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The Scholar Priest in the Church of England in the Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2023
Abstract
The Oxford Movement in the 1830s prompted some formidable theological scholarship which profoundly affected the lives and personalities of many Oxford-educated Church of England clergymen, not a few of whom combined deeply scholarly lives with successful parish ministries. This essay examines the lives of two such men, Canon T.F. Simmons, a parish priest in Yorkshire for some thirty years, and Bishop Mandell Creighton, much of whose scholarly writing was produced in a remote Northumberland parish before his return to Cambridge and London. By the end of the century such learned clergymen were becoming a rarity in the Church of England.
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- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Journal of Anglican Studies Trust
Footnotes
1
David Jasper is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
References
2 John Keble was elected professor of poetry at Oxford in 1831 and was also a country parson. Unlike Arabin, however, Keble achieved a double first in Latin and Mathematics.
3 Quotations are from the Penguin Random House edition of Barchester Towers (2012), II, ch. 1, pp. 197-210.
4 Anthony Trollope, Dr. Wortle’s School (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 1973 [1881]), pp. 3-4.
5 James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 2.
6 Percy Dearmer, The Parson’s Handbook (new edn; London: Grant Richards, 1903), p. 1.
7 Elisabeth Jay (ed.), The Evangelical and Oxford Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 6.
8 William Palmer (1803–85) was a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Of Irish birth, he was a protégé of John Jebb, bishop of Limerick (1775–1833).
9 Frederick Oakeley, Historical Sketches of the Tractarian Movement (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865), p. 13.
10 Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (2nd edn; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972), Part II, pp. 439-62.
11 V.H.H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge: A History c.1160–c.1960 (London: SCM Press, 1964), p. 255.
12 Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II, p. 439.
13 Owen Chadwick, Westcott and the University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), p. 3.
14 The Bishops’ Book (1537) was compiled by 46 Anglican divines led by Thomas Cranmer, and set out to expound the creed, sacraments, decalogue, the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave, addressing also questions regarding the relationship of the English Church to Rome. The King’s Book (1543) was entitled ‘Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man’. Among other things it taught abstention from the doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the dead.
15 G.J. Cuming, A History of Anglican Liturgy (2nd edn; London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 148.
16 Tract 1, Tracts for the Times by Members of the University of Oxford. I. 1833–4 (new edn; London: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1838).
17 The Tracts remained anonymous though their individual authors were no real secret. The names of the authors of all the Tracts can be found in an Appendix to Henry Parry Liddon’s Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, Vol. III (4 vols., 1893–97).
18 Among other scholarly works, Thirlwall translated writings of Schleiermacher and Tieck, and joined with Julius Charles Hare (1795–1855), Archdeacon of Lewes, in translating Niebuhr’s History of Rome. His principal achievement in scholarship is a vast (8 volumes) History of Greece (1835–47). Despite these scholarly labours, and before his consecration as bishop, Thirlwall was a devoted parish priest at Kirby Underdale in Yorkshire from 1834 to 1840.
19 Isaac Williams, Tract 86, http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract86.html (accessed 13 December 2022).
20 J.H. Newman, quoted in Ian Kerr, John Henry Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 216-17 (emphasis added).
21 R.C.D. Jasper wrote of Simmons’ contribution to the debates of the York Convocation: ‘It [Convocation] possessed a most learned liturgical scholar in Canon T.F. Simmons of York, and his influence was much more penetrating in the smaller Northern body than would have been in that of Canterbury.’ Prayer Book Revision in England, 1800–1900 (London: SPCK, 1954), p. 125.
22 T.F. Simmons, The Lay Folks’ Mass Book (EETS; London: N. Trübner & Co., 19769), p. xiv. Simmons draws upon the form of words used each day at the opening of sessions of the York Convocation.
23 York Minster Library, MS ADD 373.
24 This was in what he was later to call the ‘B’ manuscript, found by Maskell in the British Museum. Maskell was another profoundly learned Anglican priest who became a Roman Catholic after the Gorham Judgment of 1850.
25 York Minster Library, MS ADD 375.
26 See Sally Harper, P.S. Barnwell and Magnus Williamson (eds.), Late Medieval Liturgies Enacted (London: Routledge, 2016); Nicholas Orme, Going to Church in Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
27 See Kirby, Historians and the Church of England, p. 30.
28 Freeman was appointed regius professor of modern history at Oxford in 1884. Among his works are Thoughts on the Study of History with Reference to the Proposed Changes in the Public Examination (2nd edn; Oxford, 1849). His predecessor in this chair was William Stubbs. The pre-eminent modern historian of his day, Stubbs is best remembered for his Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1873–78). But in addition to his academic eminence Stubbs was for 16 years the rector of Navestock (1850–66), and later bishop of Chester and finally of Oxford.
29 L.H. Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (new edn; London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906), I, p. 44.
30 Quoted in C.M.D. Crowder, ‘Mandell Creighton’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, 2004.
31 Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, II, p. 204.
32 A. Tindal Hart, The Country Priest in English History (London: Phoenix House, 1959), p. 72.
33 See, further, George Herring, The Oxford Movement in Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 58-59.
34 See Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession (London: SPCK, 1980), p. 44.
35 There was also a sense that university life could be a tempting snare for the young prospective priest. W.E. Heygate’s novel Godfrey Davenant at College (1849) was written to warn of the snares and temptations awaiting the innocent young man at university. In 1859, a theological college designed by William Butterfield, the builder of Keble College, was established on the isle of Cumbrae, off the Ayreshire coast in Scotland. A mile of sea separated the young ordinands from the dangerous allurements of Glasgow.
36 J.R.H. Moorman, A History of the Church of England (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1953), p. 375.