Studies of Anglo-CatholicismFootnote ¹ have long held in esteem the pastoral work of priests in parishes often neglected by other strands of churchmanship in the Church of England.Footnote ² Recently questions have been raised regarding the reality of this work.Footnote ³ The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, which was convened between 1904 and 1906, provides a unique insight into the nature of services in Anglo-Catholic parishes at the beginning of the twentieth century. Through an evidence-gathering process that took place in 1904 and 1905, the commission created the most comprehensive survey of the conduct of worship at Anglo-Catholic parishes produced up until that point.Footnote ⁴ This article will use the commission's evidence to consider how such parishes provided for the sick and the dying during the period. In doing so, it will consider what was novel about the approaches of Anglo-Catholic parishes towards caring for the sick and dying, exploring how they differed from the approaches sanctioned by the Book of Common Prayer. By examining the responses of Anglo-Catholic clergy to the commission, it will consider how pastoral need as well as a belief in a ‘catholic’ theology influenced their decision to use, and their justification of, non-Prayer Book provisions for the sick and dying.

The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline was the culmination of an almost decade-long anti-ritualist campaign which had raged both inside and outside parliament.Footnote ⁵ This of course was not the first royal commission called to examine the issues raised by the ritualist movement, the Royal Commission on Ritualism having met from 1867 to 1870. It was that commission which led to the anti-ritualist legislation of the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶ The ineffectiveness of this legislation in ‘solving’ the ritualist question, and the unhappiness about the prosecutions which resulted from the legislation and affected those on both sides of the ritualist debate, were the real inspirations for the new commission.Footnote ⁷ Carrying out its duty, the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline became the largest officially sanctioned central gatherer of information regarding liturgical practice which the Church of England had seen in modern times.Footnote ⁸ John Shelton Reed claimed that the commission considered evidence from 8,689 out of the 14,234 Church of England churches that the commission identified as currently existing in England.Footnote ⁹ Donald Gray, however, gave the much more conservative number of 687 services held at 559 churches across England:Footnote ¹⁰ 559 was the number that the report of the Royal Commission used, and although not as impressive as 60 per cent of churches, 3.9 per cent of all churches was not an insignificant number by any means.Footnote ¹¹

The report of the Royal Commission, which directly led to the failed attempt to revise the Book of Common Prayer, which in turn ushered in the ‘Prayer Book Crisis’, has been the focus of most who have considered the commission.Footnote ¹² There have been a few accounts of the evidence contained within the report. The evidence was considered briefly, and colourfully, by Donald Gray in his study of the ‘Prayer Book Crisis’.Footnote ¹³ Bethany Kilcrease has also considered the commission, focusing mainly on how it was a culmination of the conflict between ritualists and anti-ritualist groupings, with both organizing to help or hinder the commission.Footnote ¹⁴ Nigel Yates, in his study of ritualism, was cautious about using the evidence of the commission, which he considered ‘relies very heavily on the observations of hostile, and sometimes not very well-informed, witnesses’.Footnote ¹⁵ Such a view ignores the fact that the priests of all churches mentioned by witnesses were given the chance to respond, that the vast majority did, and that all witnesses were thoroughly questioned by the commissioners, who, as Grey points out, were selected to bring a sense of balance and a lack of partisanship.Footnote ¹⁶ As this article will demonstrate, commissioners were not afraid to push witnesses in order to satisfy themselves that their statements were unambiguous and reflected the actual situation within a parish. I have previously considered the evidence of the Royal Commission, but have only scratched the surface of the material covered in the three substantial volumes of evidence.Footnote ¹⁷ What unites the work of Kilcrease, Yates and myself is the use of ecclesiological questions to interrogate the evidence and the consideration of how this evidence demonstrates the tension between the hierarchy of the church and the competing theological movements within it. In contrast, this article will use the evidence to build a picture of how certain aspects of pastoral care were conducted within Anglo-Catholic parishes at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Three main currents emerging from the evidence presented to the commission were seen by witnesses as unique to how Anglo-Catholic parishes cared for the sick and dying: reservation of the consecrated elements, the use of a sanctus bell, and organized prayers for the sick, dying and (in extreme cases) dead. Through an examination of these practices, the article will explore both how they were implemented in churches across England and also the pastoral reasons priests gave to explain these non-Prayer Book actions. In doing so it will consider how pastoral concern and Anglo-Catholic theology led to novel approaches to caring for the sick and dying.

In the 1552 Book of Common Prayer, reservation had implicitly been made illegal within the Church of England, with a rubric in the order for communion stating that ‘if any of the bread or wine remain, the Curate shall have it to his own use’.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1552 and 1559, no distinction was made between bread and wine that had been upon the Lord's table during the service and any surplus which had been unused, part of Cranmer's conscious omission of any idea of consecration within his eucharistic theology as expressed in his Prayer Books.Footnote ¹⁹ Since the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the reservation of consecrated elements after a communion service had been explicitly made illegal in the Church of England. The new communion rubric regarding any bread or wine not consumed by communicants allowed for the curate to take home the remaining elements which were ‘unconsecrated’. Any consecrated elements were not to ‘be carried out of the Church, but the Priest and such other of the Communicants as he shall call unto him, shall immediately after the blessing, reverently eat and drink the same’.Footnote ²⁰ This rubric was a suggestion by John Cosin, drawn from his Durham Book, prepared in advance of the Savoy Conference of 1661, in order to bring the rules surrounding the consumption of the leftover elements more into line with the Laudian understanding that these had been fundamentally changed through their use in the communion service.Footnote ²¹ However, through the latter half of the nineteenth century, reservation had been adopted by some in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.Footnote ²² The Royal Commission gives some insight into how widespread the practice was, geographically speaking. The majority of cases of reservation of the elements reported to the commission came, perhaps unsurprisingly, from London and, perhaps more surprisingly, the south-west of England. In the south-west, the most reports of reservation appeared to come from Devon, where cases were reported in a number of seaside resorts and urban centres, including Babbacombe, Paignton and Plymouth.Footnote ²³ It seems, then, that there was a concentration of advanced Anglo-Catholicism in London and the south-west at the start of the twentieth century. Nigel Yates, considering the spread of ritualist priests in the 1870s, found there was an ‘above average concentration’ of such priests in the dioceses of London, Bath and Wells and Exeter.Footnote ²⁴ This trend was continuing into the twentieth century.

Overall, thirty churches in which reservation took place were presented to the commission.Footnote ²⁵ Yates has questioned the reliability of this number, stating that it is ‘certainly inaccurate and indicates that the precautions taken by parishes to disguise reservation were remarkably effective’.Footnote ²⁶ However, this is based on his assumption that churches tried hard to disguise reservation, a supposition not borne out by the evidence of the commission. Furthermore, Yates does not question any of the other statistics drawn from the evidence of the commission. Without clear evidence of why this data is unreliable, there seems no obvious reason not to accept the number of thirty churches practising reservation. Of these, the commission found only thirteen in which reservation took place ‘publicly in the church itself or in a chapel to which the public had access, or which was so arranged that the place of reservation was visible from outside the chapel’.Footnote ²⁷ In the public evidence, moreover, only in one church, St Peter's, Plymouth, was it explicitly stated that reservation took place in public.Footnote ²⁸ St Peter's was one of the first cases heard by the Royal Commission, forming part of the evidence of the first two evidence-givers: the Revd William Edward Bowen and Henry Charles Hogan. Bowen, a priest who did not ‘hold any cure’,Footnote ²⁹ had become an anti-ritualist campaigner. In 1902 he had produced a small book, Contemporary Ritualism: A Volume of Evidence, specifically for the use of parliamentarians,Footnote ³⁰ and in 1904 he followed this up by circulating an anti-ritualist pamphlet amongst them.Footnote ³¹ Gray identified this pamphlet as having had an ‘explosive effect on the Prime Minister’, thus making the formation of the Royal Commission inevitable.Footnote ³² Bowen, then, was an obvious choice as the first witness to the commission. Instead of relying on his previously published evidence, Bowen presented evidence from Anglo-Catholic churches gathered since May 1903, relying heavily on the work of his ‘chief reporter’, Henry Hogan.Footnote ³³ Hogan had decided which churches to visit based on the English Church Union (ECU)'s Tourist's Church Guide, using the edition published in 1901.Footnote ³⁴

It was Hogan who gave evidence about St Peter's, after attending a Monday service on 25 January 1904. He had been keen to visit after seeing a piece in the Western Morning News about the first sermon by the new incumbent, the Revd H. M. Downton.Footnote ³⁵ In the sermon, Downton had referred to the bishop's visit to the parish, which seems in part to have been caused by the public reservation of the consecrated elements in the church. Downton commented that the people of the parish:

It is clear from this that public reservation had been practised in the church, but the bishop of Exeter, Herbert Ryle, had intervened to ensure that the elements were only reserved privately for the use in communicating ‘the sick and dying’. Since this decision, Downton made clear, ‘the Blessed Sacrament had ceased to be reserved publicly in open church’.Footnote ³⁷ However, the bishop had not completely stopped the practice of reservation. It was this claim, that reservation formed part of the pastoral care for the sick and dying in a parish, which was to be mentioned repeatedly when reservation was raised before the commission.

From the evidence given to the commission, London seems, unsurprisingly, to have had the highest incidence of reservation. The bishop of London, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, informed the committee that from an inquiry in his diocese, he found that thirty-four churches were practising reservation, of which fifteen practised perpetual reservation, whilst nineteen practised occasional reservation, in which the elements were ‘reserved for a particular sick person and then taken almost immediately to the sick person’.Footnote ³⁸ Overall this was a small, but not insignificant, number of churches. Winnington-Ingram told the commission he believed there were 640 churches in his diocese, although the commission believed there were 607: so around 5 per cent of London churches were practising reservation.Footnote ³⁹ Those priests from London who either wrote to the commission after a witness spoke about their church, or who appeared as witnesses themselves, all claimed that they practised reservation out of pastoral necessity. Frederick C. Holiday, the churchwarden at St Augustine's, Kilburn, claimed that reservation was not practised at his church. However, upon further questioning he informed the committee that ‘sometimes’ some of the consecrated elements were reserved after the service to be ‘taken at the end of the service to a sick person’. This occurred ‘immediately’ after the service was concluded, and thus the elements were not ‘reserved in the church’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Revd Canon C. E. Brookes, the incumbent at St John the Divine, Kennington, spoke of a similar practice at his own church, with the reserved elements being ‘taken straight from the church, and taken directly after a celebration’. Brookes was adamant that he would allow no delay to take place, telling the commissioners that he ‘was asked only the other day, for instance, to allow the Blessed Sacrament to be reserved from our 7 o'clock celebration to half past 10, and I said no – that it could not be done’.Footnote ⁴¹ This, then, was not reservation as is typically understood. The consecrated elements were ‘reserved’, in that they were retained without being consumed from those consecrated at the communion service in the church, but they were taken directly from that celebration to the communicant in the parish. There was, strictly speaking, no reservation taking place within the church building.

St Frideswide's, Poplar, pushed the boundaries of how this type of reservation could take place. The priest at St Frideswide's, the Revd C. P. S. Clarke, appeared before the commission in January 1905. In 1932 Clarke would write a history of The Oxford Movement and After, in anticipation of its centenary, in which he depicted the commission as a fruit of Davidson's early archiepiscopate, when he needed ‘time to free himself of the notion that force was a remedy [to the practices of] Ritualists’.Footnote ⁴² As an evidence giver, Clarke informed the commission that it was the practice at St Frideswide's to reserve the elements ‘for a few hours’ usually when ‘there is a person, who may be likely to die at any minute’. For those few hours between service and distribution, the reserved elements were not held in the church, but instead in the ‘Sisters’ Chapel’, presumably one designated or built for the Sisters of Mercy, who operated in the parish.Footnote ⁴³ Clarke informed the commission that the usual practice was for a priest to leave with the elements, accompanied by a verger who carried a lit candle. When pressed by Michael Hicks Beach, the chairman of the committee, over whether this was ‘desirable’, Clarke responded that he thought it was, as ‘one wants to shows some respect and reverence, to the Blessed Sacrament; and I think it is good for the people too. Of course, one might put on an overcoat over one's surplice and go secretly, but I think it is good for the people in the street to know.’ Perhaps inadvertently, he had admitted that the elements were carried to the chapel in a proper ceremonial procession, with a priest in surplice led by a verger with candle. It was hard to argue that all these elements were a necessity for communicating the sick; instead, the main audience for this procession were passers-by, whom Clarke said would occasionally ‘take off their hats or would show some mark of reverence’. It was, he claimed, ‘a witness’.Footnote ⁴⁴

The majority of churches where the commission found evidence of reservation pleaded that it was done out of pastoral necessity. At most of these churches, the priests were keen to point out that the reserved elements were carried almost immediately from the service to the sick person. In these cases, it is hard to argue that reservation was really taking place for devotional reasons. How could a congregation adore the reserved sacrament when it was never held in public, or if it was immediately taken from the church? Although it was not a main feature of theological writings of the period, the fact that reservation was almost exclusively for the communion of the sick and dying is not wholly surprising from the sparse discussion of the matter by Anglo-Catholic theologians.Footnote ⁴⁵ For example, Edward Bouverie Pusey had argued that although Article 28 of the Thirty-Nine Articles appeared to condemn reservation, it did not in fact condemn reservation for the practice of communicating the sick as this was a practice of the early church and ‘there is no instance, in which the Church of England has condemned any practice of the Primitive Church’.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, the generation of Anglo-Catholic theologians who were emerging at the start of the twentieth century would soon come to defend reservation for devotional purposes.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the case of St Frideswide's, Poplar, demonstrates that even with immediate removal of the elements from the church for distribution to the sick there was still opportunity for the priest to encourage adoration. It is tempting to give the priests the benefit of the doubt, and say that reservation was born out of the necessity of pastoral care rather than from theological reasoning. However, this begs the question of why reservation was seen as more appropriate to early twentieth-century pastoral needs than the existing Prayer Book service for the communion of the sick.

An order for the communion of the sick had first appeared in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. The order in the first Prayer Book offered two options: the first was a short service which would take place immediately after the communion service in the church, using consecrated elements from that service, distributed after a general confession and absolution.Footnote ⁴⁸ The second provided for a communion service to be held in the house of the sick person, when there was not a service in the church on that day.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the 1552 Prayer Book only the latter option was envisaged; although it did not explicitly rule out the use of pre-consecrated elements, the fact that the Prayer Book provided a collect, epistle and gospel suggested a full communion service was to be held within the sick person's home.Footnote ⁵⁰ This service was repeated in the books of 1559 and 1662 without alteration.Footnote ⁵¹ The addition of the 1662 rubric discussed above, which directed that any leftover consecrated elements from the main communion service were to be consumed ‘reverently’ immediately after the service, and not to be ‘carried out of the Church’, made clear that pre-consecrated elements were not to be used in the communion of the sick.Footnote ⁵² The use of reservation thus went against the rubrics of the 1662 Prayer Book, but could find precedent in that of 1549. The question remains why Anglo-Catholic priests were turning to an illegal practice rather than the legal service provided by the Prayer Book.

Many of those priests who discussed reservation before the commission were keen to stress that it complemented the Prayer Book service for the sick, rather than replacing it. Clarke said they ‘always’ tried to hold the communion service for the sick ‘but there are cases where the sick person cannot bear even a short service’.Footnote ⁵³ Hicks Beach asked if Clarke had ever ‘found a difficulty in celebrating the Communion Service for the Sick in a private house’ on account of the ‘surroundings’, a not very subtle euphemism for the poverty and slum housing which characterized much of Poplar.Footnote ⁵⁴ Clarke answered that he had not ‘because we have Sisters of Mercy, and they always go beforehand and get the room ready’. Also, he added, he was ‘not so easily affected’ by his surroundings, and was of the view that ‘ritual and the surroundings do not make much difference’ to the conduct of the service.Footnote ⁵⁵ When the revision process of the Book of Common Prayer took place in the aftermath of the Royal Commission, there were some claims that the communion service for the sick had fallen into disuse due to priests' dislike of being in the houses of poor parishioners.Footnote ⁵⁶ Clarke seems to have pre-emptively dismissed that as a reason.

Arthur Eglington, priest at St John's, East Dulwich, claimed that when he had arrived in the parish ‘there was no actual Celebration for the Sick according to the Book of Common Prayer’. Rather, he found that the parishioners had been ‘educated up to the practice of reservation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ In some parishes, reservation seems to have supplanted the Prayer Book service for the sick, not out of necessity but on theological grounds. Eglington was attempting to reintroduce the Prayer Book service, and informed the commission that over the previous three years he had taken around a hundred and forty services for the sick, of which twelve had involved using the reserved elements.Footnote ⁵⁸ Even in what was a quite advanced parish, the priest had managed to reduce the number of services using reservation substantially. By contrast, Ernest Charles Atherton, the priest at St James the Great, Keyham, Devonport, reported that of the seventy-four visitations to the sick he had taken in the past year, around forty-five or forty-six were private celebrations; thus the remainder, nearly thirty, involved reservation.Footnote ⁵⁹ Brooks, from St John the Divine, Kennington, claimed that ‘I very much prefer celebrating, and I very much prefer my colleagues doing the same, but I suppose that more often they are communicated with the Reserved Sacrament than with a celebration.’Footnote ⁶⁰ The people's churchwarden at St Mary Magdalene, Paddington, Charles E. J. Twisday, claimed that as doctors often ‘impose regulations as to rest and absence of excitement’ it was often impossible to conduct the Prayer Book service without going against doctors’ orders.Footnote ⁶¹

Of the priests who spoke about the Prayer Book service for the communion of the sick, if we are to take them at their word, all apparently preferred conducting that service to communicating the sick with the reserved elements. Reservation was seen as a necessity arising partly from the need not to disturb the extremely sick with a communion service. Although reservation can be portrayed as a clear token of Anglo-Catholicism, the evidence of the commission suggests that those using reservation did so because of perceived pastoral need. The concentration in London, especially in the East End of London, seems to reflect a practice adopted to suit a growing population. But a growing population alone does not fully account for the growth in demand for communicating from a sick bed. The adoption of the practice across Devon shows a growing demand within Anglo-Catholic parishes that were not subject to high population growth, suggesting a growing demand from Anglo-Catholic parishioners to receive when sick or close to death. The Prayer Book service for the sick, whilst shorter than the full communion service, was still considerably lengthier than communicating with the reserved elements. At a time of growing demands on their time, reservation was one way Anglo-Catholic priests could ensure that they met all their pastoral commitments within the hours of a day.

We now turn from perhaps the most obvious Anglo-Catholic practice to occur in the evidence to two more obscure ones. One of the most intriguing elements covered in the Royal Commission's final report was the use of church bells. The report stated that ‘it would appear from the evidence that the practice of ringing the church bell at the time of the consecration, is valued as a method of enabling the sick persons to join in the service at which they are unable to be actually present’.Footnote ⁶² The use of a sanctus bell had been growing amongst Anglo-Catholics towards the end of the nineteenth century. Percy Dearmer, in The Parson's Handbook, had suggested that ‘perhaps the bell in the tower will toll three times at each consecration, and a small bell may also be used if it is felt to be desirable’.Footnote ⁶³ Ritual Notes, another leading Anglo-Catholic manual, also recommended the ringing of a bell at the moment of consecration.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was not a practice contained within, or sanctioned by, any of the Prayer Books, and the evidence of the Royal Commission provides an examination both of the practice and of the pastoral justification many priests used for adopting it.

The evidence presented to the commission suggests that in many Anglo-Catholic parishes, the main church bell, rather than small altar bells, was used as a sanctus bell. This was the case at St Andrew's, Willesden, where the bell was ‘tolled always three times after the consecration of each of the elements’ as ‘those who lie on sick beds, as well as those at work, within hearing of it, have often spoken of the comfort of knowing that they are being remembered before God at that most solemn moment of the eucharistic service’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The same occurred at St Frideswide's, Poplar, where Clarke said that it was tolled ‘to let people outside, especially the sick, know what is going on’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly at Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon, the vicar, George Arbuthnot, informed the commission that this was done ‘to let persons outside know what was going on, so that they might, if they thought fit, join in the prayers which were being offered’. Arbuthnot went on to say he knew from personal experience ‘that sick persons appreciate this’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Percy Gethen, rector of St Benedict, Ardwick, gave a spirited defence of the practice:

This last comment, that the ceremony took place not in the church but in the belfry, seems particularly telling and may suggest why in the evidence of the commission there were no real examples of stand-alone sanctus bells in use. Gethen seems to have been aware that the ringing of such a bell would constitute a ceremony, and as it was not contained within any of the Prayer Books of the Church of England, it was not a ceremony legally allowed in a church building.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thus Gethen appears to have been exploiting what he clearly believed to be a loophole, by holding an illegal ceremony outside the church which took place concurrently with the legal service being held inside the church. This was a clever, if legally rather dubious, way to circumvent the use of non-Prayer Book ceremonies within the worship of Anglo-Catholic parishes. Presumably other churches avoided the use of stand-alone sanctus bells so as to avoid making the ceremony too explicit. The use of church bells was not regulated within the Church of England, so this too allowed a certain legal loophole in facilitating their use in ceremonies not envisaged by the Prayer Book.

The problem with all the defences given by priests for the use of the sanctus bell is they rely on what, at best, can be described as hearsay. That priests who supported the practice felt it was appreciated by the sick is not the same as it being demonstrated that the sick felt it was part of the pastoral support offered them by the parish. The pastoral need being met was also directly tied into Anglo-Catholic theology, with priests talking of the desire to make sure sick parishioners knew when the moment of consecration occurred within the eucharistic prayer. Wanting people outside the church to know when the moment of consecration occurs is arguably not, primarily, a pastoral concern. For this practice, unlike reservation, the pastoral needs of the parish seem to be a flimsy defence for a liturgical innovation driven by theological concerns.

The final example, the incorporation of extempore or formal but unauthorized prayer into the services of the Church of England, was an issue almost as old as the church itself.Footnote ⁷¹ No Book of Common Prayer had ever instituted a way to incorporate prayers for individual parishioners into the life of the local church. Non-Prayer Book prayers had been a hallmark of the Evangelical Revival, both in organized prayer services and to a lesser extent within the conduct of Prayer Book services.Footnote ⁷² Peter Nockles, considering the difference between the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century and the Catholic Revival of the nineteenth, spoke of the ‘greater emphasis on the corporate idea and life of the church’ in the latter.Footnote ⁷³ The evidence to the Royal Commission demonstrates how Anglo-Catholic parishes were attempting to personalize the prayers in their parish by institutionalizing them. In this way they were able to ensure that all parishioners, sick or not, were visibly or verbally maintained as members of the worshipping church community.

Emily Bruce, who presented first-hand evidence she had gathered on behalf of the leading evangelical group, the Church Association,Footnote ⁷⁴ noted that at the Church of the Holy Innocents, Hammersmith, she found ‘near one of the doors … a framed card with, “Of your charity”, etc., and the names of the sick and the dead’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Another witness described at Christ Church, Chester, seeing ‘in the porch a copper plate asking for prayers of the dead, “of your charity pray for Jones, Taylor, Peers, Putlans. By thy Cross and Passion, good Lord deliver”’. However, the priest of the parish, J. F. Howson, in his written response to the commission was keen to point out that ‘there is a prayer-board, but it includes living people who are sick, and the four names quoted are four sick cases in my parish, who are still living’.Footnote ⁷⁶ There was also a prayer board asking for prayers for ‘the sick and departed’ in Chislehurst Parish Church.Footnote ⁷⁷ St Stephen's, Lewisham, also had in the porch ‘a large framed card … with three headings, viz., “Sick,” – “Travelling” and “Departed,” with a list of names under each, and a request at the foot that “prayers, intercessions, etc. be made for all men”’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The same was to be found at All Saints, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.Footnote ⁷⁹ At St Hilda's, Darlington, there was ‘a framed notice with the words – “The prayers of the church are desired for [ ] In sickness [ ] Among the faithful departed.” Under the latter heading is a list of twenty-three names on the list of the sick, the words “In Pace” have been added.’Footnote ⁸⁰ These notice boards were clearly not static objects, but were continually updated to reflect the health of people across the parish.

Some parishes integrated prayers for the sick and dying into the service itself. The simplest form was perhaps found at St John's, Gainsborough, where during the course of the Sunday morning ‘Choral Eucharist’, ‘the celebrant read out the names of some sick persons to be prayed for, and then some other names’. A prayer board was also to be found in the church.Footnote ⁸¹ At St Frideswide's, Poplar, a weekly service was held on a Wednesday evening with ‘a sermon and intercessions, the congregation sending up petitions for sick friends and other things they wish prayer for’.Footnote ⁸² At All Saints, Walworth, Hogan reported that during the course of a communion service, also held on a Wednesday, ‘before the Prayer for the Church Militant he [the priest] asked for prayer[s for] certain sick persons, and for Robert Dolling, and another person departed’.Footnote ⁸³ Charles Coard, a former Sunday school teacher in the parish of All Hallows, North St Pancras, claimed there was ‘a special Saturday morning celebration in which people are asked to pray for the faithful departed’. The priest, Coard claimed, instructed that the children be taught to pray for the dead.Footnote ⁸⁴ However, the priest, B. S. Lombard, claimed in his written response that Coard's claim was a ‘misrepresentation’

Frederick Temple, archbishop of Canterbury 1896–1902, whilst no Anglo-Catholic, made public his support for prayers for the dead numerous times during his episcopacy.Footnote ⁸⁶ Anglo-Catholics were now able to use his approval to defend the practice.

Here we seem to be seeing theology informing pastoral practice. This is not necessarily Anglo-Catholic theology; the need for personal prayer was also a concern of evangelicalism. However, in some of these cases, prayers for the dying, and especially the dead, are quite clearly informed by Anglo-Catholic theology. To pray for the dying implies that they will need specific graces as they pass from life to death. Shelton Reed sees prayers for the dead as implying the existence of purgatory, and prayers for the dying can be seen to imply the same.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, this ignores the theological context of the nineteenth century. The Tractarians had published James Usher's support for prayers for the dead as practice independent of a belief in purgatory in Tract 72,Footnote ⁸⁸ and Geoffrey Rowell has demonstrated that both the Tractarians and those who followed them held views of the existence of a purgatory-like state after death, whilst distancing themselves from Roman Catholic doctrine on purgatory.Footnote ⁸⁹ Most Anglo-Catholics held a view that there was a perceived ‘distinction between the Patristic, and basically purificatory, and the Roman, and basically penal, concepts of purgatory’, and tended towards the former.Footnote ⁹⁰ In light of this, it seems unlikely that any Church of England priest offering prayers for the dead in the early twentieth century would see these prayers as being a deciding factor in whether the dead entered hell or heaven; it is much more conceivable that they were understood to help a soul through a stage its purification before it entered heaven.

Of course, if prayers could help the dead, the question had to be asked, could the eucharist? There was limited evidence for the use of requiem masses in Anglo-Catholic parishes. Hogan heard a sermon at St Columba, Kingsland Road, in which the priest informed his parishioners that ‘when death had taken place it was far more important that mourners should be present at the Requiem Mass than that they should spend money on wreaths and flowers’.Footnote ⁹¹ Such a sermon served as an attempt to educate parishioners into new pastoral ways of being: lessening the focus on existing lay pastoral response and replacing them with new ways grounded in a more Anglo-Catholic theology. The only requiem mass actually attended by someone who presented evidence to the Royal Commission was held at St Mary Magdalene, Munster Square, in Camden Town. The priest, the Revd W. H. H. Jervois, came before the commission on 12 January 1905 to answer questions about the conduct of his parish. Evidence about the church had been presented to the commission the previous year by Bowen, although there had not been a discussion of the church before the commission.Footnote ⁹² Jervois was unusual as an Anglo-Catholic parish priest in being willing to discuss his church in person with the commission, with most only sending in written responses.Footnote ⁹³ He confirmed to the commission that a service was held in his church in which ‘before the Prayer for the Church Militant the celebrant read out a long list of names of deceased persons for whom the prayers of the congregation were asked’, although he claimed he was not the celebrant at the specific service attended by the evidence gatherer. However, he also confirmed that it was his custom to ‘always ask at the offertory, before the Prayer for the Church Militant, for prayers for the sick or any other special object’.Footnote ⁹⁴ We thus see again the adoption of personal prayers into the regular liturgical practice of the church.

The chairman of the commission, Hicks Beach, had done some research on the parish and was keen to enquire about its approach to the subject of prayers for the dead. He told Jervois that he had noted that ‘in the publication of the Guild of All Souls your church is noted as having had a service entitled “Vespers of the Dead” on All Souls’ Eve’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Guild of All Souls had been founded in 1873 to attempt to make the practice of intercessory prayers for the dead more widespread across the Church of England; Reed was right to say that by doing so they hoped ‘by clear implication, to propagate the doctrine of Purgatory’, and the Roman Catholic version of that doctrine.Footnote ⁹⁶ This was an advanced, and fringe, Anglo-Catholic group and thus it is not unsurprising that Jervois attempted to distance himself from the Guild. Jervois replied that the service was an annual one, to which Hicks Beach questioned whether the service was the same as the one published by the Guild. Pushed to name the differences, he said his service ‘consisted simply of psalms and scripture antiphons and omitted the words, “Rest eternal grant them O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them”’. Hicks Beach asked if they used the two collects written by the Guild in the service, to which Jervois responded they did not, as they ‘only used one Collect’. After Hicks Beach gave him copies of the collects, Jervois conceded that they did use one of the collects: ‘O God, the Creator and Redeemer of all them that believe, grant unto the souls of Thy servants and handmaids the remission of all their sins, that through our devout applications they may obtain the pardon they have always desired.’ Hicks Beach pointedly asked under what authority Jervois held such a service. None, Jervois conceded, and both men agreed that in future he should ask the bishop for such approval. This was not the end of the matter, though, as Hicks Beach had also noted that throughout November the church's parish magazine had advertised a number of services at which ‘the Holy Eucharist will be offered for the faithful departed’. He asked what happened at these services. According to Jervois it was the ‘ordinary Communion Service with the Collects from the Burial Service’. Hicks Beach then enquired: ‘I have no doubt that you do draw a distinction, but could you tell me shortly what distinction you draw between your offering the Holy Eucharist for the faithful departed and the sacrifices of Masses condemned in the Thirty-first Article for the same purpose?’ Jervois’ response was evasive, focusing on his interpretation of the article, which he took ‘to condemn any idea of the repetition of the Sacrifice upon the Cross or any idea, but that of pleading the sacrifice – any idea of fresh sacrifice. That, I conceive, is what is condemned – the various ideas that had arisen with regard to the Eucharist being a separate sacrifice from that on the Cross.’Footnote ⁹⁷ Lewis Dibdin, Dean of Arches, revisited this question during his own questioning of Jervois, asking whether the latter's interpretation of the article was correct or whether ‘the Thirty-first Article defines that doctrine for us’? ‘It was commonly said,’ he added, ‘that the priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead to have remission of pain or guilt.’ Jervois agreed, but offered another interpretation again of the article, that it stated ‘that the priest apart from our Lord, or apart from the body, the Church, by himself, was offering a fresh sacrifice for the living and the dead; that is the case’. There followed a protracted discussion on the meaning of the thirty-first article. Jervois explained that he prayed for the ‘remission of sins of the faithful departed’, but not ‘the remission of pain’; the latter, he argued, was where ‘the whole Romish doctrine concerning purgatory comes in’. Moreover, Jervois did not ‘believe in material pains’, which suggested that his not praying for the remission of pain was less to do with a disagreement on the efficiency of such prayers and more about the status of souls after death.Footnote ⁹⁸ This was pastoral care for the dead, with Jervois offering some sort of service to the deceased through a requiem mass. Jervois was unclear about the theology behind this, though it was certainly Anglo-Catholic in nature.

It is important to emphasize that this was the only case of a requiem mass discussed by the commission, and it was not a common pastoral concern in the period. However, as has been demonstrated, praying for the dead and dying was an established practice at numerous churches. Jervois's answers demonstrate how naïve the theological reasoning behind this was. He did not wish to state explicitly a belief in purgatory, although his practices certainly suggested such a belief. The commission evidence cannot reveal the extent to which this was shared by those priests and parishes who prayed for their dead and dying. What we may be seeing is a pastoral action with historical precedents, that Anglo-Catholics were re-adopting whilst not being fully aware of, or comfortable with, the practice's original theological underpinning. Even in this unusual case, pastoral desires seem to be driving developments with theological justifications trying to catch up.

It is of course too simplistic to see pastoral concerns and theological ideas simply as competing elements. As the evidence discussed here shows, the pastoral concerns of Anglo-Catholic priests were often informed by, or at least aligned with, their theological ones. Andrew Atherstone has written of the ritualists as the innovators of what he terms ‘party badges’. These were ‘visual innovations, obvious to all … accessible symbols of their theology, otherwise only deducible from sermons and tracts’.Footnote ⁹⁹ As this article has shown, this approach is too dismissive. Although a prayer board may have helped identify a church as Anglo-Catholic, it was not constructed as a party badge, but to serve as a pastoral aid. These were novel Anglo-Catholic approaches to existing problems, created as pastoral solutions. A pastoral rationale may have been used as a cover for more obviously ritualistic practices, such as the sanctus bell, but for practices such as reservation and organized prayers, this does not seem to be the case. Instead, we seem to see pastoral actions with historical precedents being adopted without the theological implications having been fully thought through. Whilst the evidence of the Royal Commission can offer a national overview, it cannot show what the introduction of such practices looked like on a local level. Further research is also needed to reveal more about how the pastoral and the theological were linked. Whether for pastoral or theological reasons, the evidence of the Royal Commission shows us that Anglo-Catholicism was changing the ways in which the sick and dying were being cared for in Church of England parishes across the country.