416 - Churches the Victorians Forgot

Churches the Victorians Forgot
By Mark Chatfield
Ashbourne, Moorland, 1979. 171 pp. 17.50.

The liturgical revival that swept the Church of England about the time of Victoria's ascendancy profoundly influenced ecclesiastical design throughout the English- speaking world. In their zeal to introduce "correct" liturgical settings, the Tractarians built some outstanding churches. They also destroyed and "restored" so many existing churches that today, of approximately 8,000 pre-Victorian churches in England, there are only about 140 "historically true Anglican interiors" left. These few "prayer book" churches survive only because they were overlooked or forgotten by the ecclesiologically-minded Victorians.

The term "prayer book" refers to those churches whose design reflected the earlier revolution in forms of worship brought about by the introduction of the First English Prayer Book of 1549. We tend to think of Henry VIII's divorce from Anne Boleyn in 1533 as marking the founding of the English Church. But, as this book reminds us, it was rather Henry's son Edward VI (a Lutheran) who made the final break with papal authority and who established the "Protestant Church of England."

The wave of iconoclasm that accompanied Edward's new book of prayer eradicated the ritual, color, and superstition that characterized the churches of his father's reign. Rood screens, ancillary altars, wall paintings, and depictions of Christ and the Virgin were all destroyed by the idol-smashing Calvinists, so that by Queen Elizabeth's time medieval churches stood bare and empty. The new liturgical requirements-the use of English, communion for the laity, and emphasis on the pulpit-were then adapted to the medieval architectural legacy. In the early l7th-century Archbishop Laud and the High Church Party tried to introduce more ritual, but they were overruled by Parliament (which in 1643 abolished all east altars and communion rails). Until the advent of the Oxford Movement two hundred years later, ecclesiastical design (as manifested in the "prayer book" church) was a clear reflection of the Reformation.

This volume is a study of, and a tribute to, those too few churches (usually rural, often off the beaten path, and sometimes even abandoned) which provide "our only tangible link with two and a half centuries of 'prayer book' worship."

Following a preface by Sir David Stephens (Chairman of the Redundant Churches Fund) and a brief but informative historical essay, the author discusses 50 churches in considerable detail (listed alphabetically by county). There is also a gazetteer of 82 churches worth a visit. Each entry is accompanied by at least an exterior and an interior photograph, a list of specific furnishings, and something about the church's topographical setting.

417 - Churches the Victorians Forgot

For some, the descriptions may seem unnecessarily lengthy. Yet this is a poetic book, virtually a love letter, and an act of devotion. Before readers discover whether a particular church has its altar, pulpit, and font segregated, or whether these are grouped together, we are treated to some delightfully evocative passages. For example:

Tushingham old church lies beyond gently folded fields, concealed from the unknowing, safe in its pastoral solitude ... Red brick amongst a mosaic of greens, dark coniferous forms in the churchyard, drifting shadows from cumulous clouds, piebald cattle; all remind one of Gerard Manly Hopkins' "dappled things" and "couple-colour."

Overly romantic? I think not. For the "air of suspended decay" so accurately captured is as much a part of the spirit and idea of an English country church as are the religious principles its building forms represent.

The architectural heritage of these "prayer book" churches is a rich one, covering as it does everything from Norman, through medieval Gothic to Wren Baroque, Georgian, and "Gothick." Yet, it is not the elaborate English Baroque and Georgian examples, with their gilding and royal hatchments, that are most impressive. Rather, it is the simple, ascetic starkness of, say, King's Norton, Leicestershire or Widford, Oxfordshire that stand out. Their very pared-down quality, the bareness

418 - Churches the Victorians Forgot

that attracts nothing away from prayer and the sermon, offers a powerful austerity. Such churches would suggest that many 18th century American churches (like Old North in Boston, St. Peter's in Philadelphia, or even many a Quaker meeting house) should be understood as extensions of the "prayer book" style that American settlers had known in England and which they brought to this country.

While the Gothic Revival church spawned by the ecclesiologists has become practically the universal architectural symbol of Anglicanism, this book reminds us that our ecclesiastical roots go back before 1840. At a time when the Anglican Communion is undergoing yet another liturgical revolution, this appreciation of the "prayer book" churches stresses the importance of respecting the diversity of the past. For, as Chatfield remarks in his analysis of a Wiltshire church which bears a continuity of form from the late Saxon period to the late Georgian, a house of worship like Inglesharn "remains as relevant and immediate as it did to our ancestors of two and three hundred years ago."

William Morgan
University of Louisville
Louisville, Kentucky