Canterbury Pilgrims

The Canterbury Association was formed in order to establish a colony in what is now the Canterbury Region in the South Island of New Zealand.

The Association was founded in London on 27 March 1848, and incorporated by Royal Charter on 13 November 1849. The prime movers were Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Robert Godley. Wakefield was heavily involved in the New Zealand Company, which by that time had already established four other colonies in New Zealand. He approached Godley to help him establish a colony sponsored by the Church of England. The President of the Association's Committee of Management was John Sumner, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Committee itself included several other bishops and clergy, as well as members of the peerage and Members of Parliament. At its first meeting, the Association decided upon names. The settlement was to be called Canterbury, presumably after the Archbishop of Canterbury, the seat of the settlement Christchurch after the Oxford college at which Godley had studied.

The Association re-targeted its planned settlement from the Wairarapa to the Banks Peninsula hinterland, where it arranged to buy land from the New Zealand Company for 10 shillings per acre (4000 m²). The Association then sold the land to its colonists for £3 per acre, reserving the rest, the additional £2 10s, for use in "public objects such as emigration, roads, and Church and school endowments" (20 shillings = £1). The provision of funds for "emigration" aimed to allow the Association to offer assisted passages to members of the working classes with desirable skills for the new colony. A poster advertising the assisted passages specifically mentions "Gardeners, Shep[herd]s, Farm Servants, Labourers and Country Mechanics". The religious nature of the colony shows in the same poster's requirement that the clergyman of their parish should vouch for applicants, and in the specific earmarking of some of the proceeds from land sales for church endowments.

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