What is a Perpetual Curate?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

The Revd Charles Dodgson was perpetual curate of All Saints’ Church, Daresbury in Cheshire. He was the father of C.L.Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll.

Perpetual curacies had long been liable to remain poorly paid and inadequately housed relative to other full incumbencies of the Church of England, even when augmented from Queen Anne's Bounty; consequently the Perpetual Curate commonly features in mid-Victorian literary culture as a figure endeavouring to maintain the social standing of beneficed clergyman, but whose family aspirations (especially marital) were being frustrated by constricted financial expectations; most notably in The Perpetual Curate by Mrs Oliphant, and in The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope.

While not a "perpetual curate", the Minister of St Paul's Church in Jersey comes under a similar system, appointed and chosen by members of the lay congregation.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

What is a Perpetual Curate?

Most of the old churches of England were built by laymen, who endowed them with freehold land also sufficient for a graveyard, and sometimes for a parsonage house, and for a plot-the glebe-by which the rector could maintain himself for ever.

In addition, from the earliest centuries the parishioners brought annually to the tithe barn, or other convenient place, the tenth part of the yearly increment of their land, stock, and personal skill for the maintenance of their church and the clerk, or person, in holy orders who held it.

The right of nominating and presenting such a person to the living was clearly a valuable one. It was often handed down from father to son in the family of the original benefactor, or added to the dowry of a daughter, or sold, or given away as a pious act to a monastic foundation. Especially after the twelfth century it proved a very small step for such recipients to use their right to present to a living, if they were a monastic or other religious corporation, to nominate themselves to it in perpetuity.

By this legal fiction they were able to appropriate to the use of the house at least the valuable `great tithes' of the parish, those of corn, hay, grain, and wood, leaving the others, on other crops, on stock, and on personal skill, with freehold in church, etc., to the substitute whom they nominated-the vicar.

At the Dissolution such appropriated rectories, and the rights that went with them, in many cases fell into the hands of lay-men, the `gray coat parsons', where it still sometimes remains. Before the Reformation there were many spectacular cases of laymen holding clerical benefices, even bishoprics.

His Eminence Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Archbishop of York, Abbot of St. Albans, and Bishop of Durham, secured for his natural son four archdeaconries, a deanery, five prebends and two rectories, and only failed to get him accepted as his successor in the fabulously rich see of Durham, although the young Thomas was not yet in priest's orders.

After the Reformation, however, if allowance is made for monastic wealth that came back into lay hands, the number of laymen living on what had been clerical benefits was greater than ever before.

Where such layman swallowed, impropriated, the vicarage tithes of the living, as well as the rectorial, the parson instituted to its shorn freehold was, and is, called a perpetual curate. He holds, as does every rector or vicar, a benefice and cure, or care, of souls. Rectors and vicars are also `curates'. Any unbeneficed clergyman who assists them, whether he be priest or deacon, is an assistant curate.

Before the middle of the nineteenth century it was quite often this assistant curate alone who was left to look after the parish. Realistic England therefore tended to drop the word `assistant' from his title.

Although there are far more parochial benefices in England than benefices of other types, there are also others, as for example those attached to cathedrals and collegiate churches. Some of these were served before the Reformation by monks, as at Durham, or by canons living together under a rule, as at Salisbury, but where such foundations survived they became `secular' at the dissolution.

A dean, for example, holds a cathedral benefice; so do those canons residentiary who have definite full-time or periodic duties to perform in the cathedral or collegiate church. The subdean is often a beneficed canon, as is also a precentor. The latter, the leader of the music, as his Latin name implies, traditionally holds the stall opposite and corresponding to that of the dean.

Between them they have supplied the names of the sides of the choir-decani, the side of the dean (decanus: originally a man set over ten); and cantoris, that of the precantor.

At first such beneficed canons were called prebendaries. This was because, about the tenth century, they tired of living together under a common roof and split up among themselves the prebend, the revenues of the foundation.

To-day, on the contrary, a prebendary, as at St. Paul's, tends to be an honorary, not a beneficed canon. Among the rights which he enjoys is a seat on the cathedral chapter.

Why were Crypts Built?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Why were Crypts Built?

Some of the earliest Christian churches were apparently built above an even earlier vault or crypt, which held the body of a saint. The tradition that the church of St. Peter at Rome was so built, over the burial place of the Apostle, though not above Nero's circus where he was martyred, seems to have been confirmed by the recent excavations at Rome.

This part of a church was, therefore, in some cases not only the oldest but also one of the most sacred parts of the whole building. It is possible that the very word crypt is derived from the same root as the word shroud.

For the first fifty years at Rome, Christians appear to have shared burial places with the Jews: they also believed that the bodies of the departed should be laid in the earth or in the rock, and not burned.

But from the second half of the first century they began to construct their own underground cemeteries beyond the city, or to make use of natural caves under the Appian Way. When collective Christian burial became general, some of the crypts were made large enough for funeral or memorial services to be held in them, although few would have easily held a congregation of more than fifty people.

Although the Eucharist may also have been said in these catacombs even in peaceful times, this certainly became more general in time of persecution. This was not because the catacombs were secret places but because, as cemeteries, they were rigidly protected by Roman law. That similar crypts should continue to be built and used for the saying of the Eucharist, and for burials, after Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, is easily understandable.

In England there are a few very early crypts, for example, that at Hexham. But churches with crypts became more common when the Romanesque styles of architecture were brought in after the Norman Conquest.

The extraordinarily large and beautiful one under Canterbury Cathedral was started by Prior Ernulf, and finished in A.D. 1105 by Prior Conrad. Some seventy years later, on the same night that he was murdered in the Cathedral, the body of Thomas Becket was carried down to this crypt by the monks of Canterbury and laid in state on a tomb before the altar of the Blessed Virgin.

The next day the Archbishop was buried in the crypt, which remained his shrine for fifty years, and became the dearest place of pilgrimage in the country.

And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seeke,
That them hath holpen when that they were weeke.

By the fourteenth century when Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, the body of St. Thomas was housed in the great shrine behind the high altar, of which, not much more than a century later, Henry VIII was to leave no trace.

Although no other of the remaining crypts in England is as famous as that of Canterbury, some of them are very lovely-for example, those at Durham and Worcester, or the twelfth-century crypt under the church of St. Peter-in-the-East, in Queen's Lane, at Oxford. This crypt was restored and brought into use again in 1932. Originally, like those in many Italian churches, it was directly accessible from the nave. The passages, however, which used to lead up from the three doorways in the west wall of the crypt were long ago blocked.

It is possible that the barrel-vaulted chamber, eight feet by seven, opening off the crypt, is a twelfth-century reconstruction of an earlier arrangement, which may itself have been a tomb.

Like the catacombs, even the smallest of these crypts is full of ornamentation. In both are to be found the sacred monogram IHS, the three Greek letters which begin the name of JESUS; the XP, the first two Greek letters of CHRIST, and painted or carved foliage and symbolic creatures.

In the crypt of St. Peter's-in-the-East, for example, one capital has a winged dragon and two men and a beast carved on it. Many catacombs had the eagles and peacocks of eternal life, as well as ships of salvation and palms of victory, painted on their walls.

Who Sang Antiphonally?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Who Sang Antiphonally?

FROM the first centuries, in choirs and places where  they sang, most of the singing was antiphonal.

This was originally because-since the Hebrew psalms were the basis and type of all that was sung-to divide the singing between two groups, as in the synagogue, allowed dramatic expression to the Cry and Response inherent in so much that was set to music.

People who had been reared on Greek drama would also have been familiar with the voices of the chorus being similarly used.

As well as the psalm cycle, which was to be said or chanted weekly in its entirety by most monastic orders, such songs as the Magnificat and the Benedicite had long been traditionally in use by the early middle ages.

To these had been added by the sixth century the Te Deum Laudamus, which legend described as the song of exaltation improvised by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and St. Augustine, later to be Bishop of Hippo, in the fourth century, when St. Ambrose baptized Augustine.

Besides the mainly antiphonally-sung music, including the psalm cycle, which became traditional in the Offices (which the Church, and particularly the monastic orders, kept at every three hours of the day and night) the canon of the Mass began early to be embellished with singing.

To the ancient alleluias, which first belonged to Eastertide, there were added verses of psalms or of scripture, or, later, hymns based on Psalms or on the Epistle or Gospel for the day. These were sung, for example, as graduals before the Gospel, or at the offertory.

By the time of the Reformation the sequence of the Offices and of the Mass had become constantly interrupted by elaborations of such singing. Although originally this had emphasized the lesson of the day and hour, finally it was believed by some to obscure it, and to distract people.

The English Reformers, therefore, who `accumulated' Morning and Evening Prayer from the old Offices, and divided the Psalter for monthly instead of for weekly use, `cut off', as they explained, most of the old musical interpellations from these, and from the Communion Service. They left, however, some of the oldest canticles and hymns (an old Latin one, for example, in the form for consecrating a bishop), place for two daily anthems, and a few of the old interpellations, including some of the versicles and responses.

It was also under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer that Merbecke produced his setting for the Communion Service, in the old Dorian mode, which returned magnificently to the simplicity of early Church music.

For, from the beginning, the basis of all Church music had been the austere plainsong: those eight prime modes, tones or scales, of which the first, third, fifth and seventh had been arranged for Church use by St. Ambrose, and the rest added by St. Gregory two hundred years afterwards. All the music written in these modes was essentially melody of voices in unison. It was, therefore, for variation as well as from tradition that antiphonal singing became general, especially in the very long Offices with their innumerable psalms.

Nor would the whole of either side of a choir be necessarily used at a time, but increasingly choice voices from one, then the other, alternately. Although men of austere temperament always opposed it, forms of harmony like the thirds and sixths of the faux-bourdon were improvised by experienced singers, at least from the fourteenth century; and songs like `Sumer is ycumen in' began increasingly to echo back into sacred music. When such parts came to be written down, people called it `prick music', from the appearance of the notes.

Alongside the constant temptation for homophonic music to develop into polyphonic, was the temptation to support and then accompany either with instrumental music of growing complication. To the early shawm, the precursor of oboe and clarinet, were added primitive forms of violin and of organ.

The east side of Beverley Minster's reredos has a much-pained looking violinist and a boisterous fellow with a bagpipe. Winchester Cathedral, before the twelfth century, had an organ with twenty-six bellows and seventy blowers which required two organists. Some cathedrals, like Exeter, still have the galleries of their mediaeval musicians.

It had always been a full-time job to keep players and choir, even choir alone, awake and behaving suitably. The precentor, often aided, as for example at York, with two choral rulers or rectors, had to march up and down, armed with staves, on the watch for any sleeping monk or canon, who would subsequently have to explain himself in chapter; or for choristers who, catching sight, for example, of anybody in spurs, would dart out of their place then and there to demand `spur money'.

In 1485 even the privy purse of King Henry VII had to be opened to pay 4s. `to the children of the Chapell, for the king's spoures'. As late as 1850, at Peterborough, some Sapper officers with much shorter memories than choir boys were mulcted on this ancient score. The only way of escape that there had ever been was to prove that the boys could not repeat their `gamut', a complicated alphabet of plainsong:

What is a `Churching' ?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse
What is a `Churching' ?

At least until the end of the nineteenth century, country people of southern and eastern England still spoke of every church service as a churching. Even elderly dictionaries are inclined to describe a churching as `the performance, in the Anglican Church, of the office of returning thanks, or asking a blessing, with or on behalf of anyone, on a special occasion, e.g., “the churching of a newly-elected town council.”

As late as 1910, J. S. Bumpus's Dictionary of Ecclesiastical Terms speaks of an annual service in St. Paul's Cathedral, on the afternoon of the Sunday nearest to the opening of the Trinity Law Term, as `the Churching of the Judges.'

But this common use of the term, and even the special occasions, have fallen into disuse. Since 1939 the judges have been seen no more coming yearly to St. Paul's, robed and with posies in their hands. There, and in England in general, the term churching is applied now only to the coming to church of a woman `at the usual time after her delivery'.

If the term churching were still in common and proper use, the prevalent suspicion that the `Churching of Women' was a pagan survival of purification from uncleanness might not have gathered so thickly.

If people were to read the Office in the Prayer Book, they would still find that this churching is, truly, a thanksgiving. The slight changes from the mediaeval Sarum use, on which the present office is based, have only strengthened this old note. The inclusion, in 1662, of the direction that the woman should come `decently apparelled', that is, that she should be in a white veil, was the confirmation of most ancient custom, as was the footnote that it was seemly that the office should precede a Communion service, as it had always done.

It was, apparently, thought unnecessary to mention another ancient custom, whereby a woman's friends came with her; and it was not until the `Deposited Book' of 1928 that the renewal was suggested of another custom, oddly fallen into disuse, that the woman should be accompanied in thanksgiving by her husband.

As long ago as the thirteenth century, however much it may have been disregarded, the Canon Law of the Church made an attack on the assumption that a woman, after child-birth, could not enter her church or neighbours' houses for a definite period, because of some alleged uncleanness. `If women, after child-bearing, desire immediately to enter the church, they commit no sin by so doing, nor are they to be hindered', ran the Canon Law.

The very fact, all the same, that people scarcely believe that the Church has rejected all opinion that the crisis of child-birth is an evil or impure one, is in itself part proof of the lurking prevalence of a degraded pagan attitude.

The true pagan attitude, unlike this, was in its essentials passionately simple and understandable. It had a fine humanity of custom, which is still to be found among such peoples as the Marquesas, among whole Gauguin lived, or the Kaffirs, and even among the Basques. The centre of happiness was children and their begetting, and both lay at the core of the untouchable mystery of life. But both, therefore, were fearfully exposed to the hostile forces warring against men.

All people knew their particular demons: they were the vampire, the nightmare, the unspeakable `incubus'. Through Jewish legend, they were personified in Lilith, the demon wife of Adam, who peopled the air with every incubus man knows, and who, crazed with jealousy of Eve's children, attacked and attempted to murder them new-born.

The idea of purification was, therefore, threefold. It was the victorious closing of a particularly dangerous battle for new life; the redemption from peril of the father, mother, and infant (sometimes of the whole kin) by placating gifts; and their triumphant re-entry, and the infant's initiation, into the common life of the community. Nearly always the means were provided by the mighty power of living water in washing or baptism, and sometimes also by blood offering.

Where observance narrowed round the woman, it was because she only could be spared for any time from work.

Among the Jews, significantly, `purification' was needed to make possible the return to common life of those who had touched holy things (Lev. xv. i, passim). Before such purification was accomplished, persons were taboo, untouchable, in the usual term `unclean', that is, mysterious, dangerous to common life.

Incense ?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Incense ?

For at least four hundred years after Christ, Christians had to fight against incense. Until the pagan gods were dead and disassociated for certain from Christ in the minds of converts, incense had been impossible, because it had belonged in the discarded mysteries.

Some people may be betrayed to their past above all by their sense of smell.

Associations with the mysteries of Tammuz (whom Milton calls Thamuz, and the Greeks called Adonis), may have been particularly feared by the Christians. Incense had long ago spread from his worship in Lebanon through Cyprus to Greece, and thence to many parts of the Roman Empire.

Classical writers believed that the frankincense originated in Syria and Phoenicia. In fact it came from the sacred trees of the fabulous Punt, which has some- times been identified in the lands of the Hadramaut or of Somaliland, where the resinous trees still grow.

From here the caravan routes ran overland through the countries of the Edomites and of the Amorites, leaving a trail of cities like Petra, Philadelphia ('Amman), and Damascus. The first meeting place of frankincense with the cult of Tammuz was probably southern Babylonia, where he seems anciently to have been a king.

The originals of the dirges which the prophet Ezekiel, to his dismay, heard the Hebrew women wailing at the north gate of the temple are likely to have been Babylonian hymns to Tammuz. Their echoes could well have confused Christian converts centuries later.

Arise then, go, hero, the road of `No-Return'.
Alas, hero! son-my faithful lord; .. .
Alas, hero! thou who art my heavenly light; .. .
Alas, hero! brother, mother, heavenly vine.
He goeth, he goeth, to the bosom of the earth-
He will cause abundance for the land of the dead.
For his lamentation, for the day of his fall,
In an unpropitious month of his year.
To the road of the peoples' end
At the call of the lord.

Tammuz, the lord of the seasons, almost the god of spring, of the sun, of resurrection, of germination and growth, was the beloved of Istar, whom the Greeks called Aphrodite, and the Romans Venus.

According to Phoenician legends Tammuz was killed in his youth as he hunted the wild boar, and Istar went crying for him to the house of the dead. Because the world could not do without them, they were finally allowed to return to earth together for part of every year.

To-day the associations between Christ and Tammuz are curious: for example, the fact that a scarlet pimpernel is called `Adonis', and, in Arabic, both `the blood of the Messiah' and `the flower of Tammuz'. In the first Christian centuries such confusions were deadly, and incense could have been a medium for them. It came to be enough in times of Roman persecution for a Christian to throw a little incense on an altar to admit that he had reverted to paganism.

It was, perhaps, for similar reasons of association, as well as because of the general temper of Puritanism, that incense was banished from Anglican worship after the Reformation. Its growing use at Masses, in the blessing of relics, and at shrines, seemed to the Reformers to have become idolatrous.

It was a great change from the eighth century, when a Roman Ordo had first allowed incense in a procession, to the last two centuries when incense was being used in the central ritual of the Mass itself. The Reformers did not see it as the fulfilment of Malachi's prophecy, `In every place incense shall be offered in my name', nor as St. John's `smoke of the incense which came up with the prayers of the saints' (Rev. viii).

After the Reformation, therefore, and until the Ritualists of the nineteenth century successfully revived the use of incense in a certain number of English churches, censers virtually vanished from liturgical use. A number of those of which there are record had in any case belonged to monastic houses, and had been sold, looted, or hidden at the Dissolution.

The fourteenth century censer and incense boat belonging to Ramsey Abbey were found three hundred years after the house had been dissolved, at the draining of Whittelsea Mere. Only unusually did any continue in the old use, as, apparently, at Ely Cathedral until the end of the eighteenth century, or in the private chapels of men like Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, or of Archbishop Laud.

Otherwise incense was occasionally used before such crowded ceremonies as a Royal coronation, for the utilitarian purpose of sweetening the atmosphere. The fastidious Queen Elizabeth insisted on its use before any service at which she was expected. But on the whole the English preferred bad smells, the risk of infection, and dry-rot in the beams, to an odour which may still have reminded them of other things besides sanctity.

What is the Origin of Processions?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

What is the Origin of Processions?

The fine Puritan, Baxter, both scorned processions and in a sense revealed their origin. During the Commonwealth he criticized the old `processions and perambulations,' and attacked the `profane, ungodly, presumptuous multitude' which loved them and went on them whenever it could.

Processions were formed, that is to say, as soon as primitive man had reached sufficient agreement with his neighbours to be prepared to go dancing out with them. The earliest communities of which there is any record danced home behind bridegroom and bride; they also danced behind a bier, battling with the evil spirits for the retention of the living, and for an easier passage for the dead.

In such formal civilizations as those of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, the pace of the processions may have decreased, but the magnificence and number of occasions had increased. Besides private observances, most great public occasions for rejoicing and lamentation were marked by processions.

Egyptians went out to greet the god Osiris or to enthrone or entomb the pharaoh; Greeks and Romans celebrated with processions the feasts of Diana and Ceres, the opening of the circus games, or a general's triumph. These peoples, too, followed some of the ways of their forefathers, and went out to sprinkle the fields with holy water for fertility, or encircled a town to fasten it against demons.

Hittites and Hebrews also knew ritual processions of this sort for calling down blessings and vanquishing enemies. It is possible that when the Israelites encircled the walls of Jericho they were conforming with ancient folk-magic as well as with the revelation of Joshua. When for century after century they celebrated the feast of Tabernacles with processions of palm-bearers round the altar, to mark Israel's deliverance and the yearly harvest, the Jews were combining in an act of religious thanksgiving both a national episode and an ancient nature feast.

It is not surprising that Christians, too, should have transformed into occasions of their own many of the ancient feasts. nor that they should have introduced into the liturgy the formal dignity of the procession. At least by the fourth century there seem to have been processions at Christian funerals; there were also the beginnings of litanies, special prayers of supplication, which tended to be used in procession on anciently venerated days. 

One such occasion was the feast of St. Mark, which fell near a primeval spring festival, and this was observed through- out the middle ages as a great day of procession. Other such days were kept at the time of the ancient harvest prayers, whose hallowed rites the Church transformed into Rogation processions, now again quite widely observed in England. With the procession of candles at the feast of the Purification, the great procession of palms of Palm Sunday, and the procession of Corpus Christi, these were the grand ceremonial occasions for processions in the mediaeval Church.

But the whole of the liturgy and the calendar of the Church became interwoven with minor processions. So in fact did courtly, social, and political life, as to some extent they are still. The Lord Mayor's show is the one survivor of many old Guild processions of the middle ages.

Thus the Church transformed the instinctive urge for ritual dancing into acts of worship. It did the same for many people's desire to go farther afield together: mediaeval pilgrimage (as also modern pilgrimage) is extended procession. All over England the shrines were visited: Chaucer's pilgrims rode to Canterbury, young Henry Tudor went barefoot to Walsingham. For those who must go still farther there was Jerusalem.

For the English pilgrim who could not hope to don the `sign of the crossed palms' to show that he was Jerusalem-bound, nor the `keys of St. Peter' for Rome, there was the Englishman's dear shrine of St. James of Compostella (Santiago), on the north-west coast of Spain.

It was the `cockle shell', the sign of St. James, that Sir Walter Raleigh remembered when he wrote in the Tower:

Give me my scallopshell of quiet,
My staff of faith to walk upon,
My scrip of joy, immortal diet,
My bottle of salvation,
My gown of glory, hope's true gage;
And thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

Why Wear a Dog Collar?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Why Wear a Dog Collar?
The English clergy have been unmistakably recognizable by their outdoor dress for no more than a century. It was the influence of the Oxford Movement and of the serious Evangelicals of the early nineteenth century, of men like Pusey and Keble, and Bishop Wilberforce, that made general a quite new sense of separateness from the laity and of serious vocation among the clergy of the Church of England.

This sense came gradually to express itself even in the ordinary outdoor clothes of clergymen. From the mid-nineteenth century it was not to be only the solid majority of the clergy, but all of them, who habitually wore the most simple and sober form of the ordinary middle-class dress of their day.

But, as in the early days of the Church, this sober temper of the clergy proved to be conservative. In Rome in the third century, Christian priests continued to wear the long, sleeved robes which before the barbarian invasions all Roman citizens had worn, until they became the distinctive cassock and alb of the Church, and so, basically, of all offices of clerks, whether judicial, academic or courtly.

So, in England, the clergy have now been wearing for a century the dress which at the time of the Oxford Movement any sober educated man was wearing. The short coat of the bishop and archdeacon of to-day, and their gaiters, are the utilitarian riding dress of the early nineteenth century.

Deans, who had no occasion to travel, emulated the same garb. The clerical collar is the stereotyping of the plain stock and high collar of the same period. The cassock remained, as it had always been, the proper outdoor dress of Anglican clergymen, and came more into use. The apron of bishop and archdeacon is, indeed, merely the shortened cassock.

It is true that from about this time all masculine dress tended to become drab and rather monotonous. But in all walks of life except the clerical this meant that the possibility of recognizing a man's class and profession by his off-duty clothes at least was virtually ended. In these circumstances the clerical dress, with its logical implication that a priest was never off duty, became particularly conspicuous.

Before this every age knew its wide variations in dress which mirrored the great differences of rank and temper of mind of clergymen, just as they did those of their lay contemporaries. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, for example, as previously, there was the minority of notable fops, clerical and lay, with their laces and buckles and powdered perukes. Similarly, at the other end of the social scale, and much more numerous, there were the labourers - town and country parsons among them - living in cottage tenements on the remnant of the glebe. 

It was only new funds and financial improvements behind the determination of Wilberforce and others that, for the first time in English history, got rid of peasants in holy orders, and attempted the introduction of a gentleman into every parish in the land.

But at least the extremes of foppishness and luxury among clergy had always been liable to rebuke. In the fourteenth century, for instance, the Archbishop of Canterbury attacked ecclesiastics for being dressed more like military persons than clerical, some having knives attached to their girdles, green shoes with cracowes, slashed belts studded with precious stones, gowns lined or turned up with fur or silk, rings upon their fingers, hoods with liripipes of wondrous development, and finally, instead of the regulation tonsured head, hair as long and curly as a woman's. 

Probably, however, even among the clerical magnificos of the later middle ages, none was a match for the princely ostentation of Wolsey. Certainly after the Reformation his like was never seen again, and the English, by removing the old basis, made sure that it never could be. So lay owners and lay statesmen took over many of the old properties and offices which for centuries previously had been appropriated and held exclusively by abbots, prelates, and priests.

If before the Reformation luxury of dress was more common than afterwards, so also was asceticism. Particular holiness was ascribed to those who wore from choice the frugal garb of the monk, as St. Cuthbert did, even after he was made Bishop of Hexham. Even when such behaviour came in for papal censure, as it did in the case of some sixth-century bishops of Gaul, it did not shake the people's affection for it. 

The English chroniclers, for example, recounted with delight the reply of the saintly Englishman, Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester, just after the Norman Conquest, to the sartorial remonstrance of the Frenchman, Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances. Coutances had told Wulfstan that, in his position, he should wear his garments lined with cat's fur, not with sheepskin. Even the Normans were pleased when Wulfstan answered that he was accustomed to sing `O Lamb of God' not `O Cat of God'.

All Bishops and Curates?

Bishops and Curates

From "The Pilot", 1968, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

All Bishops and Curates?

THE prayer for the whole state of Christ's Church reduces to order the confusion of clerical titles. In England there are only, practically speaking, two orders, the episcopal and the priestly. Although it is easily arguable that the office of deacon is another, as it was before the Reformation, it is in fact only very rarely now a lifelong calling in the Anglican Church.

It has come to be generally regarded rather as the necessary preliminary step to the priestly order.

The other minor clerical orders, of subdeacon, reader, exorcist, and doorkeeper, disappeared much more completely from post-Reformation England.

Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple

Yet if the orders are but two, the administrative ranks are numerous. An English bishop (the Anglo-Saxon attempt at saying episcopus) can become, `by divine Providence,' his Grace, the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of all England, or his Grace, the Lord Archbishop of York, Primate of England.

Metropolitan

Elsewhere, as in the Greek Orthodox archbishopric of Jerusalem, the title is still Metropolitan, and in some sees with mighty histories in both Greek and Roman Churches, like Constantinople, the title is Patriarch.

To the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of twenty-eight dioceses are suffragan, that is assistant and subject in jurisdiction, as are thirteen to the Archbishop of York. Similarly, diocesan bishops have suffragan bishops, under their jurisdiction responsible for part of the see.

It was when, in the great mediaeval dioceses of England (the Bishopric of Lincoln, for example, included the counties of Rutland, Northampton and Oxford), the bishop was so much away from his Cathedral city, that somebody in full priest's orders-the dean-became master in his place of the business of the Cathedral.

When divisions of big dioceses have taken place after 1882, and parish churches become cathedrals, the new dean has usually been called provost. This was because of the Crown's warning that all deans were appointed by the Crown, not by anybody else.

Because the title of dean belonged mediaevally to the chairman of other bodies besides cathedral chapters, it is still to be found elsewhere. 

In the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, for example, the dean is as a rule responsible for the discipline and morals of the undergraduate members of the college. In the supreme ecclesiastical court in England, the court of the Arches (the corrupted form of ecclesia Beatae Mariae de Arcubus, St. Mary-le-Bow, where the court was held), the president is called the dean. The Bishop of London is dean of the Chapels Royal. 

Although they are in the diocese of Winchester, the islands of Guernsey and Jersey each retains a dean of its own. 

Dean of Jersey

When parishes were grouped for administrative purposes, the chairman of each group was, and is, the rural dean. In the dioceses of Exeter and Leicester he has always been entitled the Dean of Christianity.

It was not only in the affairs of his cathedral that a mediaeval bishop, also lord of great temporal estates, had to delegate responsibility. He had to delegate it, besides, throughout his diocese. His subordinate officer, at first the bishop's deacon, in time gained a good deal of independence and called himself archdeacon. He held a jurisdiction second only to the bishop's, and became responsible for the administration of church revenues, for ecclesiastical and clerical discipline, and for the morals of the laity.

Although from the eighth century the archdeacon had usually been in priest's orders, it was not until 1662 that English law required him to be so, nor until a century ago that it stipulated that nobody should become an archdeacon who had not been at least six years in priest's orders.

Archdeacon

The ancient, powerful, and much disliked, Archdeacon's Court has scarcely functioned in England since the seventeenth century. But every archdeacon is still responsible for the state of parishes and the fabric of churches, making visitation and instituting churchwardens, though now usually in part not the whole of a diocese. 

Although in procession the archdeacon comes after the dean, he has long had an important place in many cathedral chapters and, in the diocese at large, an eminence so venerable as to be capable of rousing the envy of deans.

By Trollope's day he had long outlived an unpopularity which had forced that distinguished scholar, John of Salisbury (d. 1180), to exclaim `Is it possible for an archdeacon to be saved?'

Archdeacon (right) in The Barchester Chronicles

Was Matins Always a Service?

From "The Pilot", 1967, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Was Matins Always a Service?

SAILORS still divide the day and the night into watches of three hours each, as did imperial Rome. At least by the third century after Christ, hermits and others of ascetic life were marking these watches with vigils of prayer.

In the small hours of the morning, the Matutina Nora, close upon the heels of midnight, they said matins.'

Only when the Latin was abbreviated did it become matt, through the custom of doubling the last consonant of an abbreviated word.

In the first days of the Church it had probably been customary for Christians to meet together for morning and evening prayer, as it had been for the Jews. For a long time these Christians, who, like Christ and the Apostles, had been brought up in the synagogue, continued indeed to attend these prayers with the Jews. In the first chapter of Acts it is recorded that `Peter and John went up together into the temple at the hour of prayer, being the ninth hour'.

This certainly remained the custom of the Hebrew Christians in Jerusalem, who clung for long to the strict letter of the Jewish Law. Gradually Christian congregations generally formed the practice of meeting for morning and evening prayer together, as they had always done for the breaking of bread.

It was when the Christian community became more complex, and to think of itself as being bound to various tasks, that the duty of continual prayer on behalf of all began to be ascribed quite particularly to priests and monks.

As early as the fourth century it was said that `a cleric who without being sick fails in the vigils should be deprived of his benefice'. When in the sixth century St. Benedict made his great rule for prayer and work, he made obligatory upon its followers the saying of the offices of day and night. His rule tended to become the pattern of observance both for other monastic orders and for the clergy.

In the high middle ages king and peasant alike remembered the constant vigils of priest and monk on his behalf. When the twelfth century French king, Philip Augustus, was in danger of shipwreck, he is said to have cried out to his companions at midnight, `You cannot perish, for at this moment thousands of monks are rising from their beds and will soon be praying for us; after whom the parish priests also will soon arise and give us their prayers'. Some declared that even `the angel host, being acquainted with the hours, took that time to join their prayers and praises with those of the Church'.

Later, popular fancy attached a symbolic significance to the seven offices, equating them with the timing of Christ's passion, as seen in Dr. Neale's words:

At matins bound, at prime reviled,
Condemned to death at tierce,
Nailed to the cross at sext, at none
His blessed side they pierce.
They take him down at vespertide,
In grave at compline lay,
Who thenceforth bids his Church observe
The sevenfold hours always.

Compline, the late nightfall office, was added a little later to the old cycle; in this verse it takes the place of the early morning office of lauds.

By the later middle ages, however, changes were noticeable in the religious observance of clergy and laymen. Too many of the former, in particular secular priests and members of the less strict monastic communities, had grown very slack, hurrying through jumbled versions of the hours. Often all the morning offices were said `by accumulation' together (or in two conglomerations with the second one squeezed in on each side of the Mass), and the evening offices were similarly treated.

As for laymen, the tendency was more and more to segregate them in the nave, away from the priests and monks saying or chanting the offices in Latin in the screened choir, so that they increasingly became merely passive spectators in Church worship.

It is true that devotional books of the hours, or breviaries, were sometimes produced for laymen, and were often beautifully illuminated.

Sometimes these carried English translations of the psalms and prayers, as does a fine fourteenth-century breviary still existing. But all the same the increasing complication of the offices, their length, and the fact that they were in Latin, tended to leave people out.

It can therefore be seen as a double success for the English reformers when in the sixteenth century they made an order for Morning Prayer and an order for Evening Prayer in English, and included them for daily use in the new Book of Common Prayer. They restored to Christian people the ancient tradition of intelligible and common prayer, and preserved the finest of the old prayers accumulated through many centuries.

It was the English people in general, however, not the reformers, who finally attached to the new order for Morning Prayer the name of the old office of Matins. In the same way they have attached to the order for Evening Prayer the old Saxon office name of Evensong.

Exceptional Hats?

From "The Pilot", 1967, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Exceptional Hats?

A early as the fourth century A.D., bishops in the West tended to appear in hats on ceremonial occasions, but the best authorities deny that they ever went into church in them until centuries later.

When Pope Constantine [not to be confused with the Emperor Constantine] made a State entry into Constantinople at the beginning of the eighth century he wore a tiara-perhaps an elaboration of the classic wreath or crown. But usually bishops were likely to wear a form of the `phrygian cap'. It would be quite natural for this helmet-like cap to be made of white stuff, sometimes stiffened to make it stand up. Its name in Greek was mitra.

But the evidence is that for many centuries people would have been exceedingly shocked if a bishop had gone into church with his head in any such covering.

There almost sounds still a breath of scandal in the seventh century exclamation of the historian Simeon, Archbishop of Thessalonica: `Every bishop and priest of the East, with the exception of the Patriarch of Alexandria, says Mass with his head bare '

Indeed when as late as the tenth and eleventh century in the West (but not till the sixteenth century in the East) it began to be not unheard - of for a bishop to appear even inside the church in his mitre, it seems as - though this procedure had started through frailty or absentmindedness. 

It may well have been a rather old Bishop of Rome who in the tenth century first went on into St. Peter's in the mitre which he had always worn in procession to the great door. But the innovation, once made, became customary in Rome.

Like the fabled garter of the Countess of Salisbury which Edward III raised to be the emblem of the most coveted order of knighthood, the wearing of a mitre in church, because it had become a peculiarity of the Bishop of Rome, became a dignity to be sought and granted elsewhere as a special favour.


Three years before William of Normandy invaded England, Pope Alexander II even honoured Abbot Egelsinus of St. Augustine's, Canterbury, by making him the first abbot ever to be granted a mitre.

Soon the novelty wore off and mitres turned conventional. They therefore had to vie with one another in magnificence. Since all the other bishops in Western Christendom had adopted liturgical mitres, the Pope differentiated his, first by the single encircling crown, then in the thirteenth century by a second, and finally in the fourteenth by a third. 

The Bishop of Durham encircled his mitre with a ducal coronet when it surmounted the armorial bearings of his see.

John Peckham, Archbishop of Canterbury, although he was a Franciscan, paid £174 4s. 1d. for his mitre in the thirteenth century (at a time when an ox could be bought for thirteen shillings, 104 eggs for eightpence, and a blacksmith might make eight shillings per month), although, in the fourteenth, Bishop John Drokensford of Bath and Wells gave only £23 6s. 8d. for two. Abbot Thomas Delamare in the brass in St. Albans Abbey wears a fine example of a great mitre of his time.

With bishops so lordly, and mitres a symbol of their mightiness spiritual and temporal, it is not at all surprising that clerics of every grade should also expect to appear in church in a version of the distinctive caps which they customarily wore out of doors. These had been a form of skull cap (specially welcome to the shaven crowns of mediaeval clerks) which had taken the place of the old hood of the rough cloak known as the `birrus'. Perhaps their Italian name biretta or beretta was thence derived.

These soft caps in time had become slightly higher, being easily pinched into dents by the hand that removed or replaced them. Then these dents, either three or four, became formalized, as they are to-day. Despite prohibitions, in England made as late as the thirteenth century, clergy of all ranks in time managed to keep on their birettas in church.

Indeed, a little later, noblemen and others generally were also keeping on their peculiar hats, and did so intermittently, in England, till the early nineteenth century.

But a memory remains even to-day, wherever mitres or birettas are still worn, of the compromise with primitive custom which their introduction signified. A bishop or priest by formal rubric discards the head covering at prayer. He wears it only when he is processing, when he is seated, or, like the judge who puts on the black cap to pronounce sentence, when he exercises spiritual jurisdiction.

Never a Hat?

From "The Pilot", 1967, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Never a Hat?

IN Jerusalem to-day, as in all places the world over where there are strict Muslims or strict Jews, men cover their heads when they pray, as they do when they eat or appear in public. There seems anciently to have been a different custom among the Jews: for example, Samson seems to have gone bareheaded and so, to his cost, did Absalom.

By the time of Christ, however, the other custom had become established, and it was understood that men covered their heads in order to show their humility and reverence before God. Their hair had in some sense become sacred, as it still is among Oriental peoples. It was something to be especially respected as a token that man had been made in the image of God. For a Jew to swear by his head or by his hair was a solemn oath; for a Jew to appear uncovered was a shame.

Probably Westerners rather vaguely think that all Christian men worship bare-headed, following St. Paul's ruling in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (ch. xi). But in fact there seems to have been neither this revolutionary intent nor effect in St. Paul's letter. St. Paul seems to have made not a general ruling but the notable decision that it was proper for Christians to follow the honourably accepted local custom in such matters as dress.

He therefore expected that Corinthian Christian men should go to church bare-headed, as they went elsewhere.

Certainly St. Paul has been taken in this sense. So, for example, converted Jews in Palestine through the first centuries kept strictly to every tittle of the Jewish law and custom, including the covering of the head. Similarly, Christian Arabs in Jordan to-day wear their head- coverings in church, though without the encircling cord, as they do as a sign of respect in everyday life.

Equally in the matter of the veiling of women, St. Paul was commending and confirming the best local customs.

It was not only deeply shocking to honourable Jews but also to honourable Greeks and Romans, that women should go bare-headed. It appears that some of the women converts at Corinth, inhabitants of the most important city of Greece under the Roman Empire, had misinterpreted St. Paul's teaching that `in Christ there can be no male or female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus'.

By copying the bare heads of the men, these women had been urging a revolution in social as well as in spiritual status, and it was to them that St. Paul addressed his arguments, justifying the honourable local customs for them as well as for the men.

Later in the West, Tertullian commented that a Christian prayed with bare head as he had no need to conceal a blush because of his prayers, unlike the heathen who, he insinuated, certainly needed to be hidden by their head-gear. St. Cyprian in Africa repeated the same argument.

Yet although it had become the custom for Christian men to appear in church uncovered-a custom strengthened by a different practice among lively pagans-some head-dresses were, in time, to appear on the heads of Christian men at worship. As soon as Christianity spread into the cold countries and, farther south, the old imperial provinces forgot their ancient austerity, Christians, like their neighbours, adopted the variety of hats suited to their rank.

Gradually these hats began to make their appearance, at first on notable heads, in church. So, from the tenth century, some bishops wore mitres in church on ceremonial occasions. Soon clerical head-dress in general became so varied and profuse that rules had to be made about it.

The Gregorian sacramentary, for instance, noted that no cleric should appear in church with a covered head `unless he have an infirmity'. It has been argued from the text that this applied only to the season of Lent.

Why a Ring for Bishops.?

From "The Pilot", 1968 comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained

By S.G. Thicknesse
Why a Ring for Bishops?

Among the collection of ancient and mediaeval rings in Room 29 of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is a strange gold one as long as a brooch, with diamond-shaped alternating with circular panels, and each panel stamped with a letter. It is the ring of Alhstan, Bishop of Sherborne, 824-867, and bears his name.

In the first two or three centuries strict Christians seem not to have worn rings; but gradually, as the bishops began to be men of importance, they began to wear signet rings, as did men of note in the Roman Empire. This was partly because an increasing number of things needed to be marked with a recognizable and authoritative seal.

By the seventh century the ring of a bishop had assumed a dual importance, as a king's ring also had. It was at once (with the pastoral staff) the sign of his office, with which he had been invested at his consecration, and his official seal, which he set to the business of his diocese and the affairs of his growing estates. By the tenth century the bishop had become a magnate, a lord at once spiritual and temporal.

For two hundred years ecclesiastical and lay powers-popes and kings-were to struggle over the right to give the bishop his ring. The Pope claimed that the ring was the seal of a bishop's spiritual office for which he was chosen and consecrated by the Church. The king claimed that since the bishop was also a great lay lord, often a royal official, he must be chosen first by him, and receive the ring as a token of royal investiture and loyalty.

In the twelfth century a compromise was reached (in England between Henry I and Archbishop Anselm) and the ring was blessed and put by the Church on the finger of the bishop-elect whom the Church had accepted and the king had nominated.

In the centuries after this shadow victory, mystical importance began to be attached to the bishop's ring, which was often made of very costly and elaborate materials. This made it an object of attack by Reformers and Puritans, and though a ring is now worn by most of the bishops, there is no mention of it in the `Form for the Ordering of Bishops' in the Elizabethan Prayer Book.

The ring had become the symbol of the sevenfold gift of the Holy Spirit. It was worn on the index finger of the right hand, the middle of the three fingers a bishop raised in blessing, `the finger of God' and the finger of discretion and silence, a symbol of the episcopal claim to reveal or seal up the mysteries of God. 

Or it was worn on the fourth finger of the right hand, as a sign of spiritual marriage with the Church, or, alternatively, as a sign that the bishop was the representative of Christ, whose spouse and Body the Church was. But thirteenth-century critics thought it necessary to remind the bishop that he was not himself Lord, but shepherd.

What are Rubrics?

From "The Pilot", 1968 comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

What are Rubrics?

In England, ever since the Reformation, rubrics have I been rules for the ordering of divine service which have behind them the force not only of ecclesiastical but also of civil authority. The detailed directions in the Prayer Book, sometimes still in the red lettering which gave them their name, but usually now in italics, can in fact bring bishops and clergy into the dock as law-breakers.

The Act of Uniformity, which can be read at the beginning of every Prayer Book, recalls by the severity of its penalties the store which Elizabeth and her Ministers set on the acceptance of a unified order and form. This, it was hoped, would put an end to those religious confusions and controversies of the Reformation which had brought such terrifying political disruption in their train.

But even in nineteenth-century England, when the political significance of religious uniformity was relatively small, clergymen were convicted and penalized for practices not authorized by rubric. So, for example, in 1868 the Reverend John Purchas was convicted in the Arches Court of Canterbury among other things for standing with his back to the people when consecrating the Elements. The judgment was upheld by the Privy Council, and when Purchas neither paid the costs, amounting to £2,096 14s. 10d., nor discontinued any of the practices which had been declared illegal, he was suspended for a year from the discharge of his clerical office.

Directions and titles written in red had, according to the Latin poet Juvenal, been customary in the old Roman law books. But very few, if any, of such rubrics appeared in the earliest service books of the Church. (Pliny says that this red colour-ruber-first got its name from a coloured earth which carpenters used, to mark their wood for the cutting.)

Of two of the earliest surviving missals, for example, the sacramentary of Leo and the Gelasian sacramentary, both of which belong to the fifth century, the first contains no rubrics at all. A French missal of the sixth century contains eight rubrics, and an Irish one of the ninth, two, in the vernacular.

Collections of rubrics were made separately in special books, under such titles as Ordo, Directory or Ceremonial. Copies of these compilations were made with not less painstaking devotion than were copies of the Offices themselves, of which Charlemagne's scholar, the Yorkshireman Alcuin, reminds us.

Part of the prologue to his Sacramentary runs: `And we pray you to copy it again so diligently as to its text that it comfort the ears of the learned and allow not any of the simpler sort to go astray. For it will be no avail, as saith blessed St. Jerome, to have made correction in a book, unless the corrected reading be preserved by the diligent care of the bookkeepers . . .'

Bishops and abbots themselves used to check the final versions of the scribes in the mediaeval scriptoria. The multiplication of such books, however, and the hardening of local traditions meant that a variety both of ritual practices and of forms of prayer became common in different areas. 

St. Augustine complained of this in the sixth century, and in the eighth, in Gaul, every priest was required to describe -his own practice in writing, and to present this libellus ordinis to the bishop in Lent for approbation. In England there grew up a Salisbury (Sarum) Use, a Hereford Use, a Use of Bangor and of York and of Lincoln.

As ecclesiastical authority became more centralized - largely a matter of the roads having become safer - such local differences began to be attacked. One way of procuring uniform practice was for the Pope to authorize a collection of rubrics which he believed to be based on the best and most primitive traditions. Such a collection was the Ordo Romanus.

Another way was for him to authorize the appearance of the most important of these rubrics in the Missal itself. This he did not do until the end of the fifteenth century. Then, despite the strong opinion of many ecclesiasts that rubrics were not a matter for the laity, Burcard, Master of the Ceremonies under Innocent VIII and Alexander VI, published together the order and the ceremonial directions of the Mass in a Pontifical. This, from then on, was the glass of fashion and the mould of form.

How Did Vestments Originate?

From "The Pilot", 1968 comes this, an interesting historical ramble. 

Some Church Customs Explained

By S.G. Thicknesse

How Did Vestments Originate?

In the stone reliefs now in the south aisle of the presbytery at Chichester Cathedral, Jesus is wearing the exquisite draperies of the Graeco-Roman world into which he was born. Under the himation, the draped overwrap of the teacher, known also in Galilee, he wears the long, full and probably white (alba) tunic, the folds of which hide the girdle at the waist.

When the English masons, probably some time before the Norman Conquest, carved these blocks of Caen stone at Chichester, the robes of the ancient civilization and of Jesus were recognizable in the Eucharistic vestments of the Church. The tunica alba had become the alb, the basic vestment of the priesthood; the himation had become formalized into the narrow and yoke-like pallium of mediaeval bishops, and its place taken by the full cloak, from the fourth century called jokingly a casula, a small house. It was not a great change from casula to the early English chesible, and the modern chasuble.

It was when people generally in the Roman Empire had begun to drop the old classical garments, about the fourth century, that the dress of Christian clergy, who continued to wear them, began to appear specialized. `Vestments' began because of a conservatism which held to a tradition of dress which had become associated with the saints and martyrs who had worn it, and was simple and excellent in itself, not from any intention of appearing different from other people.

Jewish-and even pagan-priestly vestments had probably also been gradually evolved in much the same way, and, like the Christian, became much more significant in the end because they had grown up despite the simple and strict attitude of the faithful, as well as from it.

But although the liturgical dress of Christian priests began, from the fourth century, to be distinguished from that of pagans and gradually from that of the Christian laity, it always continued to be influenced in some degree by changes of secular fashion.

Although, for example, the clergy did not adopt the short tunic which became fashionable in Rome at the end of the third century (at least until the appearance of the clerical surplice in the eleventh century, or of the Italian cotta in the eighteenth), bishops and deacons-and before the casula, priests - had early adapted to their use the sleeved garment from pagan Dalmatia, which the bizarre Emperor Commodus at the end of the second century had introduced into Rome.

When St. Cyprian was martyred in the next century he first divested himself of cloak and dalmatic. In the same way the large white linen kerchief, which once had been commonly carried by anybody, usually round the neck with the ends tucked under the tunic, by the eighth century had become the distinctive amice of the clergy. Similarly the stole, and a little later the maniple, were derived from smaller kerchiefs, carried for convenience over shoulder or forearm.

In time these were folded and, a mere memory of their former utilitarian selves, became a badge of priestly office. They also became a distinguishing mark, as a deacon wore his stole across the left shoulder, a bishop wore his hanging straight down over both shoulders, and a priest crossed the ends of his stole over his breast.

Later developments-the magnificent copes from secular cloaks, the embroidered orphrey (Pliny's `curium phrygialium', phrygian goldwork) of the chasuble, the velvets and silks and tassels of the mediaeval Church-were all a mirror to the changing tastes and growing splendour and skill of society in general, and to increased enterprise along the trade routes.

In addition there were modifications introduced for convenience (like the `fiddle-back' chasuble which made easier the elevation of the Host) which often continued from habit. The surplices, for instance, at Christ Church, Oxford, and elsewhere, which are split down the front, started in the late seventeenth century when clerical wigs were deranged getting through the traditional neckline.

It was after vestments had become customary as a distinctive liturgical dress, and their use strictly reserved by occasion and priestly degree, that they began to be invested with symbolic significance, which they still tend to keep.

So, for example, an eighth-century manuscript directed the priest to say as he put on the maniple, `Encircle me, Lord, with goodness, and ordain my life spotless'. In the tenth century, a priest as he assumed his amice prayed `Place, O Lord, the helmet of salvation on my head to the defeat of diabolic invasions'.

Later, the Eucharistic vestments were seen as symbols of Christ's passion: the alb became the robe in which Christ was mocked, the maniple his fetters, the stole the towel with which he wiped the Apostles' feet.

The first English Prayer Book, confirmed in this by Elizabeth's Prayer Book of 1559, retained with little change the old vestments and ornaments, although for centuries the letter of this law went generally disregarded.