Thomas Frederick Simmons and his world

Modern scholarship has not been kind to the medievalist scholarship of the Revd Thomas Frederick Simmons, canon of York Minster and rector of Dalton Holme. Susan Powell, for instance, has consigned his edition of the Middle English text that he entitled The lay folks’ mass book: or, The manner of hearing mass.Footnote ¹ to a form of ‘fey antiquarianism’.Footnote ² Yet Simmons is perhaps more interesting than this verdict suggests, and in his own time he was clearly regarded as a serious scholar. By 1879, when his Early English Text Society edition of the LFMB appeared, Simmons had already published articles on liturgy and on canon law in Alexander Strahan's high-profile journal the Contemporary Review. He was an expert liturgist, and at his death in 1884 he bequeathed some 600 books on the subject to York Minster Library. The library holds a number of Simmons's liturgical texts, some from his student days in Oxford and heavily annotated, and his early notebooks: all valuable evidence for his interests.Footnote ³ Canon Raine, the Minster's librarian, wrote in his preface to the first printed catalogue that

By that time Simmons was at work for the EETS on another volume – eventually completed, in 1901, by Canon Henry Edward Nolloth: The lay folks’ catechism: or, The English and Latin versions of Archbishop Thoresby's instruction for the people; together with a Wycliffite adaptation of the same, and the corresponding canons of the Council of Lambeth.Footnote ⁵ The two works stand beside Henry Littlehales's edition of The prymer (c. 1400), which he calls the ‘Prayer-Book of the Lay People’.Footnote ⁶ However mistakenly in the light of later scholarship – the Catechism for instance seems to have been designed for priestly use – the three works were clearly regarded by these Victorian editors as linked.

There are relatively few records of the life of Thomas Frederick Simmons. He was born in Woolwich, Kent, into a military family, one of twelve children of Captain Thomas Simmons. He matriculated as ‘postmaster’ at Merton College, Oxford, in 1832 or 1833.Footnote ⁷ He left Merton in 1834, presumably without a degree and quite possibly to pursue a career in the army.Footnote ⁸ However he later returned to Oxford and graduated from Worcester College with a BA in 1848 (MA, 1859). At Worcester he would have encountered William Palmer, whose Origines liturgicae (1832; fourth edn, 1845) on ‘the antiquities of the English ritual’ emphasised the continuity of the liturgical life of the ‘English Church’ from the late medieval period through the Reformation.Footnote ⁹ In 1848 Simmons was ordained deacon in the Church of England, serving as curate of Buford until 1852. In 1853 he seems to have moved to the parish of Dalton Holme, becoming its rector in 1861, and there he remained until his death on 26 September 1884. In 1869 he became a Prebendary of York Minster.

Little is recorded of Simmons's ministry apart from some notebooks, an annotated Bible in English and Greek, his heavily annotated Book of Common Prayer and a few published articles – all now in the York Minster Library. Nevertheless, there is some published evidence for his liturgical scholarship in the years before and after the publication of LFMB. In 1875 William George Henderson, a schoolmaster at Leeds Grammar School and later dean of Carlisle, edited the York missal for the Surtees Society, thanking Simmons in his introduction ‘for much valuable assistance’,Footnote ¹⁰ and in the second edition of his authoritative The Sarum missal in English (1884), A. H. Pearson both refers to and debates with Simmons.Footnote ¹¹ But Simmons's major contribution to published scholarship remains the LFMB and his unfinished work on the Lay folks’ catechism.

Simmons's work on the LFMB can of course be seen within the wider frame of nineteenth-century philology. David Matthews has contributed hugely to our understanding of the ‘making of Middle English’ after the eighteenth century, and his study of the early subscription lists for the EETS shows that many of the first readers were, like Simmons, provincial clergymen.Footnote ¹² Only later was the EETS to become a professionalised outlet for critical editions bearing the imprimatur of a wholly academic editorial council. Clergymen – perhaps most famously Richard Chevenix Trench, archbishop of Dublin, who, when dean of Westminster, has a claim to be the founder of what was to become the Oxford English Dictionary – were at the forefront of the British branch of the ‘new philology’.

However, there are clearly other currents involved in Simmons's engagement with these texts. His religious position in relation to the Oxford Movement, early in his career at least, seems to be indicated inter alia by the English Bible with Greek New Testament that he donated to York Minster: a heavily-annotated student copy, signed by him (‘Thos. Fred. Simmons’) as a Fellow Commoner of Worcester College, Oxford, in 1842. This volume appears to have been a gift to Simmons, already described as an ‘ordinand’, by John Keble himself. Keble adds a lengthy handwritten inscription: ‘Interpreting any document, try and ascertain exactly what was in the mind and intention of him who dictated it, and remember that He who has dictated the sacred scripture is God the Holy Ghost.’ Simmons was thus clearly being recognised, while still an undergraduate, as someone of promise by the Oxford Movement's most inspirational figure.

Perhaps the most interesting item in Simmons's York Minster donations are his early manuscript notebooks, in two volumes, dating from 1847 to 1852 and demonstrating his serious liturgical interests. The first notebook consists of an alphabetical list of topics, indicating that he was reading the work of William Maskell, whose ground-breaking books The ancient liturgy of the Church of England (1844) and the three-volume Monumenta ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1846) had just appeared.Footnote ¹³ This encounter seems to have triggered his interest in the LFMB, for in the edition's preface Simmons tells us that he had first encountered the work through extracts in Maskell's notes in Ancient liturgy, suggesting that the LFMB was the ‘only document I had met with that enables us to know the prayers which the unlearned of our forefathers used at mass, and by the light it threw upon their inner religious life from a point of view different from that afforded by the many mediaeval sermons that have come down to us’.Footnote ¹⁴ Maskell returned the compliment, writing in the second edition of Ancient liturgy that:

In fact, Maskell never refers to the LFMB again, though in the first volume of his Monumenta ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, he does refer to ‘portos’ as books used by laymen to say their prayers, but sometimes also used in parish churches at the altar, and therefore, presumably, related in some way to the saying of the mass; he may have been thinking of the LFMB or similar works.

The notebook also contains a long entry on the Use of Sarum, and a loose-leaf printed notice of ‘Authors of “plain sermons”, Vol. X’, among whom are named John Keble, Isaac Williams and E. B. Pusey, with a handwritten annotation referring to the Lyra apostolica (1836), a collection of poems by Tractarians, primarily John Henry Newman, but also John Keble, Isaac Williams, Hurrell Froude, John William Bowden and the theologian Robert Isaac Wilberforce. This background in Tractarianism clearly informs Simmons's later surviving writings in the York Minster collection, including the lengthy liturgical article ‘Standing before the Lord's Table’, published in 1867 in the newly-founded Contemporary Review. However, that Simmons chose the Review for his article suggests a more nuanced position in the Church, one closer to the post-Oxford Tractarian parish clergy that has been recently described by George Herring; the journal's founder, in 1866, had been the Church of Scotland Presbyterian publisher Alexander Strahan, who encouraged contributions from a wide range of confessional orientations. Simmons's essay was a response to the argument of the ritualist R. F. Littledale, the incumbent of St Mary the Virgin, Soho,Footnote ¹⁶ who had proposed an eastward-facing position for the celebrant as opposed to the north-side position adopted by most clergy of the time. Simmons, with ponderous historical reference, argues for a conservative position against ritualists like Littledale, dismissing ‘such men as are given to change’, while admitting that ‘we have had to dwell upon small facts with a minuteness which must have been wearisome to our readers’.Footnote ¹⁷

Simmons's engagement with the LFMB can therefore be seen as more than philological: as part of a programme of informed liturgical scholarship with which he had been concerned since his Oxford student days. Richard Pfaff has noted that several factors combined to promote an interest in the Anglican liturgy's medieval revival: the Roman Catholic revival, the Oxford Movement, the founding of Anglican religious orders and, in the universities, the growth of medieval history in the curriculum.Footnote ¹⁸

We have already noted Simmons's early awareness of Maskell, who, along with the layman Francis Henry Dickinson and others, formed a group which first published modern editions of pre-Reformation English liturgies. For instance, Dickinson's Missale ad usum insignis et praeclarae ecclesiae Sarum – the Sarum Rite in Latin, medieval England's dominant liturgy -- appeared in fascicles between 1861 and 1883.Footnote ¹⁹ Simmons's engagement with vernacular texts such as the LFMB can be seen in this context, as indeed can Littlehales's The prymer: or, Lay folks prayer book (1895–7), which from the title it was assigned was clearly seen as in some sense a prefiguration of the first, ‘moderate’ Edwardian prayer book of 1549, a text of crucial importance for the Oxford Movement, whose origins necessarily attracted much interest.Footnote ²⁰

However, although Geoffrey Cuming has pointed out that ‘Oxford became the source of a flood of liturgical reprints’,Footnote ²¹ the recovery and publication of pre-1549 liturgical texts in England was in its infancy. Simmons's knowledge of such matters was, of necessity therefore, largely self-acquired even though the LFMB's preface shows his engagement with those prominent contemporary medievalists, such as W. W. Skeat, who were developing the new discipline of ‘academic English’.

The Lay folks’ mass book in its contemporary context

In order to identify what Simmons found in the LFMB, and why he found it an attractive text for his purposes, it is necessary to give a clearer account of its contents. The LFMB survives in nine manuscript miscellanies of which Simmons knew six, assigning them the sigla A through F:

Three more texts of the LFMB have since come to light. These versions are noted in the Index of Middle English verse,Footnote ²² item 3507, to which might be assigned the sigla G through I:

The LFMB seems to have originated in the later years of the fourteenth century, which places it in the context of such Middle English devotional writing as the work of Walter Hilton, John Mirk, Richard Rolle and William of Nassyngton, as well as John Wycliffe (and possibly John Trevisa). BL, ms Royal 17.B.xvii provides, according to the various catalogue descriptions, the oldest (fourteenth-century) as well as fullest version (Text B) of the LFMB. The remaining manuscripts all date from the fifteenth century. In all of them the LFMB appears alongside various other works both religious and vernacular. Thus, for instance, text I is a collection of vernacular works; the LFMB is preceded there by the widely-circulated rhyming romance of Titus and Vespasian (recorded in twelve other manuscriptsFootnote ²³) and Richard Maidstone's English translation of the Penitential Psalms.Footnote ²⁴

The religious material presented alongside the LFMB in the various miscellanies in which it appears is in general theologically orthodox. For example, Maidstone was a Carmelite friar who died around 1396, well-known for his public attacks on the lollards, practitioners of the greatest and most persistent English ‘heresy’. The only manuscript that includes anything that might potentially trouble the authorities is that containing the B-text, where appear in addition two works that seem to derive from lollard sources: an English translation of Wycliffe's Latin Epistola ad simplices sacerdotes, and a Latin extract on preaching, ‘also doubtless of Lollard origin’ as the BL catalogue puts it. But neither work is especially controversial in content, and Wycliffe's name is not mentioned in either. It is entirely possible that the scribe did not know where the text came from. Similarly, the LFMB seems at first sight to be theologically orthodox. The special place given to the role of the priest in it seems not to align with lollard views on the priesthood of all believers (even including women),Footnote ²⁵ i.e. anti-sacerdotalism; the celebrant in the LFMB is described as undertaking a mystery with the congregation praying as witnesses.

The LFMB survives in a variety of written formats, and seems to have been a living text, open to significant revision depending on the functions required of it: something that is somewhat obscured by Simmons's editing practice, which reordered material to align passages with each other and which tended to detach the various texts from their distinct manuscript contexts. For example, Text G omits the material describing the activity of the priest and focuses on the prayers to be said by the congregation, thus becoming a script rather than a libretto. It seems unlikely that – with the possible exception of the manuscript of Text A, which is a so-called ‘holster-book’ – any of the manuscripts containing the LFMB were actually carried into church, for they are for the most part bulky books, all containing other, often quite long vernacular works, such as the Northern passion, Robert Mannyng's Handlyng synne and the Northern homily cycle.Footnote ²⁶

The Linguistic atlas of late Medieval English has localised the language of seven of these versions: Text B in Derbyshire (LALME Linguistic Profile = LP3); C in the North Riding of Yorkshire (LALME = LP7); G in Norfolk (LALME = LP621); H in the West Riding (LALME = LP460); and – as flagged – I to Northamptonshire (LALME = LP4276). Text D, although not assigned an LP number by LALME, is recorded there as written in a form of northern Middle English, while LALME records the three hands in the manuscript containing Text E as in a language that ‘belongs to Derbys.’ Clearly therefore, at least on the linguistic evidence, the LFMB circulated widely, especially in northern England.

Simmons provided edited versions of Texts B, C, E and F, accompanied by variant readings from A and D. Subsequently, Gordon Gerould provided an edition of D with corrections to Simmons's variants, being politely but professionally dismissive: ‘It is only fair to say that Canon Simmons, from the antiquarian and ecclesiastical point of view so admirable an editor, may not himself have seen the MS. from which he quotes.’Footnote ²⁷

The contents of the LFMB may be swiftly outlined. The B-text offers the most complete version, of some 630 lines in rhyming couplets, and for that reason Simmons placed it in prime position in his edition, with the other versions reordered to place comparable material alongside it. The poem alternates between a description of the actions of the priest and recommendations as to the actions (standing, crossing oneself) and prayers to be offered by the congregation; in B, the description and glosses are underlined in red and referred to as ‘robryk’ (rubric), while the prayers are presented ‘in blak’, without underlining. Simmons's edition tried to reproduce these features of the text through the use of bold typefaces.

The poem begins with a discussion of the alleged origins of the work, ascribed in B to ‘dam Ieremy’ (transmuted in C, completely fallaciously, to the better-known ‘Saynte Ierome’). The poet asserts that the mass is ‘þo worthyest þing’, and that it should not be accompanied by any ‘iangling’ (chatter). The focus then shifts to the priest, how he vests at the altar and then begins the mass. Each stage is described: the confession of priest and clergy followed by the ‘lered and lewed’ (literate and ignorant) in the congregation, the readings from Scripture, the Creed, the priest's preparations and the elevation of the host (accompanied by ‘A litel belle to mark ihesu crist awen presence’, something insisted upon in the text), prayers for the dead, the peace and the blessing. Throughout appear instructions to the congregation for particular actions, for example standing and crossing oneself for the Gospel, and suggested prayers to be said at key points: the Paternoster, Ave and Credo are especially noted (with translations into English sometimes provided for memorisation). There are also rhyming prayers, some of which are to be spoken internally, i.e. ‘sayande þus in þi mynde’.

Throughout the saying of the Collect and the Epistle, the laity are to kneel and repeat the Paternoster, standing only when priest or deacon reads the Gospel. It is not the words but the actions of the priest that are described and are to be followed in the ‘hearing’, that is clearly also a ‘seeing’. In the LFMB the priest moves the book to the altar's north end, making upon it and his face the sign of the cross with his thumb (Text B, lines 154–8). The LFMB gives no reason for moving the book (unlike Caxton in the ‘Noble history of the exposition of the mass’ in The golden legend).Footnote ²⁸ Rather, in the LFMB, the sign of the cross is made on the face for the priest ‘has mikel need of grace’ in speaking Christ's words.Footnote ²⁹ What matters is that during the Gospel-reading both priest and laity play separate parts, the concern being not the teaching of Scripture but that folk ‘hear’ – i.e. witness – the sacred words without necessarily the distraction of comprehension:

It is interesting that in Text C, a manuscript associated with Rievaulx Abbey, it is stated that those who cannot understand Latin should simply continue with their Paternosters while the Latin Gospel is read: Latin, not English, is regarded as sacred. When the priest says the Paternoster it is only necessary for the laity to recognise the word ‘temptacionem’, and then they must respond:

Many further textual variants in addition to those already cited appear in the different copies of LFMB, again demonstrating its status as a living text. Text F, for instance, also begins rather differently, being, in Simmons's marginal commentary, ‘[a]dapted to the practice of smaller churches and chapels in England where the priest vested before the people’.Footnote ³² Thus F provides an English prayer for the laity to say for the priest as he vests:

This prayer again indicates that ‘hearing’ the mass is participative in terms of the laity's actions, while the priest celebrates, separately, in Latin.Footnote ³⁴

It will be clear from its contents that the LFMB was distinct from the Prymer: or, The lay folks’ prayer book, which was a more precise ‘vernacular libretto’ – in Aston's words – for the liturgy, devised we now know for very distinct purposes.Footnote ³⁵ During the late medieval period primers, modelled on more prestigious Books of Hours, were some of ‘the most common books of devotion to be found in the hand of lay people’.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, they continued to be widely used in England through the early reformist period up to Henry viii’s Great primer (1545).Footnote ³⁷ Such primers catered at least in part for the growing habit whereby the laity followed books during church services, including sermons, a habit encouraged inter alia – it has been claimed – by contemporary developments in church architecture, notably the growth in the size of windows.

The LFMB was however different. Although the ‘holster book’ containing Text A of the LFMB could possibly have been used for such purposes (although its mixed content suggests that it might simply have been a ‘commonplace miscellancy’), other larger manuscripts containing the LFMB can be more plausibly accounted for as helpful study guides for pious household use, prefiguring the kind of ‘sermon manuals’ developed in English evangelical circles from the early seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁸ Numerous manuscripts demonstrating these trends have survived. Examples include the ‘common profit’ books designed for sharing vernacular works of devotion, such as John Colop's fifteenth-century collection of mystical and lollard texts,Footnote ³⁹ and, from the previous century, major miscellanies containing devotional treatises, such as Magdalene College, Cambridge, ms 2498, which included an allegedly lollard ‘farced’ version of the thirteenth-century Ancrene riwle,Footnote ⁴⁰ or the massive Vernon manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. Poet. A.1).Footnote ⁴¹ This new focus on private or household reading of vernacular texts is also illustrated by the reworking of sermon-cycles for home consumption, such as John Mirk's Festial.

There are also other surviving vernacular guides to the mass that may be compared with the LFMB. For example, Margaret Aston has referred to ‘B. Langforde's’ vernacular Meditatyons for goostly exercyse, in the tyme of the masse,Footnote ⁴² surviving only in one early sixteenth-century manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Wood empt. 17). And Caxton's widely circulated English version of the Golden legend (1483) concludes with a lengthy treatise entitled ‘The noble history of the exposition of the mass’ with the intention ‘for herte deuoute [to] vnderstonde what it is to say masse/also to consecrate the body of our Lord the precious sacrament of thauter’.Footnote ⁴³ Here each moment of the mass is theologically interpreted in its memorial aspect. Other less widely-circulated works offering comparable interpretations of the liturgy include the East Anglian Croxton Play of the sacrament, and John Lydgate's Merita missae. LFMB therefore falls into a distinct genre of vernacular devotional texts.

Simmons was well aware of these parallels, and he provided in his edition a series of appendices illustrating them. His appendix iv, for instance, is the text of the verse Treatise of the manner and mede of the mass, found in the Vernon manuscript.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet again, however, although this work has similarities to the LFMB, there are also substantial differences. There are indeed prayers in English during the priest's vesting and a form of confession, a paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer and instructions to stand and ‘hear’ the Gospel even if it is not understood. However, the Treatise is essentially a teaching poem, concerned with ‘learning’ as well as ‘hearing’. The poet explicitly writes:

Authorities such as St Ambrose and St Jerome are cited to explain the necessary and practical benefits of the mass. ‘Hearing’ it protects people against ageing or blindness, assists in daily work and cures sorrows. An early mass will protect you on a journey, and the unworthiness of a priest does not diminish the effects of the sacrament. Other appendices include a complete edition of a daring work that Simmons calls a ‘Venus mass’, being a parody of the mass addressed to Cupid, ‘the mighty god of Love’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Simmons also included Bidding Prayers according to the York Use; the York Hours of the Cross; the order of the mass for Trinity Sunday, from Minster Library, York, ms XVI A. 9, dated by Simmons to about 1425; a brief prose work on lay preparation for the mass (c. 1400); and finally a theological exposition of the eucharist more or less contemporary with the LFMB, including part of the account of the trial of Sir John Oldcastle, who was burned in 1417 for heresy and sedition linked to lollardy.

Despite their differences, all such late medieval writings reflect a desire for vernacular exposition of the liturgy. The LFMB might thus be seen as simply one amongst a number of vernacular texts that emerged in the later medieval period to serve the needs of literate folk who sought pious engagement with the mass through witness and response. None however is as focused or action-oriented as the LFMB, which precisely instructs the ‘lewed’ worshipper on what to say and do.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such works as the LFMB assumed the clear distinction between the clergy and the laity in the mass, emphasising the role of the latter, and they assumed a lay ignorance of Latin (an ignorance that was undoubtedly shared by many of the less well-educated clergy). Such works as the LFMB were not intended to instruct or provide theological speculation. In Katherine Zieman's words:

Worship, indeed, was the very opposite of ‘common’, inasmuch as the efficient utterance of the words of the Latin mass did not depend upon the comprehension of those who ‘heard’ them.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Zieman puts it:

So far, so orthodox; however, Zieman's valuable insights hint at a politics of ‘hearing’ and understanding the mass by the lay people which suggests a liturgical complexity that invites further reflection.

For there is one sense in which the LFMB does align with lollard writings, along with other works of greater orthodoxy from the end of the fourteenth century onwards: its use of the vernacular in religious practice. Helen Spencer has noted the efflorescence of such writing, which she correlates with ‘the enhanced prestige of English, the interests of an increasingly literate laity in more advanced matters of theology than the rudiments of Christian behaviour, and dissatisfaction with the Church, expressed by orthodox and heterodox alike’.Footnote ⁵¹

However, the composition, possession and reading of vernacular texts could always attract suspicion, especially when indulged in by ‘lesser’ folk; it is no coincidence that the Earthquake Council of 1382 that condemned Wycliffe was of the view that heretical vernacular writings were involved in the Peasants’ Revolt of the previous year. Suspicion of vernacular religion reached its height in the period following the 1407 Constitutions of Archbishop Thomas Arundel, which required the licensing of vernacular versions of the Bible, including works of impeccable orthodoxy such as Nicholas Love's gospel harmony The mirror of the life of Jesus Christ (a translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Meditationes vitae Christi). Even Bishop Reginald Pecock (d. in or after 1459), who undertook a programme of vernacular composition explicitly to counter the spread of lollard ideas, attracted condemnation; in 1457 Pecock was forced to make a recantation of notions deemed heretical, and to take part in a public burning of his own writings. There is an interesting parallel between the LFMB and Pecock's ideas, for the latter also saw the reading and re-reading of vernacular texts as permitting ‘the layman to memorize a fixed set of words which he could then repeat to others without distorting the information’;Footnote ⁵² Pecock himself refers to ‘the hearing of other men's reading, or … hearing of his own reading’, thus ‘assum[ing] the speaking of books’.Footnote ⁵³ The LFMB and Pecock seem to have shared a similar theological mindset and presumably would have been liable to similar contemporary criticism.

Indeed we can see in a number of works, ranging from the LFMB to ‘B. Langforde's’ Meditatyons, how the potential existed for such challenges. Geoffrey Cuming has referred briefly to late medieval works of direction for the laity while attending mass in Latin, suggesting (albeit without any substantiating evidence) that such texts as the LFMB were ‘in circulation among the more prosperous of the laity’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Cuming also cites ‘Langforde’ as urging his reader to make the mass a ‘daily meditation, to stir you to the diligent and compendious remembrance of the passion of Christ’.Footnote ⁵⁵ This stress on the memorial aspect of the mass can be traced back in Western Church at least as far as Amalarius of Metz (c. 780–850), linked to York as a pupil of Alcuin, who in his influential and controversial work Eclogae de officio missae provides a dramatic outline of the ‘rememorative allegory of the Mass’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But it also aligns with the lollard tendency to interpret the eucharist as straightforward memorial. It seems a short step from the LFMB to the Catechism in the 1549 Prayer Book which required that children learn ‘to say in theyr mother tongue the articles of the faith [in the Creed], the lordes praier [and] the ten commaundmentes’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Furthermore, if lollardy is regarded, in Anne Hudson's terms, as a ‘premature Reformation’, and given that the English Reformation was far less doctrinally exact than that of the Continent, there are certain telling similarities between the eucharistic teaching of Wycliffe and the Anglican revival of Tractarians in the nineteenth century. Both, with regard to the crucial issues of transubstantiation, argued from discussions of Aquinas on ‘accident’ and ‘substance’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Both insisted upon a clear doctrine of real presence. The LFMB was in its own time therefore potentially both orthodox and – like Pecock – suspect.

A final ambiguity illustrates the point. In her discussion, Zieman focuses on the moment of the reading of the Gospel which, in the B-text, instructs the laity: ‘Whils hit is red, speke thou noght, / bot thenk on him that dere the boght’ (lines 183–4). She comments:

But these lines could also be understood as a Wycliffite moment, Wyclif emphasising in his theology that in contemplating the eucharist the worshipper should be concerned with Christ and nothing else. Such advice is found also in the pseudo-Chaucerian and Wycliffite Plowman's tale, written in about 1400 in lollard circles and later included in sixteenth-century printed editions of Chaucer's works, where its (mendacious) presence was used to align that subtle – and very Catholic – court poet with his heresiarch contemporary.

Simmons's reception of The lay folks’ mass book

What of Simmons's treatment of the LFMB ? Was he simply guilty of ‘fey antiquarianism’? Certainly the ‘diplomatic’ editing of the work – with the ‘black-letter’ title page an inheritance from the early nineteenth-century antiquary-editors, the representation of rubrics through emboldened print, and the carefully-marked expansion of contractions through deployment of italics – is fussy by modern editorial standards, but such practices were commonplace in other EETS editions of the period. Was there, however, something more interesting going on?

A beginning might be made with the ‘Lay folks’ terminology, Simmons's invention and which he himself seems to have envisaged as covering the other volumes that share it. The terminology is perhaps justifiable for the LFMB, although less so for the very different Lay folks’ catechism, which is clearly intended by Archbishop Thoresby of York for the instruction of his clergy. The third title was of course The lay folks’ prayer book. These three ‘lay folks’ books were liturgically and theologically quite different, but the title that linked them derived from Simmons's Victorian High Church leanings, which envisaged the three texts as linked tracts.

Simmons's discussion of sources is another clue to his intentions. Working from four manuscript texts, Simmons constructed an elaborate theory of an original French text from Rouen composed by one ‘Dan Jeremy’, sometime canon of Rouen and archdeacon of Cleveland in the archdiocese of York.Footnote ⁶⁰ His theory about the LFMB's origins has been accepted without question by liturgical scholars such as C. J. Cuming and Eamon Duffy.Footnote ⁶¹ Richard Pfaff has pointed out, however, the tenuous nature of Simmons's argument for making links between the LFMB and Rouen's liturgical use, the privileging of the northern text and the identity of ‘Dan Jeremy’ (though as to the latter, in fairness, Simmons does admit that ‘this is a mere guess’Footnote ⁶²):

Simmons did indeed hint at a different explanation but forbore from making it explicit:

Despite this disclaimer, it seems that Simmons aimed to construct an argument that sets the LFMB firmly within the development of Gallican liturgy, through the Norman influence up to the York use that developed after the consecration of York Minster in 1472. He thus established his own lineage as a modern prebendary of York (we might note the interesting footnote citing prayer used ‘at the opening of each day's session in both houses of [the northern] Convocation’): a potentially attractive apostolic liturgical continuity.

The next clues as to what Simmons was attempting lie in his marginal commentary, specifically with reference to his prioritised text B. Behind Simmons's editorial work lies both the Oxford Movement's RomanticismFootnote ⁶⁵ and the medievalism that gave rise to the ‘making of Middle English’. For instance, Simmons's discussion of the elevation of the host in the LFMB might be noted:

Simmons's comment in the first part of this quotation – albeit immediately dismissed with the reference to the doctrine of concomitanceFootnote ⁶⁸ – is an indirect reference to lollard thinking on the eucharist, which contested the nature of the ‘real presence’. Such a protest against transubstantiation lies at the heart of Wycliffite theology, earning Wycliffe papal condemnation.Footnote ⁶⁹ Wycliffe's rejection of transubstantiation is difficult to articulate precisely as he is generally more eager to condemn his opponents than define his own position, but it is rooted in a very Oxfordian argument about the theology of Thomas Aquinas regarding ‘accidents without a subject’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In the words of Anne Hudson:

Why then did Simmons make this reference? The explanation seems to lie in an understanding of the eucharist rooted in the Romanticism of the Oxford Movement, and this short reference opens onto a much larger theological issue.

Though Simmons's movements in 1836 are not known, it is not impossible that he heard Pusey's Lectures on types and prophecies, delivered in Oxford in that year, which contain Pusey's first lengthy discussion of the eucharist. In these lectures Pusey affirms a real presence ‘conveyed by means of the elements’, but is quite clear in his rejection of the doctrine of concomitance, looking back to the authority of Scripture and opposing the manner of administration in the Latin rite. In short, Pusey's Tractarian understanding of the eucharist bears uncanny similarities to that of Wycliffe, while avoiding later lollard simplifications that seem to reduce the sacrament to a straightforward memorial.Footnote ⁷²

What might this context suggest for Simmons's conception of the LFMB ? What he seemed to be seeking was a work that prefigured his own variety of Anglicanism; although he was too honest and subtle a scholar to ignore the difference (viz. on concomitance), the LFMB's emphasis on the ‘owen presence’ spoke to his own understanding of the sacrament, and this approach is supported by his specific reference to Newman's Grammar of assent (1870) as an authority on the ‘dogma of the real presence’.Footnote ⁷³ His editorial enterprise was clearly intended as part of a larger Tractarian attempt to reconstruct the medieval roots of Anglicanism: roots which he found in a particular engagement with vernacular religion, especially what he conceived of as lollardy.Footnote ⁷⁴ The LFMB, then, which sat between English-language devotion – traditionally seen as ‘protestant’ – and pre-Reformation religious practice – and thus catholic – would seem to have spoken rather well to his own nineteenth-century agendas. He would have appreciated too the LFMB's action-focused content. Simmons was pedantically concerned with the importance of action and movement in the eucharist, as is evident from his lengthy essay ‘Standing before the Lord's Table’ with its discussion of the ‘rubrical determination of the celebrant's position’ and the ‘inextinguishable rule of catholic ritual’. He would have found such ‘rubrical determinations’, literally in their red ink, in manuscripts of the LFMB.

Simmons is best regarded as a scholar-priest in a ‘learned church’Footnote ⁷⁵ whose scholarship often preferred the term ‘English Church’ to Church of England, and which emphasised liturgical continuity rather than Reformation discontinuity as evidence of the Catholicity of their Church. He was not alone; another parish priest, Frederick George Lee, whose independent means allowed him to dedicate himself to study, produced the Directorium Anglicanum in 1858, described by Nigel Yates as the vade-mecum of advanced Tractarians.Footnote ⁷⁶ Its full title included the phrase ‘According to the ancient use of the Church of England’, emphasising that its purpose was to incorporate late medieval traditions as far as possible into worship based on the Book of Common Prayer. The link with such texts as the LFMB is clear. And it was not only the Tractarians who were editing and recovering early liturgical texts. The Parker Society was founded in 1841 ‘for the publication of the Works of the Fathers and Early Writers of The Reformed English Church’, supported by both High Churchmen and Evangelical clergy. (A group of Tractarians responded by founding the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.)

Simmons, though now largely forgotten or dismissed, clearly moved in distinguished intellectual circles both within and beyond the Church. His article on the position of the celebrant at the eucharist was a contribution to a larger debate among Tractarians and their followers on ‘unusual attitudes in prayer’, Simmons following the conservative example of Newman who to his last days as an Anglican celebrated from the north end of the altar, in line with the practice of LFMB (Text B, line 156).Footnote ⁷⁷ Significant also is Simmons's insistence upon apostolicity and his interest in the Prayer Book of 1549, given importance by the Tractarians since Pusey's Tract 81 (1837), again seen in terms of its continuity with the late medieval English Church.Footnote ⁷⁸

What all these approaches reveal is a liturgical imagination steeped in the theology and manner of celebration of the mass that might be expected from an Anglican who had come through the Oxford of Keble, Tractarianism and Ritualism and yet could speak of the Church of England as ‘reformed’ by our Holy Reformation. Simmons's conception of the Middle Ages was thus profoundly nineteenth-century. He constructed the mass of the LFMB in his own image, and this process then fed his own theology and liturgical sense: a perfect hermeneutic circle. He found in the LFMB, and the texts that he associated with it, what he was looking for. And as we have seen, like a distant mirror, the LFMB reflected back a delicate late medieval ambiguity between orthodox tradition and vernacular innovation that, for those who could see, pointed forward to trends yet to come. At the same time his scholarship earned Simmons a place in Percy Dearmer's widely popular The parson's handbook (1899), the LFMB, as well as the EETS Prymer, appearing there in the list of books quoted. The scholarly Canon Simmons was perhaps in Dearmer's mind an exception among the clergy whose lack of liturgical knowledge has resulted in the ‘lamentable confusion, lawlessness, and vulgarity which are conspicuous in the Church at this time’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Clergy like Simmons, on the other hand, sought an order in liturgy and ceremonial that was at once in continuity with the English Church of late medievalism, and true in his own terms, at the same time, to the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England.