CHRISTIANITY
A congregation of voices
SARAH FOOT enjoys a new history of the Church of England, a book that finds space for the reflections of ordinary parishioners as well charting the deeds of the great and the good
A People’s Church: A History of the Church of England
by Jeremy Morris
Profile Books, 480 pages, £30
The formal history of the Church of England begins with the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which declared King Henry VIII to be “the only Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia”. Yet, as Jeremy Morris demonstrates in this accessible and engaging book, the roots of Henry’s church lay firmly in the early Middle Ages. So much so that his Church of England could be understood “as the Church in England as it had been from time immemorial”.
Morris deftly guides the reader through the complex narrative of the church’s shifting fortunes, moving from the turmoil of the Reformation years, through evangelical and high church revivals, constitutional reform and the church’s responses to world wars, to the religious “crisis” of the 1960s and beyond. After a brief prelude looking at the medieval (“Catholic”) centuries, the book is divided into three sections: the “Age of the Monarch”, the “Age of the Oligarchy” and the “Age of the People”. In a postscript Morris uses a horticultural metaphor to contrast the church at its best – “like a well-rooted tree in a storm, bending to survive, but with roots which go down deep into Christian revelation, history and tradition” – with its less successful incarnations as “a tangle or knot of incommensurate claims and counter-claims, like an overrun garden gone to ruin”.
“Sunday observance coloured the childhood of author Molly Hughes, who remembered afternoons when “it seemed always to be three o’clock” ”
Monarchs, bishops and senior clergy necessarily dominate the narrative, but Morris illustrates the book throughout with vignettes about individual clergy and, where possible, lay people. Larry Banville, a 19th-century Norfolk gamekeeper, admired but doubted the sincerity of a sermon his parson preached about charity, not believing that “he would give a penny to a poor man if it would save his life”. William Taylor, a London footman who kept a diary in 1837, found his local Anglican church so full one Sunday that he could not get in, and thus ended up at a Methodist “Chapple”, where he stayed “but a very short time”. Sunday observance coloured the childhood of Molly Hughes, author of the London Girl autobiographies, who remembered afternoons that “hung heavy” when “it seemed always to be three o’clock”.
Morris handles sensitively the fact that women are markedly less visible until near the end of his narrative, and devotes a good deal of attention to the origins of female ministry (in the 19th-century order of deaconesses) and to influential Anglican women, including Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, Octavia Hill and Maude Royden.
Social and cultural contexts are explored throughout in parallel with the overarching political and religious narrative. Morris is particularly effective in portraying a sense of the spaces in which Anglicans worshipped, devoting much attention to changes to the place where the eucharist was celebrated. Occasional chapters break the narrative flow to discuss the “Great Churches” (former monastic foundations, Oxbridge college chapels and other churches set apart through history and function), the life experience of the clergy, or the importance of music in the Anglican tradition.
This is a rich and vividly illustrated book, which not only traces the history of the Anglican church, but demonstrates why it continues to matter.
Sarah Foot is regius professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Oxford
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