PRIEST-RIDDEN, EXETER (& THE NATION!), 1843.

The Bishop of Exeter and his minions had been persecuting, in the opinion of The Western Times, the Reverend Henry Erskine Head, Rector at Feniton, for opinions he had published in the newspaper concerning what he saw as  inconsistencies in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.  This was seen as rebellion to the bishop's authority.   

Mr. Ralph Sanders, citizen of Exeter, was delegated to bring a complaint against the Reverend Henry Head to the clerical court, the Arches Court, which, predictably, condemned him .  He was to lose his benefice for three years and he was obliged him to pay the crippling costs of his case. 

On the 24th June 1843, The Times published this letter to the editor from A FRIEND OF LIBERTY:

 "I observe in the London papers that judgement has been given in this cause, and that Mr. Head is condemned to pay the costs of the suit, and suspended for three years.

"That such a sentence should be pronounced every liberal-minded man must regret, as well as for the cause of liberty, as that of true religion.

"Surely it is disgraceful that in this enlightened age a man should be persecuted, yes, absolutely ruined, for expressing his sentiments on the Common Prayer Book.  If the Common Prayer Book will not bear examination, it is unworthy to be read in the church.

Galileo was persecuted for uttering his opinions:  we readily condemn the authors and abettors of that persecution; and will not the public at once come forward and with one voice condemn the proceedings in this disgraceful suit, by raising such a subscription as will enable Mr. Head to pay the costs of the suit, and thus testify that they will not be priest-ridden.

"Surely the English of the 19th century will not stand still and suffer this matter to pass unnoticed?  If they do, must they be surprised at any step, however infamous, which may be taken to shackle and restrain their liberties." 

I am writing under the governance of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, at a time, an enlightened age?, when punishing Englishmen for their opinions is back in fashion.  The last paragraph, substituting 21st for 19th, could apply to our current discontents.

My pet blasphemer, Tom Pooley (1857)  liked to compare himself to poor Galileo. 

A WATERCRESS MAN, EXETER, 1843.

 "Prior, a watercress man, was fined ten shillings, and in default of payment committed to the treadmill for a fortnight on the complaint of the Rev. Charles Rodwell Roper, for using indecent and obscene language.  

"A woman, who had refused to buy his cresses incited the wrath of defendent;  and he avenged himself by a torrent of excessively bad English.

"The reverend gentleman remonstrated with him; but reproof led to no reformation, and hence the result." 

I have not met a watercress man before in the golden realm of The Western Times but they would have been busy here with their baskets of cress in or around the Higher Market.  I imagine the cresses in Exeter would have been foraged, raked from local streams and ponds rather than farmed, although the Victorians did have watercress farms.

Two weeks imprisonment with hard labour seems a stiff sentence for effing and blinding, but then there was an Anglican parson involved and no doubt Prior was 'disrespectful'.  I smell something of what Tom Pooley would call Bible Tyranny in the case.

I have blogged the Tractarian, Reverend Rodwell Roper before.  He was the Rector of Saint Olave's who made Mr Ferris take off his hat in the vestry.  https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3897615916165646799/3234197303490926862 (THE CLERICAL COMMAND).

20th May, 1843

A PUSEYITE OF THE MOST FLEXIBLE KNEE, EXETER, 1843.

Parsons were different 180 years ago.  When the Reverend Harold Browne of Saint Sidwell's Church felt that one of his parishioners was about to leave him for the Exeter Dissenters at Saint George's Meeting in South Street (now a Witherspoon's pub.)  he sat down and wrote to him a personal tract, some 2000 (two thousand!) words long, pointing out that, on the grounds of 'apostolic succession' only the Anglicans could 'really' baptise his child.   

This parishioner, we are not given his name, already had six other children who had been baptised at Saint Sidwells's without any fuss but the Reverend Browne was a Puseyite of the most flexible knee and had introduced a form of baptism at Saint Sidwell's which involved the babe attending a full church service.  Our parishioner was having none of it  - all those people and his wife might catch cold;  he was off to the Meeting House.  

Apostolic Succession was a hot topic in Exeter in1843, not least because Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter made much of it  (which was the source of Sydney Smith's famous quip: I must believe in the Apostolic succession, there being no other way of accounting for the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.) and The Western Times (11th March 1843) was pleased to get hold of this letter and publish it in full.  Below is an extract from the parson's letter:  

"The church was ordained and founded by our Lord Himself, He commanded baptism to be used as the way of entering His church.  He ordained that baptism should be administered by certain persons authorised and sent by Him Himself.  He promised inestimable blessings to those baptized.

"Now the church is the very same as that which Christ ordained; and the dissenters are rebels against it.  The clergy of the church derive their authority from Christ Himself, by unbroken succession through the apostles;  and therefore baptism administered by them is real baptism, because it is administered as our Lord commanded it to be administered,  But dissenting teachers do not derive their authority from Christ or His apostles, but from man; and who, therefore, can say that they have any power to give real baptism."

The Times dismissed all of this as jabber and unadulterated nonsense.

And so it is but the Anglicans still officially subscribe to the daft notion that supernatural grace is imparted by the laying on of hands from bishop to bishop and bishop to clergy way back to Roman Palestine but then, I suppose, we are all of us, to some extent or another poor, deluded children! 

THE CORDWAINER AND THE RECTOR, EXETER, 1843.

 The Western Times, as here of 11th February, 1843, in its sceptical coverage of all religion, took a mischievous delight in reporting the advance of Puseyism and the local reaction to it: 

 "PUSEYISM is going a head in Exeter.  At St. Olave's church, the rector preaches in a white surplice, to the great horror of the old inhabitants:  a couple of parsons go to the communion table - 'the altar' they will have it, one turns his back to the people in reading certain portions - and the clerk Colman has been deposed from the duty of giving out the venerable Sternhold, by the ruthless hand of the rector.

"Clerk Coleman is a cordwainer by trade, and the sensible people in the parish do say, that all the rector hath done by this new move of deposing the clerk from the discharge of of one of his most important functions - is to break the heart of a most worthy shoemaker, and prove him but an indifferent 'psalm-smiter.'

"The rector may see the last of the shoemaker, but we doubt whether the public will see the last of his folly just yet if he go on as he hath begun."

It seems amazing these days that good church-going citizens in 1843 were bothered by a white surplice and by 'you say communion table but I say the altar' but there you are now!

I read the ambiguous second paragraph as meaning that the Puseyite rector of St. Olave's has  dispensed with 'Sternhold' altogether.  Sternhold being the Anglican Church's metrical psalmbook dating from the time of wicked Henry Vlll. 

Need I say it?   The rector may see the last of the shoemaker is an outrageous pun and the hath and the cordwainer are consciously archaic.

In our local parish registers for the eighteenth and early nineteenth century cordwainer is the word mostly used, shoemaker hardly at all.  The etymology, a worker in cordovan leather, is fun! 

Going a head  meaning, as here, to prosper is another Americanism that may well have travelled from Devonshire.  It is subtly different from going ahead and I would bet my boots this is not just a typographical error.