 |
|
I was half way through my studies at Wells Theological College when a friend gave me a copy of Prayer Book Ideals by H.P. Denison, published in 1913. I read it at one sitting, then read it again. For the rest of my time at Wells that book performed the same service for me as did Churchill's speeches for the nation during the darkest days of the war. When the waters of Tillich (does any one remember him?) threatened to overwhelm me, and when my ears were filled with canticles from the Grail Psalter and worse ("The Lord has done marvels for me; holy is his name") and when there was no liturgy except that of the Mission de France filtered through the Liturgical Commission (so that the sacred ministers trotted into the sanctuary at a light infantry pace, vested, if it were Lent, in garments made of mattress ticking) Denison's voice spoke encouragement, and recalled me to the Tradition on which the Church is founded. Taking as his text the words of our Lord to the Church in Sardis, he said "'Strengthen the things which remain which are ready to die.' God's method is to recall men to the ideal, and as with him there is neither variableness, neither shadow of turning, so we are quite sure that in twentieth-century England, he calls us back to the old ideal, and bids us be watchful and strengthen the things which remain . . . we are to conform our life to the ideal, not our ideal to our life." It has been said that if you can survive theological college you can survive anything, and Denison must take part of the credit, if credit is due, for my survival at Wells.
Henry Phipps Denison was born in 1848 at Hobart, one of the many children of the Governor of Tasmania, and spent his childhood there, and afterwards in the Governor's house at Sydney N.S.W.. Long before he was twelve he had made up his mind to be a clergyman, and said later that the seeds of his Catholic life were sown in the happiness of his childhood home, where the Oxford Movement was quite unknown. His early experiences of religion were entirely favourable; it never occurred to him that church services were in any way dull or wanting - church going was always a joy to him. When grown up he questioned the assumption that children - and boys in particular - must rebel against religious observance.
Let me now try to sketch my first church as I knew it. We entered by the vestry door, and passed by a passage straight into the Governor's pew, without going into the body of the church at all. We found ourselves in a large square pew about the size of a small room. The pew was higher than our heads, and there was a curtain about eighteen inches deep at the top; so that I cannot describe the church, because I never saw it! ... Just outside the pew was the "three decker." We had a good view of the top deck, i.e. the pulpit, and a somewhat subdued view of the middle deck, where we could see the head and shoulders of the officiating clergyman behind a sort of balustrade, which gave to my young mind the idea of being in a kind of cage. The lower deck, i.e. the clerk's seat, was quite hidden from us. By a process of reasoning I arrived at the conclusion that the said "three decker" must have stood in the centre of what (if there were such a thing) might have been Chancel arch, there being, as I imagine, a shallow chancel behind it. We could see part of the gallery and the organ; and standing on a stool, as we small ones did, I could see through the chinks of the overtopping curtain the bonnet of a mysterious somebody in the next pew.
"Poor children!" I can fancy some sympathizing High Church person say) - "How dreadful for them to have had such a dismal vision of a church." No, my High Church friend, we were not at all to be pitied. The very limited view gave a sense of mystery that is all too often lost in a modern "High Church" church. We are now familiar with every nook and cranny of our churches . . . It is all part of everyday life. But it inevitably wears off some of the bloom of the aloofness and mystery of my first church. When, after the Litany, the clergyman disappeared out of the cage of the middle deck, and one heard his voice from a new place, in a somewhat darkened recess that one had never seen and could never see, there was a sense of the mysterious, of the unknown, about it.
I do not want to be simply a laudator temporis acti. My first church was not ideal, though I had no fault to find with it. But one cannot but feel that, in the immense amount that we have gained, we have to cut a certain loss; and we find, I think, that loss in the "miss" of the element of aloofness and mystery that I seem to find behind the Oxford Movement. (CR 9-10)
Denison also compared favourably the use of the Tate and Brady psalms of his childhood with the "tyranny of hymns, under which we now groan."
He took the same line about religious education. It was enough that children should learn the catechism by heart, and hear the Bible read, and be shown holy pictures and the crucifix, and be told stories of the saints. The excessive stress on religious instruction leaves out of account the supreme importance of indirect influences on the formation of a child's feelings and thoughts about God. Make sure that they know the text, and persevere in good devotional habits, and let the seed spring up "it knows not how."
Denison's father became Governor of Madras in 1861, and the four children who formed the middle group of the family, which included Henry, now aged 13, came to live with their uncle and aunt, Archdeacon and Mrs George Denison, who had a large vicarage at East Brent in Somerset, and no children of their own. Denison at once fell in love with the ancient parish church, which he thought the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Even for those days East Brent lagged far behind the typical churches of the Oxford Movement, especially in lacking a surpliced choir. "Right up to my uncle's death, in 1896," he wrote in Church Recollections, "this church had what I should now call the proud pre-eminence of never having had such a thing." There was no sequence of colours, the altar being always covered in red velvet, no proper altar equipment, Communion was only once a month - but one thing marked it as of the Catholic Movement: mattins was said daily at 8.30, and Evensong at six, and the Litany was said on Wednesdays and Fridays at twelve.
It is difficult for Catholics today to understand the huge and essential importance that the daily Office had in Tractarian times. It is not too much to say that it was, for the time, to them the articulis stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae. One cannot read the history of the Catholic Revival in England and not see the slow, steady, patient growth that characterized it, in which we discern the finger of God. Things that are now taken as matters of course were successively, one by one, the vision of the Catholic Revival. One bit of Catholic truth rose after another, like the various constellations in the sky; and each, as it came to the fore, was the point to be secured. And, as a matter of simple fact, it was the Divine Office that came first of all.
At every stage of the Catholic Movement we find three sets of people: (1) The pioneers, who have already gone forward to attack the next entrenchment of the enemy; (2) the main body of the movement, who are consolidating the ground already gained; (3) the hangers-on, who have not the wit or faith to see what underlies external manifestation, and who therefore make a hopeless mess of the whole thing, vulgarizing everything and robbing it of all significance. In the early sixties the pioneers, thank God, were hard at work (mainly in London) . . . ; and East Brent in those days was consolidating, in the faithful daily recitation of the Divine Office, the ground that had already been gained. But the "mixed multitude", those terrible campfollowers and hangers-on, had hardly yet emerged, as they were so soon to do, to hinder and thwart the movement by their senseless vulgarity . . . I shall have more to say about these noxious hinderers of the Catholic Revival as time goes on. (CR 19-20)
(In the light of the description of East Brent Church as it was in the sixties, it is strange to recall that Archdeacon George Denison had in 1855 been tried before the Archbishop for teaching the "Real Objective Presence" of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, and had been sentenced to deprivation, which sentence was later overturned on appeal. The person at the centre of this controversy was content to celebrate the Holy Communion once a month and at the north end of the altar, being at that time probably more conscious of the Sacrament of Communion for the sustaining of the individual soul than of the Sacrifice of the Mass for a continual remembrance of the death of Christ by the whole Church.)
I went to school at Winchester in the autumn of 1861. The old chapel impressed me much: the old mediaeval building with its glorious great Jesse window, the Grinling Gibbons panelling, the old organ in its picturesque loft, the picture of the Annunciation over the Altar, all made a most dignified and impressive tout ensemble. I may remark that after a lapse of fifty years I stood once more, a few years ago, in the old college chapel. I never want to stand in it again. That enemy of our peace, the pedantic restorer, has been at his destructive work! Grinling Gibbons panelling, old organ in its loft, picture - all have disappeared. The bare walls have brand-new stalls along their whole length, and the verger proudly tells us that these glaring new things are "thirteenth century." Exactly' Oh! the pedantry of these destroyers of our peace! Your pedantic restorer comes into the building that has been committed to his ruthless hands, looks round, and says - "This is a thirteenth- century building". Well, none of us supposed it was Queen Anne. And having delivered himself of this pompous dictum, he proceeds to tear away everything that is not thirteenth-century, destroying every trace of history and every vestige of interest.
With the idea of the Divine Office germinating in my mind the whole thing appealed to me at once. There were the stalls of the Warden and Fellows, the scholars of the foundation in surplices on Sundays and festivals, the singing boys and men also on the foundation, as were the chaplains who sang the Office. It was all of a piece with the new vision of the Divine Office, of which East Brent had given me the beginning. (CR 24-5)
At school Denison was confirmed, after being prepared by the Head Master. There was much instruction and assiduous taking of notes, of which he afterwards could remember nothing.
I knew absolutely nothing about the essence of Confirmation and Communion until long after my own Confirmation and first Communion. And in my old age I say 'Why should I?' . . . We are not satisfied unless, in the six weeks or so of the terrible Confirmation class, we think that we have made theologians of our poor little victims . . . There comes to my mind a perfectly delightful book called Copsley Annals. It deals with Church of England life in the eighteenth or quite early nineteenth century. We have been rather trained to turn up our noses at the eighteenth century, with the single exception of the Evangelical Revival, of which it is the stock thing to say that it was all very well as far as it went. My own impression is that it was nothing of the sort. Like Methodism, the supineness of Churchmen gave it a handle and a shade of excuse: but, like Methodism it was anti-Church in its principles. I venture to think that the Catholic Movement would have grown more easily and naturally without the Evangelical Revival behind it . . . Now, in Copsley Annals there is a delightful picture of the Confirmation class of those despised and sneered at times. The good old vicar sits in the church with the candidates before him, simply hearing if they can say the Catechism, and passing them accordingly! I think, for all our cleverness in later days, we may still learn something to our advantage from the eighteenth century! (CR 26-7)
After a short stay at Winchester Denison fell ill and returned to East Brent, to be under a tutor until he should go to Oxford, where in 1866 he matriculated at Christ Church. At Oxford from the very beginning he felt himself to be in an ideal world of beauty. His ecclesiastical stock in trade when he arrived consisted of a strong idea of the Divine Office, a vision of the Real Objective Presence and of the Apostolical Succession, and a dawning hatred of Protestantism, which was to intensify with every year that passed. He was much impressed by the college chapels, with their rendering of the daily office, but also discovered churches of the Oxford Movement, such as St Thomas's, St Cross, the iron church of Cowley St John, and the chapel of Merton College, which at midday on Sundays was used for a "choral communion" for the surrounding parish. In Church Recollections he wrote, "I love now in my old age to think of such churches as they were fifty years ago, before the noxious brood of camp-followers had sprung up . . . If one saw a green frontal, one knew the Catholic faith was there."
Of an English Church Union festival at SS Philip and James church he says: "The choir of undergraduates would produce a curious list of names. I refrain from mentioning the names here because it might in some instances provoke inquiry when one considers the present ecclesiastical temper of some of that then band of joyous and enthusiastic undergraduates."
At the age of 19 he decided to make his first confession, and had the daunting task of ringing at Dr Pusey's door bell in Tom Quad in order to make an appointment, first walking all the way round the quad summoning up his courage to do it.
In Long Vacations he travelled abroad with his Catholic friends, and used in later life to recommend foreign travel as a wonderful safeguard against High Church tendencies, which show themselves either in the introduction of what Fr Stanton called the "inventions of man in Divine Service" or in an appalling correctness that freezes the worshipper.
Denison was ordained deacon at Wells on Trinity Sunday 1871 to a title at East Brent. Soon afterwards the Vicar introduced the daily mass, and made the sung mass the principal Sunday service, the new curate himself playing the organ. These advances, for which the nephew was no doubt largely responsible, caused dissension among some parishioners of non-conformist leanings, and a complaint was made to the Bishop, who took it with the utmost seriousness. Nothing really changes, does it? Denison's licence was revoked, but Uncle George appealed to the Archbishop's court on the grounds of a flaw in the legal procedure followed by the Bishop, and the licence had to be restored. The Bishop thereupon refused to consider Denison as a candidate for priest's orders, and he served the parish as a deacon for four years. After that a compromise was arranged whereby Denison should be ordained in another diocese and be exiled for a year before being allowed to return to East Brent, but before the year was up the Bishop sent for him and all was forgiven. From that time on he showed Denison nothing but kindness.
Controversy in the parish gradually died away, and congregations and numbers of communicants increased greatly, so that latecomers sometimes could not find space inside the church. Denison attributed this growth to a readiness to match doctrine with its open expression in the forms of worship. He always asserted that doctrine and ritual are all of a piece, and that "faith without works is dead".
Having lived at East Brent for ten years already before his ordination, Denison proceeded to serve there for another 25. Meanwhile, his contemporaries were in and out of incumbencies, canonries or deaneries, and in some cases had reached the episcopate; but he counted it a great blessing to have been so long in one place, and to have been able to develop slowly. His uncle died in 1896 aged 91, having been Vicar for 51 years, during the last 25 of which there had been a daily mass and a sung mass on Sundays. Under the next incumbent the parish passed into the surpliced choir/High Church condition, and daily and sung mass were swept away. The choir came in and went out singing a hymn, and the older people looked back on what seemed to them a golden age.
Soon after his uncle's death Denison was made Prebendary of Yatton in Wells Cathedral, and soon after that became Vicar of St Michael's North Kensington, a place he had never hitherto heard of. His aunt Mrs George Denison moved with him to London to keep house for him. She was a constant and strong influence on his spiritual life, having, as he said, opened his eyes to the Catholic vision. He describes her at the age of 87 going up the Scala Santa in Rome on her hands and knees, and hearing mass in the chapel at the top. She died in 1908 at St Michael's Vicarage.
Denison was the sixth Vicar of St Michael's in eleven years, and so weary were the parishioners of change that they would give a free hand to any priest who was likely to stay, so that Denison could say, "I soon found that I might steal a horse where some of my neighbours might not even look over a hedge." He was pleased to find plain Mattins and Litany at 10.30 with Sung Mass and Sermon at 11, and set about adding "the things that were wanting, viz. the High Mass and Solemn Evensong", which then became the rule at St Michael's. His principle was never to "lead up to" changes or explain them beforehand, but simply to go ahead and do what he thought necessary or possible and deal with questions afterwards as they arose, saying, to explain why something was done in a particular way: "I do not know. It is how our fellow Christians do it, and that is enough for me." This principle would rule out "High Church tricks" or the "inventions of man".
As with what we do, so with what we omit to do. It is a great satisfaction to me to reflect that, during the whole twenty-two years of my incumbency of S. Michael's, we never once were guilty of a "Harvest Festival." Nor did we ever, during all those years, follow the modern fashion of the "Three Hours" Devotions on Good Friday. I think I may say that we stuck rigidly to Catholic principle: and I take it as a great compliment that it should have been remarked by a friend that S. Michael's was the best church in Kensington because "there was no nonsense there."
Bishop Creighton made a personal request that incense should be given up, to which Denison acceded, since it was a personal request and not an appeal to the judgments of the Privy Council, "but Bishop Creighton's lamented early death put an end to his strictly personal request, and after his death we reverted at once to the high Mass and Solemn Evensong". The next Bishop refused to license a curate to any parish where there was High Mass more than fifteen times a year, and for nine Years St Michael's was under the episcopal ban, but after that time the condition was suddenly rescinded without any explanation.
In London Denison was confirmed in his belief in the inefficacy of house-to-house visitation as a method of parish work, finding it to be in any case impossible. In the choice between missionary and pastoral work in a town parish, he believed that pastoral work should take precedence. Very early on in his incumbency a parish mission was conducted by the Cowley Fathers, which bore out Bishop Creighton's observation that such events may have some effect on the regular congregation, but have very little on the parish at large. Social clubs and meetings Denison regarded as a waste of time and money, bringing little spiritual benefit to the participants, and even societies with an avowedly spiritual aim, such as Bible classes, tended to become ends in themselves. Of Sunday Schools he had this to say:
A good Sunday school or Catechism for children who go to church is quite one thing. It is, of course, at best somewhat of a makeshift, devised to do work that ought to be done by parents and godparents: but, if it starts from the right end, it must do much good. But what generally happens in the Sunday school is that parents are glad to get the children out of the way, and to know they will not be messing their Sunday clothes, and therefore turn them out to find some Sunday school. Any one will do; let the child choose its own. It may be Catholic or it may be fire worshippers. It does not in the least matter, if only the children get out of the way! And they will get a summer outing and a winter treat, or two or three, if they play their cards well and the Sunday school authorities are sufficiently green. But the real mischief of the Sunday school is that it is supposed to do duty for Religion! As for what is taught in the average Sunday school!!! all one can say is that in a vast majority of cases the Catechism, which is the one thing that they have got to learn, is the very last thing in the world that is commonly taught them! No! There is a very seamy side to Sunday school! (CR 104)
Denison revelled in being set free for his priestly duties by expert helpers who took care of the various departments of church life - the sacristy, service of the sanctuary, the music, poor relief, church finance, catechism class, and so on. His experience was that in London Catholic parishes the laity did the shoving, rather than - as in the country - the clergy.
In his later years at St Michael's Denison noted that the resistance of the official Church of England to sacramental confession, prayer for the dead and the reservation of the Holy Sacrament was breaking down, although, as to the last, the energy of the hierarchy was mostly directed to preventing the faithful from expressing any devotion to the Sacrament, whilst when Benediction was at issue, which had an immediate appeal to simple Christians, every weapon was used to put it down. During the Great War, as the casualties mounted, prayer for the dead became more widely acceptable, even in Establishment quarters, but Denison was scathing about the change in fashion: "Prayers for the dead are now quite 'comme il faut' because of dear dead Tommy on the battlefield
. . . but . . . the 'theology' of these people remains exactly where it was before." The war gave a great impetus to undenominationalism, and Denison said of "the large proportion of baptized English men and women, skipping naked and unashamed round the altar of the undenominational God". . . "Take all the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape" - this being the necessary prelude to the coming of the rain.
In general Denison drew his spiritual refreshment not from the official kind of Anglicanism, but from things that survived despite its oppressive influence. He was constantly cheered by the profound spirituality of poor uneducated people for whom the official Church of England hardly catered at all. As the spiritual life of St Michael's intensified, so did hostility from outside, even to the extent of insults being offered to Denison in the street; but he took comfort from these, reasoning that whilst the official Church might afford amusement to onlookers, it was considered scarcely worth hating.
In 1918 at the age of 70 Denison, feeling no longer able to put as much effort into running the parish as it needed, removed to Wells, where he considered his duty lay as a Prebendary. Little could the Bishop have foreseen in 1896 what his bestowal of a prebend would mean both to the recipient and to the Cathedral Chapter many years later. Denison's decision to live in Wells is evidence of a mellowing of outlook; in earlier times the place had excited his disgust, both because of the arrant Protestantism of what went on in the Cathedral, which consorted ill with its grand Catholic architecture, and because it was associated in his mind with episcopal bullying and haulings over the coals. However, he was always proud to be a Prebendary, and the more so because he had become one before he was an incumbent of a parish, and throughout his London years he was linked to the Chapter by the daily recitation of the psalms allotted to his stall - 22, 23 and 24. The daily psalter had been divided amongst the Chapter in the thirteenth century. He would also say two masses every week for living and dead benefactors of the Cathedral, being almost certainly the only Prebendary to fulfil this duty, and one of the very few who were even able to. With these observances he had made up for the enforced absence from his stall, but now he looked forward enthusiastically to exercising his prebendal rights to the full.
We Prebendaries, in modern times, find ourselves in the position of the Levites who were scattered from the Temple because their portions had not been given them. Every farthing was filched away from as in the general "setting to rights" of Whig ascendancy in the early nineteenth century. . . . In the very utilitarian, unspiritual, and unimaginative mind of that dull period, we were mere cumberers of the ground who ought to be routed about and made to "do something" in order to justify our existence. But had they left us but a proportion of what, after all, was our own property, we might have been able from time to time to come into our residence and fill our places at the Choir Office, that much despised "work" that produces no tangible result, and therefore is beneath the contempt of those who measure everything by bustle and statistics, but which, when weighed in the balance of the Sanctuary, will be found to be indeed worth the sacrifice of a life. (CR 139)
From his arrival in Wells Denison performed his Cathedral duties with the utmost diligence, being in consequence the constant, and no doubt at times exasperating, companion of the Canon in Residence at the Office and such masses as were celebrated. He naturally became a familiar figure, going continually in and out of the Cathedral dressed in his cassock (over which, in cold weather he wore an Inverness cape) and shovel hat. He was tremendously impressed by the continuity of Cathedral worship, assembling for Choir every day by the tombs of Saxon bishops who had been there nearly 1000 years before. He felt that at Wells the Lord had "shut him in", to devote himself peacefully to the concerns of the whole Family of God, which, since it consists mostly of the Faithful Departed. could have little interest in war, peace, armistice or reconstruction, but was interested rather in the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the world to come. Congregational worship was an unwelcome intrusion - he had always been accustomed to say that the Church was perfectly delightful from Monday to Saturday, and from Saturday night to Monday morning it simply had to be put up with. Especially did he feel this at Wells, where he objected strongly to anything's being done in Cathedral worship with an eye to attracting or pleasing a congregation which with virtually no parochial commitments, and with the inhabitants of the city supposed to be provided for by their parish churches, there was no necessity for a Cathedral to do.
The prebendal vocation brings one down to the simple issues of created life. It is indeed a joy to me to find myself in my old age at last free to follow the blessed simplicity of life in "quires and places where they sing", and to realize as years go on, that after all that may be said and done in this feverish and restless world, the issues of life are perfectly and absolutely simple, viz., God and His Creation, and the relation in which His Creation stands to God. Quite, quite simple. The "deep" of created life calling to the "deep" of the Uncreated, Incomprehensible, Eternal Life of God.
There are those to whom the Prebendal stall seems like a kind of Board School medal, a reward for good conduct or long service. The Prebendary to whom the honour has been accorded will preach, in his turn, once or twice in the year: and that seems about all. But the Prebendaries who are lying in the cloister or under the Cathedral pavement will think or care little or nothing about the "preaching turns". The great fact to them will be the solemn collation to the prebend by the Bishop, followed by the solemn installation, which two facts constitute the man a Prebendary, incorporate him with the Chapter, give him his share in the Chapter prayers, and put him in possession of his stall, which is thenceforth his freehold. It is these things that bind us all together in one Chapter, dead and living.
Denison was stern in his criticism of many Cathedral practices, and no doubt, by being always there over a long period, and unvarying in his reasoned arguments, helped to bring about an improvement. One change which took place was not an improvement. When he first came to Wells, the Canons were all incumbents of parishes who in turn spent a month in residence, leaving a curate in charge of the parish. The system was changed so that the Canons had full time work which could not be done by deputies. The Bishop's private secretary (who could not use a typewriter), the suffragan Bishop of Taunton, the Principal of the Theological College, and the Cathedral Organist - all were also Canons. Even the maintenance of daily services became difficult, and pastoral work, even the little that there was to do, was wholly neglected. Denison said "we thought the old system was bad enough, but at least in those days the Canon in Residence did regard himself as parish priest of the Liberty and called on every one as soon as he arrived. Nowadays we could be dead in our beds and the Cathedral clergy would know nothing about it. I hear of these things from the man who comes to wind the clock." On Sundays at 8 a.m., when the Canons were free. there would often be three of them in the sanctuary as celebrant, gospeller and epistoler, but they would walk into church, not in liturgical order, but in order of seniority in the Chapter. Once when Denison was participating his voice was heard loudly from the sacristy asking, "Do we walk in as Christians or as the Cathedral Clergy?" In the days before there was a daily mass he would complain that on four days of the week the city was given over to the Devil.
Probably Denison would have been offended to be called an original thinker, but his ready command of the arresting phrase, and his gift of trenchant utterance, together with his unswerving adherence to principles, made him a stout ally and a formidable adversary in the contention for what he considered to be the "ordinary decencies" of Christian devotion, worship and life. Looking back over his life he regretted that so much of his energy had had to be spent on reclaiming those rights of which Protestantism had robbed us, and which we ought to be able to take for granted; and he never lost sight of the fact that when everything is eventually gained - free access to the Sacraments, and Catholic devotions as a matter of course - then we are still only at the starting point, when we can begin the life of "absolute simplicity". This consistency gives a compelling force to his writings, from which we can sense what a very strong influence he must have had on the people round about him. Life was all of a piece for him, dogma and morality were two parts of the same truth. To tamper with doctrine is to tamper with the very root of Catholic morality, and he poured scorn on the attempt to make morality the raison d'etre of the Church, on which all good men could agree. Morality, cut off from its origin, is left "like Mahomet's coffin, hanging between heaven and earth", and moreover will steadily diminish in quantity in the course of time. Who shall say, when we review the progress of secular humanism over the last fifty years, that he was wrong?
After his death on the 16th January 1940, in the exercise of a final Prebendal privilege, Henry Denison was buried among his peers in the Camary on the south side of the Cathedral, the only fact recorded about him on the gravestone, apart from the dates of his birth and death, being that he was Prebendary of Yatton.
NOTES
Quotations from Denison are from 72 Years' Church Recollections published in 1925. I have been helped by the Reverend Michael Lewis, Vicar of North Curry (who also gave me my copy of Prayer Book Ideals, now most regrettably out of print) and John Palmer, Esq. of Pitminster who told me his personal recollections of Denison.
Jeremy Hummerstone 1986
Return to Top Document Index Home Page