PROVIDING CHURCHES

Keble's verses from The Christian Year, the book that became the period's most popular work of Anglican poetry, express a sense of anxiety about the displacement of the Church from its central role, and its vulnerability in a new and hostile environment. In the face of this anxiety, the Anglican response fused elements of yearning for the past with an appreciation of the need to be practical. The apparently tranquil English village, with its ancient church built in a local style, became invested with a new, somewhat nostalgic, significance. It was hardly surprising that Victorian Anglicans should have alighted upon the medieval parish church, and the orderly, God-fearing society with which they associated it, as a most potent emblem of the world they were losing. The high evaluation of all things medieval – a feature of the Gothic revival – was partly responsible. The ancient building was, furthermore, a powerful monument to the pre-industrial age, seemingly at one with the natural landscape, and pointing also to the integrity of local building styles and materials.