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| Sarum Missal (Missale Sarisburiense), 1527 |
Guest Opinion by Liam Warner
Now and again one hears at a cocktail party that when Pope Pius IX restored the English diocesan hierarchy in 1850, the bishops seriously considered adopting the missal and breviary of Sarum, which had been those used in England before the Reformation. In fact they adopted the Roman, but the story provides a tantalizing what-if, especially to people interested in traditional liturgy today.
The claim seems to be that there was a definite proposal made to the bishops and others in authority, not simply a vague suggestion or idle wish on the part of antiquarians. The difficulty is that no one has ever been able to prove that this happened. It is not mentioned anywhere one would naturally expect it to be: Ward’s lives of Wiseman1 and Newman2, Purcell’s of Manning3, Snead-Cox’s of Vaughan.4 The decrees of the first provincial synod after the restoration, that of Westminster in 1852, simply presume, rather than declare, that the Roman Rite will be used.5 Fr. Nicholas Schofield, the archivist of the Archdiocese of Westminster, said in an email to the writer, ‘I have read this several times in secondary sources or heard it in conversation but have never seen any confirmation in original documents."
It is certainly true that there was considerable interest in pre-Reformation Catholicism during the period in question, especially among two groups: the Anglican Tractarians and the Catholic Gothic revivalists. The former included the famous Oxford academics John Henry Newman and E. B. Pusey; the latter was led by the architect A. W. N. Pugin, Fr. Daniel Rock and John Talbot, the 16th Earl of Shrewsbury. Pugin had been an Anglican but converted in 1834, before the Oxford Movement was blowing in full gale. In her biography of Pugin, Rosemary Hill makes scattered references to Sarum. For instance: “When Pugin was at Oscott for Easter he observed that Wiseman was using the Sarum Rite, aware of its appeal to Young England and the Oxford men.”6 Nicholas Wiseman, later the first archbishop of Westminster in the restored hierarchy, “was a long-standing friend of Rock and the Shrewsburys, sympathetic to their antiquarianism and to the Oxford Movement.”7 Hill also reports that when Pugin’s wife, Louisa, was received into the Catholic Church in 1839 at a chapel at Alton Towers, the Mass was celebrated by Rock according to the Sarum books.8 Hill gives no direct source for either assertion (although she did have access to his surviving diaries, which do not seem to have yet been published).
Pugin and other promoters of the pre-Reformation Catholic tradition, such as Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle, were designing rood screens, pyxes (rather than tabernacles) and Gothic vestments. In late 1839, the Congregation de Propaganda Fide wrote to Bp. Thomas Walsh, the Vicar Apostolic of the London District, censuring the use of these vestments.9 Phillipps responded angrily to his friend Lord Shrewsbury:
An uniformity of vestments or even of rites and Liturgies has never yet been enforced in any period of the Church, and the Bull of St. Pius V. Quod à nobis published in the year 1568 expressly sanctions the use of all Missals and Breviaries published 200 years before the Council of Trent (and hence there is no doubt that any English Bishop has full power to command the restoration of our glorious old Sarum Rite).10
Thus Phillipps, for his part, knew his historical and legal ground and, we presume, wished the bishops would act as he suggested they could. Rome’s disapproval of Gothic vestments, however, persisted into the twentieth century, as a decree of the Congregation of Rites of December 9, 1925, evinces.11 This cites an earlier decree of August 21, 1863, to the same effect. It seems very unlikely, then, that Rome was willing to entertain a wholesale restoration of the Sarum Use even while she was condemning such comparatively minor variations.
Meanwhile scholars and interested amateurs continued their pro-Sarum campaign. Phillipps wote to Cardinal Acton, July 22, 1842, that a correspondent of his was on his way to Belgium to oversee a reprinting first of the Sarum Breviary and then of the Missal.1 Purcell says in a footnote that this correspondent was the Rev. J. B. Bloxam of Magdalen College, Oxford, a Tractarian. The Count de Montalembert, the famous French liberal Catholic, wrote to Phillipps in December 1842 that he had crossed paths in Brussells with a Charles Seager, “who had come over in order to reprint the Sarum Missal and Breviary.”13 Seager was an assistant lecturer at Oxford in Hebrew under Pusey until 1843, when he converted to Catholicism.14
In the spring of 1840, Newman, Pusey and John Keble had been contemplating publishing an edition of the Sarum breviary in Latin and English.15 According to Liddon, Pusey’s biographer, nothing seems to have come of it.16 It would stand to reason, however, if Seager’s effort was the fruit of the other men’s initial plan. Seager published the first fascicle of his Portiforii seu Breviarii Sarisburensis in 1843, but that was the year he left Anglicanism for Rome, so the project appears to have been discontinued. Hence the Missal was not printed until the 1860s.
Yet while all this zeal for the Sarum Use was simmering, we do not find it as ubiquitous as the foregoing quotations initially suggest. Phillipps wrote in 1839 from his estate, Grace-Dieu Manor, to Lord Shrewsbury, inviting him to visit the chapel there. “All is done precisely as in parish churches in England before the change of Religion, with this only difference that of course we follow the Roman and not the Sarum Rite: though you are aware the two hardly differ at all.”18 Thus even in the strongholds of neo-Gothic, antiquarian sentiment, such as Phillipps’s house was, Sarum was not used consistently or even frequently. Gwynne reports tantalizingly that the new chapel at Oscott, the Catholic college and seminary in Birmingham, was dedicated in May 1838 with a pontifical high Mass at which “Pugin himself assisted as joint master of ceremonies” and Rock, “who had given constant help to Pugin as the leading authority on pre-Reformation days,” was also present, but which liturgical books were used is not said.18
A similar notion, namely that the Sarum Use was considered for Westminster Cathedral, completed in 1903, is also doubtful. The historical accounts of its construction say nothing about the Sarum Use; what they do mention is a protracted controversy about who should be employed to sing the public Office in the cathedral. Cardinal Vaughan, the third archbishop of Westminster, was very keen that the Office return to the normal public worship of the Catholic Church in England. “So completely,” he said, “has the idea of the public celebration of the Divine Office, as the normal form of public worship prescribed by the Church, faded from men’s minds, that even Catholics have come to consider it as a curious survival, and the peculiar heritage of ancient orders of monks or nuns.”19 But rather than charge cathedral canons or diocesan clerics with this task, “it had always been part of Cardinal Vaughan’s plans, even in the days when the Cathedral was still a project, to entrust the daily singing of the Divine Office to a choir of Benedictine monks.”20 If the Sarum Use was being seriously considered, surely this is the place to mention it, yet his biographer Snead-Cox here says nothing. First Vaughan considered the English Benedictines and then the congregation of Solesmes, until finally he decided that it would be best for the secular clergy to run the cathedral. This was announced in the Tablet, a weekly Catholic magazine, in June 1901. The notice draws particular attention to the liturgical books: “It would have been somewhat anomalous and somewhat inconvenient for both priests and people had the Roman Office, which is in common use throughout the Church, been excluded from the Metropolitan Cathedral to make way for a Breviary limited to the use of a Religious Order.”21 Of course nearly the same criticism would apply to the adoption of the Sarum Office for the cathedral. Such a remark, then, seems to clash with the idea that the Sarum breviary had been considered. The tenor and tone of the sentence are against it.
Thus the conclusion we are forced to draw is that the available evidence does not substantiate the idea that the English hierarchy seriously considered a proposal to adopt the Use of Sarum either for the entire country or for Westminster Cathedral. This may very well have happened, but no one has been able to demonstrate it. In fact, it is conspicuously absent in every source where it might naturally be mentioned. What the evidence does bear out is the existence of widespread learned interest in the rites and practices of pre-Reformation England, which interest has persisted to the present day.
-- Liam Warner is a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Boston. He graduated from Harvard College in 2020 with a degree in Classics.
Endnotes:
1. Wilfrid Ward, The Life and Times of Nicholas Wiseman. 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897).
2. Ibid.
3. Edmund Sheridan Purcell, The Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. 2 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1896).
4. J. G. Snead-Cox, The Life of Cardinal Vaughan. 2 vols. (London: Burns and Oats, 1910).
5. Decreta quatuor conciliorum provincialium Westmonasteriensium, 2nd ed. (London: Burns & Oates, no date), 13-26.
6. Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 264.
7. Hill, God’s Architect, 236.
8. Ibid., 211.
9. Ibid., 223.
10. Edmund Sheridan Purcell, The Life and Letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle. 2 vols. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1900), 2:220.
11. Theodor Klauser, A Short History of the Western Liturgy, trans. John Halliburton, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 131; Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 18 (Rome: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1926), 58-59.
12. Purcell, Ambrose Phillipps, 1:234.
13. Purcell, Ambrose Phillipps, 2:236.
14. Thompson Cooper and G. Martin Murphy. “Seager, Charles (1808–1878), orientalist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Sept. 23, 2004, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-24981.
15. The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Gerard Tracey, 32 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-2008), 7:265-266.
16. Henry Parry Liddon, The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 4 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1894), 2:147.
17. Purcell, Ambrose Phillipps, 1:77.
18. Denis Gwynne, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin and the Catholic Revival (London: Hollis and Carter, 1946), 56-57.
19. Snead-Cox, Cardinal Vaughan, 2:320.
20. Ibid., 2:346
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