Reading Barchester Towers: Qs about CofE practices, controversies, hierarchy, etc.

Cafe Society
1

I’m reading and vastly enjoying Trollope’s Barchester Towers, but there’s much that is not clear to this non-religious American.

I’ve gathered that the main doctrinal conflict between the Grantlyites and the Proudieites has to do with the differences in high church and low church beliefs and practices. I’ve found a few online sources that explain some aspects of this controversy, but I’d welcome any explanations from fellow Dopers who could put it more fully in the context of the novel.

This passage touches on a few of the issues I’m not clear about.

For instance, what is intoning, and on what basis did Mr Slope and his ilk object to it and other musical aspects of high-church services?

What are the issues with candles and high-breasted silk waistcoats?

And I’m puzzled by the apparently infinite number and variety of clergymen in the diocese of Barchester. Off the top of my head, I can recall the following: vicars, deans, chaplains, prebendaries, wardens, precentors, canons, chancellors, etc., etc. I’ve read the dictionary definitions of most of these titles, but I don’t see the big picture: how they all related to one another. Can anyone help me?

Finally (for now), one gets the impression from the book that the ratio of ordinary citizens to clergy was about 2:1. That’s partly because the book is about the clergy, and partly for satiric effect, but just how numerous were clergy in mid-19th century England, any way?

Although I would like answers to these questions, I’d be happy to entertain any general discussions and observations about Barchester Towers in this thread as well.

Thanks.

2

You have no hope with Trollope without What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England. Trollope or any other 19th-century author. Their environment was so unlike our own that you cannot imagine it.

As to your specific questions, the quotation points out some of the differences between High Church (Anglican and worst of all, by their guilt by adopting many of the traditions and liturgy, the (dare I utter the name?) the Roman Catholics) and the Low Church of the Non-Conformists, like the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, who didn’t hold with all the fooferaw, like fancy vestments and incense. Though there are some Low Church advocates that still (grudgingly) consider themselves Anglicans, they would probably be happier some Sunday morning if they realized they aren’t.
FTR, my wife, raised Methodist but exposed at an impressionable age to Pre-V2 Catholicism, prefers Evangelical Lutheranism, though she doesn’t realize that we don’t mean the part about being evangelical literally.

3

A quick googling of Edward Pusey makes it appear to me as though he was a High Church advocate (“bells and smells”, as they say) not Low Church (also, your quoted passage makes a lot more sense that way). Are you sure you’ve got that bit right?

4

Yes, the Puseyites were definitely of the High Church persuasion.

5

I was AMAZED when my wife’s Methodist church included a full Processional, including “bells, smells, and fancy vestments.” At that point I realized they had tossed aside the Low Church, though their pastor was the asshole who cranked up the UMC to totally scream when a gay pastor was ordained. Since then said pastor, I understand, has died. The Christian in me hopes for the best, but the non-Christian, reprehensible jerk, hopes otherwise.

Honest, these centuries you can’t beat a Catholic whose understandings of The Church includes both Catholicism and the Roman Panthology. We have you CREAMED!

6

Hah! Reading that right now. In fact, last night I read the chapter on CofE! Small world. It is almost as tho we were neighbors! :stuck_out_tongue:

So what’s the deal? Are they putting in a whole new pool across the street from you or what? Man, your town must be SWIMMING in dough! Get it? Swimming? Man - I crack me up! :cool:

7

Intoning is the practise of chanting parts of the services. It’s most common with the Psalms and the anthems (Te Deum, Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis), but can be extended to the entire service, if desired. It’s not singing in the ordinary sense of a song, since the words of the Psalms and the service are not songs, but it’s a musical form.

Low Church Anglicans object to it on a variety of grounds. One is that it’s a form of worship inherited from the Roman Catholic church, and therefore inherently suspect. As the split with Rome deepened, theological issues over the liturgy became one of the flashpoints, with strong Protestants favouring simple and sparse ceremonies and churches, with preference given to the liturgy of the word - Bible readings, prayer and preaching. Another is that since some training is required to acquire the practise, not everyone has the ability to chant, and it therefore deters people from fully participating in the services. Also, they would argue that specialised forms of worship like intoning encourages the development/maintenance of a professional priesthood and choristers - contrary to one theme of the Reformation, that every believer is in a direct relationship with God, without the need for clergy as intermediaries.

For candles, similar to the objections to intoning - “Popish practice”; too ceremonial; detracts from the purity of the word. When Elizabeth I had candles on the altar in her private chapel, the strong Protestants of the day viewed it as a cryptic suggestion that she had Roman Catholic leanings.

There was one case in the Victorian period where a parishioner actually brought a charge against a parish priest who started introducing some of the fancier elements - I think it was a cruxifix on the altar (or the communion table, as Low Church would term it). I’ll see if I can find a cite.

Don’t know about the waistcoats, but I would hazard a guess that it’s because some Low Church Anglicans carried their desire for simplicity in worship over into their personal lives as well, favouring simpler clothing, not fancy silk stuff.

We had a discussion of many of these terms a while ago in this thread: Catholic church terminology, which veered into Anglican territory.

Here’s a quick summary:

  • vicar - the incumbent priest/minister in a parish;

  • dean - the priest/minister responsible for a cathedral;

  • chaplain - a clergyman employed to provide pastoral services to a specific group (e.g. - an Army regiment) or a wealthy person;

  • prebendaries - a senior clergyman attached to the cathedral;

  • warden - a person (not necessarily clergy, but can be) appointed to run a particular institution such as a residential charity, which was the post held by the Warden in the first of the Barchester books;

  • precentor - a clergyman responsible for the organisation of the liturgy and worship in a large church, such as a cathedral;

  • canon - I’m familiar with it as a largely ceremonial title, but it has its origins in the period when the cathedral had a body of clergy appointed to it to run the cathedral, under the direction of the dean. The group as a whole was called the chapter, and the individual members were canons. How much authority a canon had at the time of the novels, I don’t know.

  • chancellor - I’m familiar with this term as the lawyer who is the legal advisor to the Diocese, but it may have more extended functions in the Church of England; for example, in one Rumpole story, he appears in a Chancellor’s court to defend a clergyman from charges of ecclesiastical misconduct.

(And, paging APB and Polycarp to see if they can elaborate on any of this.)

8

In the present context, that’s a bit misleading. The point about the High Church-Low Church split being described by Trollope is that it was a split within the Church of England. By later standards, most Anglican services in the early nineteenth century had been distinctly Low Church. Although they did stick to the Book of Common Prayer, they had avoided most of the self-conscious ceremonialism later associated with the Oxford Movement.

Thus, the point Trollope is making in the first paragraph of the passage quoted by commasense is that the local Anglican clergy had hitherto been firmly High Church in their politics (i.e. Tory), but that they had also been what would come to be considered Low Church in their liturgical preferences. Trollope is neatly describing how such liturgical preferences then suddenly become an issue only as a result of the new, very different liturgical fashions emanating from Oxford. These were issues over which Anglicans continued to disagree for much of the rest of the century. Low Church Anglicanism was always a force to be reckoned with.

It helps to remember that within any given diocese there were two distinct hierarchies centred on the bishop and on the cathedral respectively. Every bishop had his own team of officials to assist him in the administration of the diocese. That diocese was usually sub-divided into archdeaconries, within each of which an archdeacon would transact some of the more minor business on behalf of the bishop. Each bishop also had his own ecclesiastical court, headed by a chancellor (a layman). He would also have other officials to administer his episcopal estates (the temporalities).

A cathedral was a corporate body consisting of a group of clergymen, the canons (or prebendaries or prebends), who together comprised the chapter headed by the dean. The chapter would divide most of the senior offices within the cathedral between themselves. They also had their own officials to administer their own lands, which would be completely separate from those of the bishop. Canons - as canons - were never especially powerful. They were only responsible for running the cathedral. Canonries did however tended to come with large landed endowments.

But there is a further complication. These two hierarchies overlapped because archdeacons were often appointed as canons. Also, all the canons were usually nominated by the bishop. Even so, there could be bitter rivalries, often long-standing ones, between cathedral chapters and the local bishop. Canons - as canons - were, once appointed, largely independent of the bishop’s control. They literally had tenure.

In 1841 just 0.3 percent of the adult male population within England (and not in military service) were Anglican clergymen. Indeed, the great Victorian concern was that there were far too few Anglican clergymen. Mind you, this did tend to be combined with the view that too many of those that there were already were in the wrong places, not least on overstaffed cathedral chapters.

9

Thanks for the replies, and sorry for my mistake about the Puseyites.

Thanks for the book recommendation, dropzone. I just used Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, and found many of my answers right there. (I’ll probably buy the book anyway, but I wish it were available for the Kindle.)

And thanks especially to Northern Piper and APB for your excellent posts.

I’m a little confused here: I thought that intoning (etc.) was a High Church practice. Are you saying that the Dr. Grantly would have considered the little intoning that Mr Harding did as Low Church, but that Proudie and Slope were advocating Lower-than-Low practices?

10

Remember, these were government jobs. Some things never change. :smiley:

(spoken by a government worker)

11

Just to add to APB’s point - the Church of England has long had a “big tent” tradition, unlike many other Protestant groups from the Reformation, because it is the established church. For a good part of post-Reformation English history, only members of the Church of England had full civil rights - Roman Catholics couldn’t vote, while members of other non-conformist Protestant groups might not be able to be employed at the universities or in government, or to have their marriage ceremonies recognized at law.

As well, the C. of E. had government subsidies, in the form of tithes, and had considerable political influence (to take the most obvious example, the senior bishops of the Church were peers spiritual and members of the House of Lords, the upper House of Parliament).

So there was a strong social pressure on most English to stay within the C. of E., which meant that unlike other Protestant churches, there wasn’t as great a tendency for people to leave the Church over theological or liturgical differences and start new churches. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t splits from the C. of E. - congregationalists, Quakers, presbyterians, methodists and other non-conformist groups had their roots in the C. of E. It’s just that the social strengths of the C. of E. as the established church meant that those theological and liturgical differences were also fought out within the Church, as APB mentions.

The result was that you had a very wide range of theological and liturgical practises, often summarised as High Church and Low Church, although like most labels, there’s a lot of ambiguity there. Depending on the local incumbent, some C. of E. churches could feel almost Catholic, while others might seem like a congregational meeting house (but all using the same Prayer Book and Bible!)

And like APB, I would respectfully disagree with dropzone’s reference to presbyterians, methodists and baptists as Low Church. My understanding of the term is that it means a group within the Church of England and other Anglican churches, not to churches which are separate from the Church of England. See this wiki article: Low Church.

12

Sorry, I missed this question this morning. Yes, intoning is a mark of the High Church practices.

As I read that passage, Dr. Grantly hasn’t cared very much about developing High Church ceremonial practises up to the time of this novel. He’s been following the traditional low-key practices that had been the custom. The tentative attempt at intoning from that poor young curate (note that he had just arrived from Oxford, the hotbed of the Oxford Movement) was merely tolerated as an idiosyncrasy. (I don’t think it was Mr. Harding, was it? He’s quite elderly at the time of the first novel.)

However, since the Proudie/Slope faction were so strongly Low Church, Dr. Grantly was determined to go as far as possible the other way to demonstrate his opposition to them, and if that meant bringing in new clergy who could intone (since he lacked “the mystery of doing so” himself) and who would wear silk waistcoats, so be it. He would shift towards High Church liturgical practises as part of his overall opposition to the aggressive Low Church practices of the Proudies and Slopes.

13

Apparently, I was mis-informed. In my defense, I was brought up to believe that everybody who wasn’t Roman Catholic was uniformly damned, so the niggling details between them really didn’t come up. :smiley:

14

Again, my mistake: Mr Harding didn’t intone, but he did conduct the musical portion of the services, which was also apparently too High Church for Mr Slope.

So I take it that Grantly’s practices weren’t as High Church as some (hence they frowned on the intoning and wore plain vests), but with the music, and other things, presumably, they were still higher than the Proudie/Slope faction.

I’ve got my copy of What Jane Austen Ate, and will get into it this weekend.

15

More questions: what credentials were required of a clergyman in the mid-19th century? Am I to assume that all the vicars, canons, curates, deans, etc., in Barchester Towers held university degrees? Was a general B.A. sufficient, or did one need religious instruction and a particular kind of degree? How common were D.D.s, and was it an advanced degree as we think of them now, pre-requiring other, lesser degrees?

Could one become a member of the clergy with no special training, or with no degree? I’m thinking of Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility, who takes up a living from Colonel Brandon, but whose formal qualifications for the post (IIRC) seem to have been rather minimal.

Also, should I assume that the more elevated ranks of the clergy had worked up the hierarchy, paying their dues in lower positions first? Could one be appointed a bishop (for example) for entirely political reasons, with no previous clerical experience or credentials?

16

No thoughts on the last post?

Also, one of the first questions that came to me: Why is Mr Slope so unwilling to use the word “Sunday” instead of Sabbath? Does this represent a real controversy within the C of E, or is this a trivial pseudo-controversy Trollope made up for satirical purposes?

17

Some of us do sometimes go out into the big wide world and away from the computer now and then. :stuck_out_tongue:

With respect to training of the Anglican clergy, I believe that all that was necesary in the 18th and 19th centuries was a B.A. There were more specialised degrees, like the Doctor of Divinity, but I think the B.A. was all that was needed to be ordained. But remember that having a B.A. then was itself a mark of considerable learning, with a great more status than it now has. There were only the two universities, and it was expensive to earn a degree, so only a small proportion of the population had a B.A. As well, the church in the 18th and early 19th centuries was not as fervent as it later became, and being a clergyman was seen as a profession. It was a common refuge for younger sons of the upper classes, so Edward Ferrars taking orders wasn’t that unusual (although it was unusual that he was the elder son, while the younger son got the inheritance).

The bishop is the highest of the three ordained positions in the Anglican church, the first two being deacons and priests. I don’t think it’s possible to be ordained bishop without first being a deacon and then a priest. I suppose someone could be rushed through all three orders, but that sort of political manipulation of the church was one of the triggering points of the Reformation in the first place, so I doubt that it could happen, as a matter of practical politics.

It was a real issue, but no doubt Trollope emphasises it with Slope for satirical purposes (I don’t think Trollope liked Slope very much…)

Sunday observance was one of the points on which Low Church Anglicans and members of other Protestant non-conformist churches could agree. With their emphasis on the Bible as the sole source for doctrine, they tended to take literally the commandment, “keep holy the Sabbath day”. This emphasis dated back at least as far as the Puritans, according to the wiki article on the Sabbath in Christianity:

See also the Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, at p. 346:

18

Weirdo! :smiley:

I got all the stuff about Sabbatarianism as Trollope explains it. I was wondering about the smaller matter of why Mr Slope never used the word “Sunday,” but only “Sabbath.” I assume it was an excess of zeal for the principle, a feeling that “Sunday” had come to stand for all the backsliding, and that always saying “Sabbath” emphasized its religious importance (and his own position)?

19

As others have noted, historically “High Churchmen” were Anglicans who remained very traditionalist, ritualistic, formal and even Catholic. “Low Churchmen,” the descendants of the Puritans, believed in much more stark and simple rituals, and were leery of any doctrine that sounded too Catholic.

Trollope is pointing out that, at Barchester, the Anglican Church and its clergy didn’t fit neatly into either category. They had never been very Catholic in their approach to ritual or doctrine, but stuck to a fair amount of tradition simply through habit and inertia. They had stumbled upon a religious formula that seemed acceptable to most High and Low Churchmen, and stuck to that formula without thinking much about it.

The clergy of Barchester didn’t think about most religious matters very deeply at all! In theory, the nature of Communion is rather important… but in reality, the Barchester clergy had gotten comfortable with saying (or implying), “If you believe the Communion bread is the body of Christ, that’s fine, but if you believe it’s merely a cracker with only symbolic value, why that’s fine too, and there’s no point in fighting about such things, is their, old boy?”

In the same way, they took a Least Common Denominator approach to ritual. Their services had just enough incense and bells and glitz to appease High Churchmen who craved such things, but not enough to tick off Low Churchmen or (more importantly) to look too tacky or too Roman.

The Barchester clergy would have preferred to keep straddling this way, but politics got in their way. The High Church became synonymous with the Conservative Party, in many circles, while the Low Church became synonymous with the Liberals… even though, as Trollope demonstrates, many of the “leaders” of BOTH sides were pretty shallow thinkers, and had no particularly strong political OR religious principles.

Once the Church started dividing along religious lines, High Churchmen felt compelled to become more ostentatiously Catholic (even though many didn’t really want to, and many more didn’t really know how!), and Low Churchmen felt compelled to become more aggressively Puritanical, and to purge their Churches of all High Church traditions and trappings… even though many of them actually LIKED those traditions and trappings!

20

Make that “is THERE, old boy?”

And make that “Once the Church started dividing along POLITICAL lines.”