The title of this book echoes Adrian Fortescue's much older work, The ceremonies of the Roman rite described, and this is quite deliberate. Urquhart, who teaches Classics at Rutland School, presents the Ceremonies of the Sarum missal, with the subtitle ‘A careful conjecture’. It is at the very least a learned labour of love, and liturgical scholars will be surprised by this meticulous discussion of the details for an ‘authentic’ celebration of the Sarum use Missal in various forms – for low mass, high mass and sung mass, as well as for the special ceremonies for important feasts and seasons such as Holy Week. This type of liturgical study has until recently been under a cloud, but with the rediscovery that liturgical texts and rubrics are for performance, there has been a renewed interest in what Edward Ratcliff once described as ‘circus’. Urquhart has drawn on extensive sources and this is an impressive piece of work. However, it is not without its own agenda, which has impacted the use of sources, and explains some of its observations and statements. ‘The altar ideally should be free standing so that it can be walked around while censing’ – that would have been hard to find in most English medieval parishes that used Sarum; ‘The Sarum books do not presume Eucharistic reservation in a tabernacle placed on the altar’ – only contemporary Roman Catholics and Anglo-Catholics would need to know this. And the reference to clergy choir dress as ‘cassock, surplice and biretta’ seems to forget the place of origin of the biretta, which had no place in Sarum use. It is well-known that there are some similarities between the Sarum use and the Dominican use, but it seems unnecessary for the author to footnote the differences. Urquhart's agenda is stated in the preface: ‘This liturgy, thoroughly Catholic in sentiment, thoroughly Roman in origin and thoroughly English in accent, should be seen at least as an extraordinary form of the Anglican rite, enriching the ceremonial, and eventually perhaps the texts themselves of the Ordinariates’ worship.’ In old-fashioned partisan mode reference is made to the post-Reformation Church of England as schismatic with schismatic priests. This is a book to encourage, and to await a golden day, when more traditionalist-minded English Roman Catholics can freely celebrate according to the Sarum use. This accounts for the list of dates and occasions when the Sarum use has been celebrated since 1556. 1996–7 records some celebrations at Merton College, Oxford, and the 2000 celebration in King's College, Aberdeen. Passed over in silence is the fact that although the bishop of Birmingham gave permission for a celebration of the Sarum use on 10 February 1996 at Merton College chapel, and that the following February a solemn mass was celebrated for Candlemas, also at Merton, an anonymous inquirer contacted the Congregation for Divine Worship, who ruled the celebrations unlawful and demanded that they cease. When in 2000 Mario Conti, bishop of Aberdeen, celebrated mass according to the use of Sarum in King's College Chapel in Aberdeen, he seemingly was unaware of the Oxford ruling. Furthermore, since Aberdeen had its own use adapted from Sarum, it is unclear as to why an un-adapted Sarum use should have been chosen anyway. Urquhart gives no mention of the many celebrations that have stemmed from John Harper's ‘Experience of Worship’ project, with celebrations of Sarum use in St Teilo's Church, Wales, in Salisbury Cathedral (where it all began) and other medieval Churches – no doubt because they are ‘schismatic’. There is no reference to the customaries published on http://sarumcustomary.org.uk which corrects some of Frere's earlier work; no reference to Late medieval liturgies enacted; or to the important studies by Matthew Cheung Salisbury on Sarum use. The latter warns that there was no one Sarum use but only Sarum uses. Parish churches could not replicate a customary designed for the architecture of Salisbury Cathedral, and manuscripts vary considerably in their provision. Urquhart is very dependent on Fr Daniel Rock's work of the nineteenth century, which was an important study in its day. Rock and Pugin urged the reintroduction of Sarum use in the re-established English Roman Catholic Church, but the archbishop of Westminster decided otherwise. Urquhart cites Pope Benedict xvi's Summorum pontificum which allowed the so-called Tridentine rite (actually the Missal of 1962) to be celebrated more frequently as the ‘extraordinary rite’, but Pope Francis's Traditionis custodes now restricts its use, and would seem to rule out any permission for Sarum use.

What, then, are liturgical scholars to make of this ‘careful conjecture’? A useful analogy might be as follows. I am a rail enthusiast, and when I was a teenager the UK still had steam locomotives until 1968, though they were phased out from East Anglia where I lived by 1962. They went for scrap. Some were preserved for the National Collection. Some were purchased by groups who also purchased closed railway lines, and now run steam locomotives on what are called Heritage railways. People love to ride on these, but most of the lines begin nowhere in particular and do not go far or to anywhere else of magnitude. There are one or two exceptions. The Paignton-Torquay line runs regular services and uses steam locomotives, and the Great Central does the same. Running regular passenger service from and to obvious towns and cities does keep alive what until the 1960s was common. The Heritage railways are fun and run for tourists and enthusiasts rather than for regular commuters. For Sarum use to become more than the liturgical equivalent of a Heritage railway, a chapel or church would need to have the ability to celebrate it weekly as a regular service with parishioners who are more like regular commuters than tourists. Urquhart has given us the equivalent of a lovingly restored steam locomotive which has no track for it to run anywhere.