Using the UK Web Archive

I have recently begun to take a part in a project at the British Library, the 'Researchers and the UK Web Archive' project. A group of scholars, including sociologists and experts in the built environment, politics and the visual arts have embarked on a year-long project using the UK Web Archive as a source. Topics include sport, gender, elections and religious architecture, amongst others. More details are available on the project blog.

The project should provide the BL with valuable feedback on the archive itself; in addition, several of us will be helping to create new collections of previously unarchived material relating to our particular research projects. My own is on the politics of religion in Britain in the last five years, paying particular attention to events such as reactions to the recent visit of the Pope, and to Rowan Williams' lecture on the place of sharia law in England. I'm particularly interested in the ways in which the communication of religious ideas has been affected by the web, and by social media in particular.

Of particular interest is how perennial themes in the church/state/law relationship are transmuted in a new information environment. Part of the endeavour is to suggest that contemporary historians are in a unique position to anticipate which present-day websites will be of interest to future historians, by virtue of understanding something about the pedigree of an issue, and the significance of a forthcoming event.

Colin Slee

I note a number of recent obituaries of Colin Slee, dean of Southwark, described by the Telegraph as 'one of the most outspoken and controversial Church leaders of recent times'. They appear in the Telegraph, Guardian (with susbsequent letter) and Independent

National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927-28: a review

[A review due to appear in the Bulletin of the Christianity and History Forum in 2011. It is published here by kind permission of the Editor.]

John Maiden
National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927-28
Woodbridge, Boydell, 2009 (Studies in Modern British Religious History, 21)
978-1-84383-521-9

The events often known collectively as the Prayer Book Crisis of 1927-8 occupy a singular status in the historiography of British Christianity. To many observers of the period in general, one of acute economic and social strain, the sight of Parliament concerning itself with the theological significance of parts of the liturgy of the Church of England is curious at the very least. As John Maiden notes in this admirable new study of the crisis, it took a full two minutes to restore order in the chamber of the Commons after the first vote in December 1927; this was no dry-as-dust matter but one that generated considerable heat. To scholars of the religious state of the nation, this display of Protestant political muscle has often been seen as an anomaly; a re-animation of spirits left for dead in the previous century. In what might be termed the ‘company history’ of the Church of England, itself often a product of the ‘Centre-High consensus’ that Maiden sees as dominant at the time, the episode has often been met with incomprehension; a strange irruption of the ‘Protestant underworld’. Hensley Henson’s famous image of ‘an army of illiterates generalled by octogenarians’, massing to oppose the new Book, has had an influence that far exceeded its accuracy.

Yet despite its apparent marginality, the crisis cast a long shadow, not least within the central hierarchy of the Church. The shock of the defeat in Parliament of the proposed Book, properly formulated and brought forward by the church’s own legislative body, was to condition all subsequent dealings between Church and Parliament right up until the establishment of the General Synod in 1970. The great strength of Maiden’s book, the first full-length study of the episode, is that it draws out the full import of the questions raised by the crisis about English, and British, religion. Chapters 1 and 2 set out the background, dealing with the attempts over the previous decades by the Church to secure a modicum of independence from Parliament in its own affairs, culminating with the institution of the Church Assembly under the Enabling Act of 1919. In a way that complements usefully the work of Matthew Grimley, Maiden also describes the ‘Centre-High consensus’ dominant within the institutional church and to which both Archbishop Davidson and Prime Minister Baldwin in their different ways subscribed: a consensus, according to which the national church ought to be comprehensive of all the doctrinal emphases and varieties of sacramental practice that had historically found a niche within it.

Chapters 3 to 6 then proceed to analyse in detail the varying trajectories of response among different bodies of opinion both within and outside the Church of England. Amongst Anglicans, what might be termed ‘Low Church’ responses are carefully distinguished from those of evangelicals, and the varieties of catholic opinion are skilfully and usefully described and distinguished. Chapter 4 considers the reactions of the other English Protestant denominations, pointing out the tensions between latent disestablishmentarian feeling among some, and the increasing value placed on the existence of a national church by others, so long as it remained distinctively Protestant. Chapter 5 considers the wider British aspect, since the anomaly of Scottish, Welsh and Irish MPs voting on what was considered by some to be a domestic matter of the English church went unnoticed neither at the time nor since. Implicated in the matter was a still deep-seated sense among many in the country at large of the importance of ‘national religion’, the subject of the concluding chapter. Far from being a private mania of a lunatic fringe, the crisis activated Protestant understandings of national identity and their attendant anti-Catholicism which were of greater importance to a greater number of Britons than many within the ecclesiastical and political establishments cared to acknowledge.

If there is any criticism to be made of the book, it is one not of fact or interpretation but of structure, in that a good deal of the material in the climactic final chapter is foreshadowed in earlier chapters, such that it loses some of its force. That aside, John Maiden has provided a useful and important study that is likely to remain the starting point for study of the Prayer Book Crisis for some time to come.

The archbishop and the Lord Chamberlain

I'm this week preparing to head off to the St Andrews conference of the Ecclesiastical History Society, where I'm to give a paper on this particular theme from 1909 to 1949. It concerns the informal advice that archbishops Davidson and Lang gave the Lord Chamberlain on the matter of the licensing (or otherwise) of stage plays. It has been a most intriguing investigation, and reveals a good deal about the position the archbishops had, until quite recently, at the heart of the 'Establishment', and how very informally it functioned. I hope to get it into print at some point. The conference programme is online at the EHS site.

Homosexual law reform in the Sixties

I note the recent appearance of the latest miscellany from the Church of England Record Society, in which there is a useful selection of edited letters from the papers of the Archbishops of Canterbury, including some to and from Wolfenden and others. They are edited by Hugh McLeod, and cover the period from 1953 to 1967. See the Boydell and Brewer site for further details (a snip at £100).

I also noted last week an obituary in the Guardian of Anthony Grey, one of the principal campaigners for a change in the law.

The Tea Party Jacobins

I note this intriguing article by Mark Lilla in the New York Review of Books (May 27th). It is mostly about the US, but makes an intriguing point about the apparent fusion of the seemingly contradictory impulses of Sixties personal autonomy and Eighties economic liberalism. He argues that unlike many conservative movements, the new populism is not to do with rolling back the moral changes of the Sixties, and neither is it a traditional anti-capitalist movement: 'The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.'

There is intriguing food for thought as to how far this is parallelled in a European and a British context.

The role of the laity

Two things I note under this rather vague title: the first is from the Lambeth Palace Library annual review, which reports that the library has received the papers of George Goyder, described accurately as one of the architects of synodical government in the Church of England (see also an obituary in the Independent, 3rd Feb 1997). They remain to be catalogued, but will be a tremendous resource once they are.

The second is more by way of an appeal for information, on Ernest Shippam. In looking into national days of prayer in the sixties and seventies, I find a letter apparently from him to all the bishops. All I know so far is that he was one of the Chichester fish paste dynasty, and that he came to faith as a result of hearing Billy Graham at Haringey in the fifties. Any pointers would be gratefully received.

Belloc, Chesterton and the Red Tory

I note an interesting exchange following on from a Jonathan Raban review of Philip Blond's Red Tory, which has been influential in the formation of the programme of the (now) present Conservative government. Leaving aside how realistic or otherwise the present programme might be, there is some more interesting thinking to be done about whether Blond's historical analysis of the period since Belloc and Chesterton stands up to scrutiny, and on the imaginative power amongst thinkers of the organic, rural, Christian society that Raban ridicules.
For more, Google Raban Blond Red Tory.

Eric Kemp

I note these obituaries of Eric Kemp, late Bishop of Chichester, in the Telegraph, Times and Church Times. He is ever-present in the papers at Lambeth Palace in relation to canon law revision and Anglican-Methodist unity, and an intriguing voice in the reforming movements of the Sixties.