I have just found this fascinating photo of an eighteenth-century Anglican chapel, the Charterhouse of Sculcoates in Yorkshire, not the famous public school in Surrey where Vaughan Williams was educated or even the former Carthusian monastery of the City of London.
It all reminds me of a courtroom, with the bench for the Judge, the bar for the solicitors and barristers, the dock for the accused and seats for the public. It is interesting to see that the altar follows a Laudian arrangement, up against what is presumed to be the east wall and a three-sided communion rail. The late nineteenth-century organ is stuck in a most unfortunate place almost pressing against the right part of the communion rail.
All the pews are facing towards the liturgical north and the rather fine Queen Anne pulpit above the places for the clerks and other authorities of the institution. I don’t know who would have sat each side of the pulpit.
The chapel is exquisitely decorated in the style of the late eighteenth century, a time when English religion was at its most secular, dreary and moralising. There is no iconography of any kind, not even in the memorials of those rich benefactors who arranged to be remembered in this way when they departed this life.
There are quite a few churches in England that “the Victorians forgot”. They remained as they had been since the seventeenth century. These churches represent the change that happened when the pre-Reformation liturgy was swept away, and worship was removed from the chancel to the nave. The ‘new’ characteristics of the post-Reformation church were to be large two or three decker pulpits, box pews, and galleries. The Victorians put everything almost back to how things were before the Reformation. The one thing the Victorians missed was the riot of colour and iconography one would have found in the average fifteenth century parish church. Much of that was recovered under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement and better scholarship in the very early part of the twentieth century.
From the late sixteenth century, iconography was either destroyed or whitewashed over. The rood screens were destroyed, though some have been restored more or less as they were. The Prayer Book inspired changes such as rearranging the church for hearing the Word above any other aspect of worship. Large pulpits were built in the nave (as in Catholic churches on the Continent after the Council of Trent), and the communion table was only stored between services where the old demolished altar stood. It was placed in the body of the choir or the nave in an east-west axis, and the priest would celebrate from the north side as prescribed in the Prayer Book. The chancel thus became an annexe for storing the communion table and other objects for occasional use.
Pews are an invention of the seventeenth century, common to the Laudians and post-Tridentine Catholics. They made the congregation keep still and listen to the Scripture readings and the sermon. This was more about hearing and learning God’s Word and good Christian morals before prayer or the Sacraments. Box pews became popular, and the richer members of the congregation installed their personal stoves, and all the flues went up through the roof of the church.
From the seventeenth century, Archbishop Laud encouraged the altar to be left at the east end of the church, protected by the communion rail with which we are all familiar. North side celebration became north end celebration. The communion rail was also designed to keep dogs from fouling the sanctuary. Churchwardens’ accounts as late as 1850 record entries for payments to the dog-whipper!
The eighteenth century saw the installation of galleries in churches, not only a west gallery but also at the sides of the church. They are still to be seen, and there are fine examples in St Mary’s, Whitby, in Yorkshire. They were to become a permanent characteristic of non-conformist denominations like the Baptists, Methodists and the United Reformed Church.
The Tractarians, the Oxford Movement and Ritualism signalled the death-knell of this kind of church furnishing. The tendency was to return to medieval norms, more authentically reproduced from the very end of the nineteenth century. The Anglo-Papalist imitations of post-Tridentine church furnishings and architecture came into fashion in London and the South Coast from about the end of World War I.
Some complain about ‘wreckovations’ that occurred in Catholic churches since the 1960’s with the installation of an altar facing the people and sometimes the destruction of the old high altar. In most cases, this was nothing compared to the hecatomb in the late sixteenth century and at the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads.
Here is a Communion Service celebrated in about 1581.
Finally, here is a typical Communion Plate set, probably from the seventeenth century. The paten is big enough for a loaf of leavened bread as was the usage before the introduction of leavened hosts by the Ritualists. The two flagons were filled with wine and were used to refill the chalice with consecrated wine in the event of a large communicating congregation. At the bottom right is the decent and godly basin.
There is a church in a village in Lincolnshire which until very recently (in the last few decades) had fitted seating all the way around the South, East and North ends of the chancel, with a trestle table lengthwise in the centre. The nave, not much bigger than the chancel, had pews in rows facing East – but actually focused on the enormous triple-decker pulpit that obscured half of the rood screen.
The pulpit was downsized (I think; or possibly removed), the Eastern pews in the chancel were removed, and the altar was restored to the East. I think that the arguments about it rumble on to this day between three different groups of people:
a) the people who say that it should have been preserved as a fine example of Protestant re-ordering (subdivided between those who say that the diocese should never have given permission, and those who say that the diocese didn’t give permission and it was done on the sly).
b) those who say that a church is a building which must adapt to the needs of the Church, not ‘tother way around
c) those who say it should have been restored to its pre-Reformation state, not a half-job to suit post-Vatican II liturgy.
I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the village or the church, but there’s a website somewhere with a lot of before and after photographs. I’ll let you know when I find it.
This church is at Hailes, Gloucestershire, and Fr Allan Barton of the Diocese of Lincoln has done an article on it.
Lincolnshire… Gloucestershire…
I get lost on my way to the Post Office.
Hello Father,
Since the time I am interested in Anglicanism (and that’s since I’m 8, having been a boy-chorister at the ECUSA cathedral in Paris that was just near my school), I have never understood what is north end, or side, celebration. How can a priest celebrate facing north when the altar is facing east? He will be celebrating on the little side of the altar? Or was the altar to be removed?
I have only in one place seen north end celebration, at a very low-church parish in Kendal, where I was baptised – St Thomas. They now face the people. In the 1970′s, they still had the Communion Service from the 1662 Prayer Book. The Vicar, in surplice and scarf, stood and knelt at different parts of the service at the north end of the altar facing south, with his left shoulder to the east. This left a small area on which to place the chalice and the book. I found it ridiculous. As I explained, originally, the communion table was only stored in the place of the old altar, and it was moved to the centre of the church each time it was to be used. Like in the black and white photo in my article, the table was end-on to the east of the church, so the priest would be at the north side, not the north end. He faced the people across the table, because the people faced him from the south side of the table.
Thanks for the explanation (and typos correction). I understand now, and it seems to me that the north side celebration is very much alike what is done still today in some calvinist churches here in the continent (Ex: l’Oratoire du Louvre in Paris).
Pax et Bonum