True, but misleading. Henry VIII declared that there was no ecclesiastical jurisdiction except him. Mary went back to a European appeal and supreme court system, Elizebeth back to independent jurisdiction.
So the English system of parishes was a civil jurisdiction even to the extent that it was an ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the “ecclesiastical” part of it was the least of it anyway: part of the parish taxes went to pay for education (“ecclesiastical” function), but parish taxes also paid for roads and justice, and even the charity part was mostly a separate tax and separate administration.
I don’t know what was the civil function of parishes in France and Spain, but the fact that French parishes were taken over as elective communes suggests that “related to the church” was the least part of it.
@Melbourne I wonder if this thread was resurrected by a since-cornfielded spammer before you found it. It was last active in 2005, and the Doper to which you replied was only active here for a few weeks in '05.
Trivia - the province of Quebec also has French civil code, a holdover from when it was New France. The jurisdiction was allowed to keep its existing civil code, but of course the British criminal law was the rule all over British North America. At least three of the nine justices on the Canadian supreme court must be qualified in Quebec civil law.
In Australia parishes are a surveying unit in the sequence State → County → Parish → Township → Section → Allotment. A parish would typically have an area of 25 square miles.
The state of Victoria has 37 Counties, 2004 Parishes and 909 Townships.
Counties (or Shires) would have an administration centre, parishes would not.
In Australia they were initially coincident with Anglican parishes, but that changed in the early 19th century. Land administration generally was tracked at the parish level until more complex cadastral record-keeping came in. For historians, parishes are critical to accessing and understanding 150 years worth of civil and administrative records.
Thus the phrase “Doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.” I was waayyyy too old when I figured that one out.
I suspect the most relevant fact is that Louisiana’s early Governors, Derbigny, Dupres, and Roman, were all Catholics, and educated in Catholic schools. And so in dividing the territory administratively, they would have used the familiar word “paroisse.”
It’s a zombie, but to the point of fighting ignorance/clarifying, counties are more a 46-state thing. Connecticut and Rhode Island have historical counties that have little practical impact these days. Virginia also has a unique situation where all legal cities are independent entities (3 other states have a similar thing but only 1 each), while counties are the non-cities outside of them.
In line with this, sometimes you get bad trivia questions like “How many States doe the USA have?” And then zing your correct answer of 50 with “46, as 4 states call themselves ‘commonwealths’!”. “ha ha ha”
They are wrong. The Constitution is the Supreme law of the land, and it calls them all “States”. A State could call itself throat warbler mangrove, and still be a State.
