Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815–84)

Thomas Frederick Simmons, churchman, liturgist, and textual editor, was born in Woolwich, Kent, into a military family, the eldest son of twelve children of a captain in the Royal Artillery, another Thomas Frederick Simmons (d. 1842). The father was a prolific writer on military matters whose most successful work, running through some seven editions, was The Constitution and Practice of Courts Martial (London, 1830). Of the younger Thomas Frederick’s eight brothers, six were army officers, most notably General Sir John Lintorn Arabin Simmons (1821–1903), a highly distinguished soldier whose later appointments included governor of the Royal Arsenal and Military Academy at Woolwich, colonel-commandant of the Royal Engineers, and chief technical military adviser for the British delegation at the Congress of Berlin (1878). Another brother, Major Egbert Simmons, was killed at the Siege of Lucknow in 1857 while in temporary command of the 5th Fusiliers.

The younger Thomas Frederick was educated at Winchester College, matriculating as ‘post-master’ at Merton College, Oxford in 1832 or 1833. However, he left Merton in 1834 to pursue a career in the army, like his brothers; on 6 November 1840 a ‘Lieut. T. F. Simmons’ of the 72 Foot not only obtained a Certificate of Qualification from the Royal Military College at Sandhurst but was also commended with two others for:

Simmons seems to have been a successful soldier, becoming like his father a specialist on legal procedures in the military, although before the Crimean War (1853–56) graduates from the College, being ‘experts’, seem to have been discriminated against by the more gentlemanly officers who achieved rank through purchase. Nevertheless, although he left the army and later returned to Oxford and eventually a career in the church, graduating from Worcester College with a BA in 1848 and supplicating for his MA in 1859, Simmons never lost his interest in army matters.

The Salisbury, or Sarum, ‘use’ was ‘the local modification of the Roman rite in use during the Middle Ages at the cathedral church of Salisbury’ (ODCC). Traditionally ascribed to St Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury (d.1099), it is, in fact, much later. By 1457 it was claimed that it was used in public worship throughout most of England, Wales and Ireland, and it furnished the primary material for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. The most comprehensive modern edition of the ‘Use of Sarum’ (not including the Missal) remains that edited in two volumes by W. H. Frere in 1898 and 1901.

The purpose of this appendix is to illustrate many of the contentions of this book. The following parallel analysis of the LFMB and the Sarum Mass is, it has to be admitted, a necessarily artificial exercise. Simmons, it is true, linked the LFMB more closely with the York (Ebor) rite, since he was keen to make connexions between his Yorkshire parish and the usage of the metropolitan see, but the text aligns more closely in many ways to that of Salisbury (Sarum). Present-day indications of the provenance of versions of LFMB, however, show that it was circulated across a wide area of the north midlands as well as Yorkshire (see Appendix I).

Apart from Simmons’ edition of the LFMB we have deliberately used nineteenth-or early twentieth-century editions of the Sarum Missal in Latin and in English translation, as these texts were understood and revivified in the Victorian period. The LFMB is not, of course, a liturgical text as such, but rather a vernacular guide for those attending the Latin Mass.

Simmons, as we have seen, was perfectly well aware that this late medieval form of public worship should not be understood or viewed through the lens of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Nevertheless, in the context of Victorian medievalism and the Tractarian sense of the catholic continuity of the English Church, learned churchmen like Simmons, many of them devout parish priests, moved from the early Tractarian emphasis on doctrine to a growing and living sense of liturgy and later ritual.

Showing his working

At The End of the first quarter of the twenty-first century the practice of textual criticism remains as racked by controversy as it has always been. However, one positive outcome of the various debates currently circulating has been an increasing habit of reflection on the editorial craft. Tim Machan, for instance, has called for ‘editorial and interpretive self-conscious[ness, and] … greater historical sensibility in an activity that is inherently historical’ and his views have, with pithy perceptiveness, been more recently echoed by Derek Pearsall: ‘the only rule that all scholarly editors and editors of critical editions must observe is – Show your working, as we used to be exhorted when we were doing maths problems at school’. There is above all an awareness that the editorial process is not, and never has been, ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ but is rather a hermeneutic act constrained by the conditions of publication dominant at the time of the edition’s creation, and, perhaps even more importantly, the edition’s intended audience.

Simmons himself would have agreed with all these sentiments. His inheritance from the Oxford Movement included, as we have seen, an engagement with history, linked to their concern for the catholic and apostolic nature of the English church; Newman had, for instance (and rather unfairly), criticised his high-church predecessors for their ‘lack of historical sense’. And Simmons was impressively explicit about his editorial practice, even if his manner of expression is somewhat personal for the austere critical and editorial tastes of the present day: unsurprisingly, perhaps, given his immersion in the pressing liturgical and theological debates of his time. For it is possible, on the basis of ‘The Editor’s Preface’ that he placed at the beginning of his edition, to reconstruct in detail how he set about his editorial task.

Simmons tells us that his attention was drawn to LFMB by William Maskell, who took extracts from what was to become Simmons’ B-version4 and reprinted them in his book The Ancient Liturgy of the Church of England (1844): a parallel text of the eucharistic rites of Sarum, York, Hereford and Bangor, and the Roman Liturgy. Simmons also mentions his projected edition of Archbishop Thoresby’s Catechism in English, which, later published as the Lay Folks’ Catechism, remained unfinished at his death and was completed by his friend and fellow Yorkshire clergyman, Henry Edward Nolloth.

This book had its beginnings some years ago when we were both teaching at the University of Glasgow. A battered volume in the liturgical library of the late Dean Ronald Jasper of York Minster entitled The Lay Folks’ Mass Book attracted our attention. It drew us towards the forgotten figure of its editor, Thomas Frederick Simmons – liturgist, churchman, second-generation Tractarian parish priest, philologist, and one of the earliest members of the Early English Text Society – and to the late medieval poem that lies at the heart of this study.

This study of the text now known as The Lay Folk’s Mass Book, and of its editing for the Early English Text Society (EETS) in 1879 by Canon Thomas Frederick Simmons, is by two authors coming from very different academic backgrounds. David Jasper is a student of the relationship between theology and literature, with a particular interest in the nineteenth century, and is thus at home in the ecclesiastical – and indeed wider cultural – world of Canon Simmons and his church. Jeremy Smith specialises in English philology, with a particular interest in late medieval and early modern textual cultures. Our project brings these two different disciplinary perspectives and their readerships into articulation, hoping to develop new insights into the Victorian encounter with the Middle Ages, with relevance to contemporary liturgical and medieval studies.

Many people have helped us towards the completion of this book over the years. We thank in particular the staff of the following: the Archives Service of the East Riding of Yorkshire in Beverley; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Borthwick Institute for Archives in the University of York; the British Library, London; Cambridge University Library; the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield; the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Glasgow University Library; the Libraries of Gonville and Caius and Newnham Colleges, Cambridge; the Hull History Centre of the University of Hull; Liverpool University Library; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; York Minster Library.

Warm thanks are due to the present Lord Hotham and to Giles Peacock, current Church Wardens of St Mary’s Church, South Dalton (as it is again), for their patience and generosity during our visits to their magnificent church, and our endless questions.

The Church Quarterly Review

That Simmons’ Work was taken very seriously in his time is evidenced by a lengthy and – in accordance with contemporary fashion – anonymous review of his edition, in the Church Quarterly Review (CQR), the high-church journal encountered in the previous chapter. Discussion of Simmons’ work is there linked to reviews of the work of Maskell (Monumenta Ritualia Ecclesiae Anglicanae), of Henderson on the York Rite, and of H. T. Kingdon (Vice-Principal of what was then Salisbury Theological College), and of the third Marquess of Bute.

Beginning with the Roman liturgy, and ‘books provided for the use of Roman Catholic laymen in England’, the CQR review goes on to observe that ‘since the early days of the Catholic revival, the study of our early insular services has received considerable impulse’. Reference is made to Palmer’s Origines Liturgicae, and to the recognition by Isaac Williams that attention to the Sarum Use quickly dispels the false assumption of ‘innovations on the part of the Reformers’. After Newman in 1839, Williams had brought to popular attention ‘the hymns of a nearer continental Breviary (the Parisian, no longer now a living use.)’ The developing understanding of the history and forms of the BCP is noted alongside such works as Scudamore’s Notitia Eucharistica (1866), Medd’s The Priest to the Altar (1861), John Fuller Russell’s (1813–1884) Hierurgia Anglicana, published for the Cambridge Camden Society in 1848, (and re-edited by Vernon Staley in 1902), and – another work already referred to – Proctor’s History of the Book of Common Prayer (1855), which remains even today in authoritative use through its substantial revision by Walter Howard Frere (1901).

The CQR review-article continues with a substantial bibliographical commen-tary on nineteenth-century scholarship in the medieval English liturgical tradition, beginning with Francis Henry Dickinson’s still useful List of Printed Service Books, According to the Ancient Uses of the Anglican Church (London, 1850), and with texts of breviaries, missals and pontifical published by the Bannatyne Club, and, in particular, the Surtees Society. Significant also is the publication of C. Walker’s Sarum Missal in English.

The writer in the CQR, like most of his contemporaries and unlike their modern successors, accepts Simmons’ thesis about the identity of ‘Dan Jeremy’ and the French origin of the LFMB in Rouen without question, and also acknowledges Simmons’ interest in language and dialect.

Sources for Simmons’ liturgical commentaries

In Chapter 4 we addressed Simmons’ editing of the LFMB largely from the per-spective of his editorial activities as a philologist and active member of the EETS. Simmons, who was as we have seen mindful of the literary and non-theological concerns of the EETS, had drawn for many of his references in his notes upon the growing contemporary interest in the Middle English poetry of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Lydgate and others. He also referred to such canonical literary critics as Thomas Warton and his substantial History of English Poetry (London, 1774–81) with its significant emphasis on medieval literature; modern literary scholarship now tends to dismiss the work of Warton, though David Matthews has credited him with opening up historical criticism, at a time when there were few scholarly guides to offer professional assistance.

But Simmons also engaged in depth – in a way which shows an interest prefiguring twentieth-century attempts to effect a synergy between literature and theology – with a substantial body of writing on the history of liturgy. In addition to the work of Palmer, Maskell, Dickinson and Henderson – all discussed in chapter 2 above – he made considerable use of both continental and British sources for medieval liturgical study that these earlier authorities had themselves referred to: Mabillon, Martène, Bingham, Gough, and Dibdin, and – of special interest to Simmons for his writings on the early liturgical traditions of Rouen – Le Brun des Marettes. Other continental writers, many of them also used by Palmer and Maskell, to which Simmons makes frequent reference include Goar, Renaudot, and the Italian theologians Catalani and Zaccaria.

Simmons’ liturgical reading is revealed especially in the comprehensive set of ‘Notes and Illustrations’ that appear on pp. 155–401 of his edition: an astonishingly large body of material given that the longest version of LFMB, the B-text, is a mere 630 lines. Simmons’ notes are made complicated by themselves being supplied with a considerable battery of footnotes (themselves occasionally supplemented by foot-notes). Their content is very different not only in length but also from not being restricted to the philological focus supplied by, for instance, Richard Morris or Walter Skeat for their near-contemporary editions of Cursor Mundi or Piers Plowman. Simmons in sum was attempting to deploy, with reference to a vernacular text, the same degree of attention, range and ambition that editors such as Maskell had afforded Latin medieval liturgical texts.

Cracking the codes

This book is an exercise in what may be termed recursion: a reconstruction of the cultural and theological significance of Victorian recuperations of medieval liturgical and devotional practice. This task is pursued through a case-study: a Victorian clergyman’s edition – still regarded by scholars as authoritative – of a late Middle English poem, a guide to the liturgy of the Eucharist now known as The Lay Folks’ Mass Book (hence LFMB). The title is the invention of the Victorian clergyman, Thomas Frederick Simmons, who edited it for the Early English Text Society in 1879. This case-study is then used to allow for reflections on the ways in which Victorian and late medieval religious life and practice were connected. In sum, we are trying to re-engage – from a twenty-first century perspective – with a dialogue between medieval past and Victorian present. This dialogue, we believe, demands the distinct perspectives – medievalist and philological, Victorianist and theological – with which our different disciplinary formations have provided us, and which have inspired us to undertake the collaboration of which this book is the outcome.

Why is such an exercise, seemingly convoluted, worthwhile? Despite valiant twentieth- and twenty-first-century attempts at rehabilitation, the Victorian clergyman has from the outset tended to become in popular (and indeed sometimes ‘highbrow’) culture a target for satirical attack or mockery, from Charlotte Brontë and Trollope through Oscar Wilde, Lytton Strachey and beyond. In Shirley (1849), for instance, Brontë wrote of ‘an abundant shower of curates’ raining upon the north of England. These young followers of the Oxford Movement were in her view ‘the present successors of the apostles, disciples of Dr. Pusey and tools of the Propaganda, [who] were at that time being hatched under cradle-blankets, or undergoing regeneration by nursery-baptism in wash-hand-basins’. And, a few years later, Anthony Trollope in Barchester Towers (1857) lampooned evangelical clergy in the figure of the Rev Obadiah Slope. Moreover, as we shall see, with the rise of professional academic practice, especially encouraged in England by contact and sometimes rivalry with the great German-speaking universities at the end of the nineteenth century, it became commonplace to dismiss the scholarly efforts of learned Church of England clerics.

As We Have seen, the later years of the nineteenth century saw numerous popular publications by Church of England clergymen of works intended to provide commentary and assistance to both laity and priests in their participation in the liturgy of Holy Communion. Non-Eucharistic services and offices were catered for by books like The Priest’s Prayer Book, with a brief pontifical (London, 1864) by R. F. Littledale and J. E. Vaux, both ritualist clergymen, which was repeatedly reprinted into the twentieth century following considerable enlargement in 1870. This was designed as ‘an Appendix to the Book of Common Prayer’, intended as a pastoral aid for parish clergy. To assist the laity and ‘intended chiefly for such as do not communicate oftener than once a month’ there was – as we have seen – W. E. Scudamore’s Steps to the Altar: A Manual of Devotions for the Blessed Eucharist (London, 1866). Echoes of the LFMB are clear in this often-reprinted manual in which Scudamore, on at least one occasion (as we have seen) the victim of Simmons’ scholarly correction, offers, very much in the spirit of the LFMB, ‘a few directions for the behaviour of the communicant to accompany the devotions provided for use during the celebration’. And we have already referred on several occasions to Medd’s widely-used The Priest to the Altar, drawing largely on ‘the ancient English Use of Sarum’, of which the revised and enlarged third edition was published in the same year as Simmons’ LFMB, viz. 1879.

But perhaps the most significant and enduring of works in the tradition of the LFMB was a product of the eighteenth century, though regularly reprinted for over a century afterwards: Bishop Thomas Wilson’s A Short Instruction for the True Understanding of the Lord’s Supper (London, 1734).

Thomas Wilson (1663–1755), Bishop of Sodor and Man from 1697 to 1755, was a notable churchman who was known and loved for his scholarship, his piety and his pastoral energy. Among many other good works Wilson built libraries for the education of his people on the Isle of Man. His Sacra privata – a collection of per-sonal prayers – were widely read until the early twentieth century, running through twenty-four publications (ten of them in the USA) between 1796 and 1903, includ-ing an Oxford edition with an introduction by a young John Henry Newman.

Simmons as parish priest, 1853–1884

On 25 January 1853, Thomas Frederick Simmons was licensed as perpetual curate of Holme-on-the-Wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire; he had clearly been identified as the man to develop the projected new parish of Dalton Holme, which included not only Holme-on-the-Wolds but also nearby South Dalton, both part of the great Hotham estate.

Between 1840 and 1876 some 1,727 new churches were built in England, and not least among them was the grand parish church of St Mary, South Dalton. The old church of St Peter’s was in poor condition2 and on 15 March 1858 work was begun on a new church fifty yards north of the old building. Lavishly financed by the third Baron Hotham, St Mary’s Church was completed in 1861 and on 6 August in the same year, the benefices of Holme-on-the-Wolds and South Dalton were officially united, with Simmons instituted as the Rector of Dalton Holme.

General Beaumont Hotham (1794–1870), Simmons’ patron, was a distinguished soldier – a veteran of the Battle of Waterloo – and it seems probable that military connections through Simmons’ father and brother brought him to Dalton Holme. Lord Hotham was unmarried, devout, and eccentric, and local gossip maintained that he spent his entire fortune on the church to prevent his nephew from inheriting it. Though hardly the lot, Hotham did spend the enormous sum of £25,000 on the new church of St Mary’s. The church was further extended in 1872.

John Loughborough Pearson, the architect, was – as already noted6 – an admired builder of churches in the English Gothic style, later to be known for his work in the Early English style at St Augustine’s, Kilburn (1871), as architect of Truro Cathedral (1880), and for his restorations at Westminster Abbey. Pearson had become a member of the Ecclesiological Society only in 1859, but his work at Dalton Holme quickly attracted the Society’s attention and approval. A review (February, 1862) of St Mary’s Church in The Ecclesiologist praised Pearson’s work, albeit with some qualifications:

Pearson was personally a devout man, and his being chosen as the architect of St Mary’s church was not without significance.

The Early English Text Society and its nineteenth-century editors

Thomas Frederick Simmons was, therefore, a clergyman whose theological and ecclesiastical formation was derived from the Oxford Movement and its aftermath. However, he is remembered, if at all now, for something that he might be presumed to have thought of as a secondary, if complementary, part of his life: as an editor for EETS. Simmons was demonstrably an active member of the contemporary EETS community. He subscribed to all its volumes, and commented regularly in his edition on its policies and on discussions with the Society’s worthies. It is to the place of EETS in Simmons’ life and times that we will now turn.

EETS remains today the most academically-prestigious locus for the publication of editions of Old and Middle English literary texts, as proudly claimed on its website: ‘Without EETS editions, study of medieval English texts would hardly be possible’. Those undertaking such study are clearly conceived of as being a particular kind of person; as the website goes on to state: ‘Editions [of EETS] are directed at a scholarly readership rather than a popular one; though they normally provide a glossary and notes, no translation is provided.’

‘Popular’ is, perhaps understandably, undefined by EETS. In the twenty-first century, ‘scholarly’ would seem to equate to the world of the ‘professional academic’, and most present-day subscribers to EETS are university libraries, or researchers and students affiliated to universities, or scholars working in such specialised fields as academic librarianship or historical lexicography. This last group include researchers employed by the great historical dictionaries of record, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (hence OED), the Middle English Dictionary, and the Dictionaries of Old English and Scots Language. Comparatively few (even though there are a few still) are ‘independent scholars’.

In 1864, however, when EETS was created, things were rather different. The founding figures of EETS – Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910), Richard Morris (1833–94) and Walter Skeat (1835–1912) – were considerably more various in their backgrounds than the current members of the Society’s Council, all of whom are practising or retired university academics. Of these three founding fathers, Skeat was the only one who would (almost certainly) have taken a position on that august body in present-day conditions.