion the depriving of a rector or vicar, or by the revocation of the bishop's licence. (Burn, Ibid.) Though the form of licences to perpetual cures expresses that they last only during the bishop's pleasure, the power of revocation, thus reserved to the bishop, has seldom, if ever, been cised.
There is another kind of perpetual curacy which arises from the erection in a parish of a chapel-of-ease subject to the mother church. But the curacies of chapels-of-ease are not benefices in the strict legal sense of the word, unless they have been augmented out of the fund called Queen Anne's Bounty. The offi ciating ministers are not corporations in law with perpetuity of succession, as par sons, vicars, and other perpetual curates. Neither are chapels-of-ease subject to lapse, although the bishop may, by pro cess in the ecclesiastical courts, compel the patrons to fill them up. But the sta tute 1 Geo. I. seas. 2, c. 10, provides that all churches, curacies, or chapels which shall be augmented by the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty shall be from thenceforth perpetual cures and benefices, and the ministers duly nominated and licensed thereunto shall be in law bodies politic and corporate, and have perpetual succession, and be capable to take in per petuity ; and that if suffered to remain void for six months they shall lapse in like manner as presentative livings. The 59 Geo. III. c. 134, contained provisions enabling the Church Building Commis sioners to assign districts to chapels under the cure of curates, and it enacted that no such chapelry should become a benefice by reason of any augmentation e the maintenance of the curate by any grant or bounty. Both this statute and that of 1 Geo. I. were partially repealed by 2 & Viet. c. 49, which has a clause enacting that any church or chapel augmented by Queen Anne's Bounty, and which has had, or may hereafter have, a district assigned to it, is to be a perpetual curacy and benefice. 'Phe commissioners for building new churches may assign dis tricts to them, and such church or chapel may be augmented by the governors of Queen Anne's Bounty.
The district churches built in pursu ance of several recent acts (as 58 Geo.
III. c. 45 ; 59 Geo. III. c. 134 ; 3 Geo.