Clergy Reserves

1. noun, Cdn hist. Crown lands set aside during the settlement of Upper and Lower Canada, the revenue from which was to be used to support Protestant clergy. They caused considerable political debate until the land was secularized in 1854 (COD); attributive

1.
“Then there was the first Crown and Clergy Reserves on the Island. And then eventually all the Clergy Reserves, like the money from the leases or sales of them, went supposedly for the benefit of the Protestant clergy.”

“There were two hundred acre blocks with lots of land that were designated as Clergy Reserves, and the other one seventh was apparently in exchange for removal of the conditions that were not fulfilled on the original grant.”

2.
“That was 1822. But when the surveyor came to lay out these Crown and Clergy Reserve lots and surveyed the whole island, he was only here a short time and he ran into the old survey, and he said … ‘If I lay out these lots according to the usual way, where there are five lots on the water now, there’ll only be one’.”