It might have escaped your attention, but there is some big Anglican conference happening this summer. For those of you with long memories, you might recall that the big issue is something that was discussed the last time the big Anglican conference met ten years ago.

And that’s the problem. Our longest memories go back ten years.

Which is all very disappointing, when you consider that the Church of England in particular, and the Anglican Communion in general, like to think of our selves as a historic church, with our roots in the succession of our apostolic churches. We haven’t just made all this up: we are inheritors of the past. And yet, “big picture” knowledge of our origins and our history seems to be pretty vague: not just among the people in the pews but also among the prelates in the palace.

Which means, of course, that we may face a problem when the newspapers and the blogosphere start writing about course of the conference. We will hear, I am sure, that the Church is facing an unprecedented crisis of faith and confidence, due to, they will say, its authoritarian and/or weak-willed Archbishop, its oppressive and/or irrelevant nature, its ultra-conservative and/or ultra-liberal character. Much of what will be printed will be contradictory, and lacking in any historical or theological context. This doesn’t matter, so long as it makes good press.

Which presents a problem for those who wish to remain faithful members of the Church. Too often we know too little about where we have come from (the history of our church), and because of that, we know too little about where we are going (the future of our church). Too many people think the Church is facing difficult questions for the first time, that this is the worst crisis in the Church’s history, that this is the closest we have ever been to breaking up. Of course, this is not the case.

So, in order to prepare ourselves for the Lambeth Conference, in order to have some idea about where we have come from, to recall the greater crises of our Communion, and to see the hand and purpose of God in what has happened in the past, I am going to start a new series of posts:

Based upon a study day hosted on Pentecost eve by St Stephen’s Canterbury, and Affirming Catholicism, Canterbury, I will look at eight significant dates in the history of the Anglican church, four significant movements and four significant inheritances the present day Communion possesses.

I hope that this won’t be of just historical interest. I firmly believe that the past, if not determining the future, at least builds it’s outline. Or, to put it more theologically:

If we know where we’ve come from,
we might learn where it is
God wants us to go.

The intention for this series, based on a study day held on Pentecost Eve in Canterbury, is simply this:

Too often we know too little about where we have come from (the history of our church), and because of that, we know too little about where we are going (the future of our church).

Perhaps this doesn’t convince you: you might think that we should be concentrating on the challenges of the present and the future, rather than doing the naval gazing of looking over where we have come from? After all, we all know that history is bunk, don’t we?

And yet, there is something profound, vital even, which is lost if we don’t know where we come from. I propose to give four justifications for undertaking a “rooting exercise” in understanding who or what Anglicans might be.

The first justification comes from a most curious source, a Franco-Jewish radical, trade unionist, philosopher and professional troublemaker: this woman, Simone Weil— born in 1909 in Paris, died in 1943 in (of all places) Ashford, Kent.

Weil was one of the most original, brilliant, intense, and enigmatic thinkers of the twentieth century. Born to a family of notional Jewish heritage, Weil placed much more emphasis on left wing political activity. At the age of six she refused to take sugar in solidarity with the suffering of the French soldiers on the Western Front. As an adult she became active in the trade union and workers’ education movements in France. Her fierce moral earnestness and certainty earned her the nickname “the Categorical Imperative in skirts”. She was a pacifist until the rise of fascism in Spain, when she briefly served with the Republican forces before her physical frailty and ineptitude made her such a liability (she gave herself second degree burns over a cooking fire!) that she reluctantly returned to France. She worked as a manual labourer on farms and in the Renault car factory, until the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France. Weil sought ways to be involved in the Resistance, but at risk because of her Jewish ancestry, she was forced to flee France, and in 1942, after a short detour in the US, she finally settled in London. Determined to share in the privations of the people she had left behind, and further weakened by overwork, and overcome by self-doubt and depression, When she died in August 1943 she was just thirty-four. She was buried in Bybrook Cemetery, where her grave can be seen today.

In 1942 she had been invited by the Free French government in London to consider what would be needed for the reconstruction of France following liberation from Nazi control (this was back in the days when governments did post-war planning). Her thoughts were articulated in this work, L’Enraincement, which was published posthumously in 1949, and translated into English in 1952 under the title The Need for Roots. This is what Simone had to say about the title:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.¹

All of which is true, if a little dry.

If you need more persuading, then let’s try something English. Steve Knightley and Phil Beer, otherwise known as the incomparable Show of Hands, produced an album in 2005 called Witness. The single taken from the album, “Roots”, expressed the perennial frustration of the English folk musician, working in a time and culture which seems to have forgotten all its own songs.

Which is what Anglican Roots is all about (in a way)².

Some of you might still uncomfortable with the justifications I have produced for studying our roots; a French radical and an English folk group. Would a bishop do?

Stephen Sykes, formerly Bishop of Ely, wrote:

… it is a mistake to think that if one is English one has no need to study this history [Anglicanism]. A Church which has not examined its past, with the best methods of analysis and interpretation open to it, is liable to misinterpret its present situation. We live from our memories as well as our hopes, and our accustomed way of telling our own story needs to be purged of vanity and illusion.³

Some of you might even feel that a bishop is not justification enough for such a historical exercise. Well then, will these words do?

“… the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away.”⁴

Remembering where we have come from, in a way which unpeels (perhaps) some layers of myth, falsehood and ignorance, so that we might have some kind of better idea of where we are, so that we might be open to hearing God tell us where we are to be.

1. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge & Paul, 1952). Part Two : Uprootedness, p. 41 [↩]
2. Visit the Show of Hands website and download the full length video for yourself— and then the rest of their albums. You won’t regret it! [↩]
3. Stephen Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’ in Unashamed Anglicanism, (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995) p. 219. [↩]
4. Luke 8:11-13 [↩]

We are looking at the origins and history of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion, to understand better where we have come from so as to understand better where it is that God wants us to be. As part of this process we will look at eight dates, four movements and four significant inheritances from the 1600+ year history of the CofE: the dates may not always be the most obvious, but each date, perversely chosen by me, has some lasting significance for the way the CofE/AC might be today.¹ Continue Reading »

1. If you need some historical context for these dates, then look at Ed Friedlander’s Anglican Timeline, published by the Anglican Society of St Justus, which is useful, eccentric and has an unacknowledged debt to David Edwards’s Christian England (London : Fount, 1989; combined ed. with new prefaces; originally published in 3 vols 1981, 1983, 1984). [↩]

We have all heard of Magna Carta, although, like Tony Hancock we might be a little hazy on when and why and what it was for.

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Benedict was a Roman nobleman who lived in the last years of the Roman imperial rule. He was born in about AD 480 and died about 70 years later, shortly after Rome was sacked and destroyed by the Gothic king Totila (546). He lived at the beginning of what used to be called the “dark ages” and what can still be called fairly, the collapse of a particular society. As a young man he had left Rome, shocked by its depravity and licentiousness. At first he lived as a hermit, but gradually his reputation for sanctity and plain good sense spread, and he was asked to become the leader of a number of small communities, who had withdrawn from the world. He eventually withdrew again from the Roman countryside and settled on the top of a steep mountain in the hills south of Rome: Mount Cassino. Here Benedict gathered a community of like-minded men around him, and he drew up a rule of life for them, which came to be known as “The Rule of St Benedict”, the foundational document for the most influential monastic order in Europe: the Benedictines.

Benedict’s character, like the character of the Benedictines themselves:

must be discovered from his Rule, and the impression given there is of a wise and mature sanctity, authoritative but fatherly, and firm but loving. It is that of a spiritual master, fitted and accustomed to rule and guide others, having himself found his peace in the acceptance of Christ.¹

The order spread swiftly throughout Europe, and soon arrived in England. The first Benedictine abbeys were founded by Wilfrid of York at Ripon and Hexham at the end of the 7th cent. The order spread rapidly. As time passed the great cathedrals of England came to be run by a chapter of Benedictine monks: the English clergy (monastic and parochial) were steeped in the ethos of Benedictinism, and even though Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell destroyed the monasteries, the ethos remained.

Rowan Williams has pointed out three key characteristics of Benedict’s ethos²: “(i) what the Rule has to say about the use and the meaning of time, (ii)what the Rule has to say about obedience, and (iii) what the Rule has to say about participation.”

Time is to be carefully structured in community, balanced between work, prayer, community time and rest. The purpose of the monastery is not to produce and neither is it to consume. The monastery is to be sustained, but that sustaining has to be, as it were, sustainable not just on economic grounds, but also to do with humanity and spirituality. We are more than our work.

Second, the monk is to live under a rule of obedience, and this is obedience for a purpose: “being ready to suspend a purely individual will or perception for the sake of discovering God’s will in the common life of the community.” We are better together.

Third, one of the abbot’s responsibilities was to make sure that everyone in the monastery worked in a way that was appropriate to their abilities and to the needs of the community. No one was to be excused boots, just because of their wishes or status: everyone had a contribution to make. We are all responsible for the health of our community.

The Rule of Benedict as lived in monasteries then and now has been called simply “Anglicanism with a structure.” Traits thought to be quintessentially Anglican, such as balance, thorough scholarship, hospitality, and an emphasis on practice rather than abstract theory, all have their origins in the Rule of St Benedict.

Anglicans are living proof that you don’t have to be a monk to be Benedictine.

1. Michael David Knowles, O.S.B. “Benedict of Nursia, Saint” Encyclopædia Britannica Online 2008. [↩]
2. Rowan Williams, ‘Benedict and the Future of Europe’ : Speech at St Anselmo in Rome, Tuesday 21 November 2006. Available online from here. [↩]

The Church and its Spirituality

The Church of England was founded as an international church, whose pervading ethos was the compassionate and humane structure of Benedictinism.

“The Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”

There are many myths about the origins of the Church of England, and most of them coalesce around the middle years of the sixteenth century: roughly from the time when Henry VIII began to worry whether he would ever get an air in the 1520s to when his daughter finally saw off the challenge of Presbyterianism to her new “Elizabethan Settlement” of the Church in the 1570s.

Curiously, there are two, almost entirely contradictory myths about this period.

Continue Reading »

We cannot escape the fact the Church of England as we know it came into being because of the will, whims, and cruelties of Henry Tudor, the eighth king of that name. The Church of England is not solely a product of Henry’s need for a divorce, but the gulf between the way the church was in the 1520s and the way the church was in the 1550s is stupendous: the way a church building was laid out, the way in which it was decorated, the language spoken in the church, the legal framework which compelled you to worship, the pattern of the church’s year, even the landscape of the country— all were unimaginably altered.
And this was caused by a loyal, thoughtful, conscientious Catholic: Henry VIII.

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One way in which the mythful retelling of the events of the sixteenth century works its way out is this: after the confusion of the reign of Henry, the austerity of Edward’s and the sheer bloody eventfulness of Mary’s, once Elizabeth came to the throne, all was peace and light; we had a Queen who was also tolerant, respectful and wise:

I would not open windows into men’s souls¹

But Elizabeth was a queen who tortured heretics to death in public. What she meant by this supposed espousal of toleration is “she did not care what people understood by the formularies of the Church of England; only that they would assent to them.”²

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1. Oral tradition only. The earliest written record of this espousal of toleration is in J. B. Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth 1558–1603 (1936), p. 19. [↩]
2. Andrew Brown, ‘Shuttered windows to the soul’, The Guardian : Comment is Free website [↩]

The Church and its learning

Despite being the product of a national church asserting its national identity (and its submission to the secular power of the realm), in the period in which the Church of England was learning to define itself as opposed to its mother church on the continent, it is significant that it was an intellectual movement which had the greatest influence. The Church of England was founded as a church of learning: often it has been able to remember that legacy.

Christian Humanism

Nowadays, if you say “humanism” people tend to think you mean “atheism”: the British Humanist Association is prominent in opposing all public expressions of religion in our society. But in the early sixteenth century humanism didn’t mean such a feeble-minded thing. Then “Humanism” was a liberal arts movement: it was an attitude towards learning, which emphasised the skilful use of the past, applied to the present. The Christian humanist wished to apply his knowledge of the ancient writers, Christian and pagan, in the betterment of the lives of his fellows.

Christian humanists advocated a synthesis of classical, biblical, and patristic learning as the basis for an ambitious renewal of theology, piety, and public morality.¹

This was a Europe-wide movement, and something that was shared in with enthusiasm by English scholars. Early examples are John Colet, (founder of Saint Paul’s School at London), John Fisher, (prime mover in the foundation of St John’s College Cambridge), Lady Margaret Beaufort, (founder of Christ’s College Cambridge) and Thomas More. Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, was a huge influence on the development of Anglican learning, and the church and universities weren’t afraid to import the best continental learning: Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr Vermigli are two of the most prominent scholars of the period.

For the consequences of which see… here.

1. James Michael Weiss “Humanism” Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation. Ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand. (Oxford University Press, 1996) [↩]

The Elizabeth Settlement of 1559 was no such thing. It was the Elizabethan Truce, and a truce which became increasingly out of date over the course of her long reign. The enemy at the beginning of her reign was, as we have seen, the papalists: those who wanted to bring England back into communion with Rome. By the 1590s it was the Puritans: those more radical Christians who wanted to take the examples of reformation to be found in Zurich and Geneva and apply them to England.

There was another example of a thoroughly reformed church, closer to home. The Church of Scotland, by law established, was presbyterian in governance and doctrine, “one of the best reformed churches”¹. Perhaps when the King of Scotland became King of England as well he might bring some of his presbyterian ethos with him. Elizabeth died in 1603, and James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Even while he was travelling south the Puritans of England approached him. They presented him with the Millenary Petition, so-called because it was supposed to have been signed by a thousand ministers. The Petition was, as these things go, moderate and peaceful. The petitioners wanted a number of catholic hangovers from the Elizabethan Settlement to be finally removed from Church of England worship:

• the sign of the cross at baptism
• forbidding the administration of women at baptism (ie in emergencies)
• making the cap and surplice optional
• abolition of the ring in the marriage service
• restrictions on the use of music in worship
• forbidding kneeling at the name of Jesus

There were some other, godly, proposals. The Puritans wanted ministers to hold one living only, and not many parishes in plurality; that people should not be excommunicated for “trifles and twelve-penny matters”, and that only learned men, “able and sufficient”, should be admitted to ministry.

The Puritans didn’t know two things about James. First, he loved a good debate. Second, he had no intention of allowing any reforms which questioned, even remotely, the status of the monarch. To the consternation of the Bishops, he said that the Petition deserved a good discussion. Some Puritans took this as a sign of the King’s favour and began petitioning for more radical reforms. This had the expected effect on the Church: reaction. All Puritan agitating was condemned, and Archbishop Whitgift undertook a survey of all dissenters and sectaries within the province of Canterbury: know where your enemies might be.

The Conference met at Hampton Court Palace, the home of Wolsey and Henry VIII, in January 1604. The English Bishops were represented by Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London and soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Puritans by John Rainolds, fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, Dean of Lincoln, tutor to Richard Hooker and former Roman Catholic. The conference was run amicably, although it soon became apparent to the Puritans that James was more interested in arguments than outcomes. The king agreed to act against ministers not being resident in their parishes, and to improve the quality of preaching (OffPreach?), but he had no intention of budging on church discipline and ceremonies. Rainolds made a tactical error when he recommended the king set up a synod of bishops and presbyters to determine contested issues in the church. This so infuriated James that he walked out of the room, snapping ‘No bishop, no king’ as he went.

Various bits and pieces were agreed upon; commissions were to be set up to tinker with certain small reforms, only one of which was every achieved; an agreement to produce one uniform translation of the Bible led directly to the Authorised Version of 1611: the so-called “King James Bible”, which is so much a defining possession of the English speaking world.

Two different, ideologically determined translations were in use in the Church of England at the time: the Geneva Bible (with its biased explanatory notes in the margins) and the Bishop’s Bible (1568). James entrusted the task to Bancroft, who formed a network of committees to produce the new translation: six committees of fifty-four scholars in all, meeting in Oxford, Cambridge, and the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey. They took as their starting point the earliest English translations of William Tyndale and was completed in five years.

Looking at the way the AV has been worshipped subsequently, it is interesting to see how little loved it was when it first appeared. It was said to be filled with ‘uncouth and obsolete expressions’, and to have ‘all the disadvantages of an old prose translation’. It wasn’t until 1760 that it had completely superceded the Bishop’s Bible or the Geneva Bible as the standard English translation (which is why Book of Common Prayer of 1662 uses Coverdale’s Great Bible translation of the psalter). Curiously, it was never “Authorized”.

1. Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II: 1558-1688 v. 1 (London: SCM Press, 1996), p. 94 [↩]

What was a interesting diversion for James, debating with bishops and puritans, became a matter of life and death for his son, Charles I, and, to be honest, mostly death. James’s refusal to address even the minor issues agreed to at the Hampton Court Conference left a bitter taste in the mouths of the Puritans, a group of people whose numbers and influence increased in the 1620s. A bourgeois middle class was developing, making money through trade, and they began to chafe against the social restrictions that the Elizabeth and Jacobean settlements placed upon them.

Continue Reading »

The Church can be self-reforming

When the Church of England relies on law and enforcement it cuts itself off from the richness of skills and gifts that God has given all his people. When it remains open to the new things God is doing among us, it can be a self-reforming, self-healing and self-strengthening body.

Dissenters and Sectaries (aka Methodism)

The Church of England never learnt to cope with dissent. More groups split away from the church throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The American high churchman, Samuel Johnson (not the English dictionary compiler) referred to those affected by the so-called Great Awakening in America in the 1730s and 1740s disparagingly:

There is nothing they will stick at: they patronize monstrous enthusiasm, strolling teachers and wild notions.¹)

Similar attitudes were found in the mother church. At the same time the Duchess of Buckingham reacted with horror to the “Methodism” introduced into aristocratic circles by the Countess of Huntingdon: “Their doctrines are most repulsive, strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth”. (The Duchess of Buckingham is only notable otherwise as the illegitimate daughter of James II).

John Wesley was born in 1703, the son of the rector of Epworth, in Lincolnshire. Whilst at Oxford, he gathered a group of devout undergraduates around him who attempted to live their Christian faith methodically: they became known as the ‘Holy Club’ or ‘Methodists’. Ordained priest in 1728, he went to America as a missionary in 1735: it was an unmitigated disaster, and he fled back to England. In 1738 he had (another?) conversion experience at a meeting of a Moravian church group in London: “I felt my heart strangely warmed”. He determined to devote his life to evangelistic work. Finding the churches closed to him, he began preaching out doors, and developed his own organization with the help of lay preachers and extended his activity to cover the whole of the British Isles by 1751. Although he lived and died as an Anglican priest, and wanted his organization to remain within the Church of England, in 1784 he ordained Thomas Coke as a superintendent for the growing Methodist organisation in America.

But what is his relevance to Anglican self-understanding? It is simply this: God raises up men and women within the church who are capable through grace of reforming the church, strengthening it for the task ahead. Most times the Church ignores or persecutes them, only recognising the meaning and value of their contribution with hindsight. Whenever we despair of the paucity of resources available to the church in its challenges today, we should remember John Wesley, and look for his equivalent among our number today.

1. Richard Webster, A history of the Presbyterian Church in America from its origin until the year 1760, with biogr. sketches of its early ministers, (Philadelphia, 1858 [↩]

So far, the acute-eyed among you will have noted, that in this series about Anglican Roots, as we prepare for the Lambeth Conference of the world-wide Anglican Communion, we have heard very little about the world beyond the Tweed, the Severn, the Irish Sea or the English Channel. A lot of what we have said has been about the Church in England as well as the Church of England. Where did this W.W.A.C. come from then?

It certainly didn’t come from the Church of England’s own self-understanding. As we have seen, the most consistent thread throughout the Church of England’s history is that it is self-governing and autonomous, in as much as the sovereign, the chief magistrate of the realm, allows it to be: “no king, no bishops” and no Church of England. How would that work in lands which weren’t ruled directly by the king, in the new trading posts and colonies which began to emerge in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century?

The first Church of England service to be held outside the lands of the English crown was a celebration of Holy Communion at Frobisher Bay on 3 September 1578, presided over by Robert Wolfall, chaplain to the exploration voyage of Martin Frobisher. The first service within the lands which later became the United States was probably in a bay in Oregon on 19 June 1579 when the crew of the Golden Hind and Sir Francis Drake landed to repair the ship. Attempts were made to set up permanent settlements on the west coast of North America in the later years of the sixteenth century, but all failed until the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia in 1607. The Church of England was designated the established church there in 1609, in the lower part of New York in 1693, in Maryland in 1702, in South Carolina in 1706, in North Carolina in 1730, and in Georgia in 1758.

But what did “established” mean in this context? It certainly didn’t mean “bishops”. The parishes were expected to be self-financing and largely self-governing. The Bishop of London, William Laud, was appointed in 1632 to over see the overseas churches in the king’s dominions, but he was never expected to visit the parishes(!). Instead he ruled by commissaries, and, for many years, this light touch governance seemed successful. By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, there were perhaps 400 parishes in the American colonies. But it was built on thin roots. Most of the parishes were served by priests sent out from England; there were very few local men ordained priest— the long months of sea voyage to England to find a bishop to ordain them was a strong disincentive.

And then came the Revolution. How was a Church which placed so much emphasis on loyalty to the King to deal with a Revolution which overthrew the authority of that King? By 1783, when the War of Independence ended, almost 80,000 loyalists had left the colonies, most (50,000 or more), heading for Canada. By 1790, in a nation of four million, Anglicans were reduced to about ten thousand; in Virginia, for example, of the 107 parishes which existed in 1784, fewer than 42 were able to support a priest between 1802 and 1811.¹ Others, who wanted a balance between national loyalty and religious conviction, attempted to find another way. Samuel Tingley, an SPG missionary in Delaware and Maryland, attempted vagueness (a very Anglican solution!): rather than praying “O Lord, save the King” in the Office, substituted “O Lord, save those whom thou hast made it our especial Duty to pray for.”

In 1783 the Clergy Convention of Connecticut recognised that if the church in America couldn’t have a king, it still needed bishops. They elected Samuel Seabury to be bishop, and like Don Quixote, he left home on a voyage to seek consecration.

Seabury was a colonist, born in Groton, Connecticut, in 1729. He trained as theologian at Yale College and then as a doctor at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst in the United Kingdom he sought ordination, and returned to the colonies as a missionary for the SPG. When the War broke out he resigned his living in Westchester, New York, and served in private medical practice and as chaplain to the British army. And yet when the war ended, he had remained in the United States. He was unsuccessful in finding an English bishop who would ordain him. They were reluctant to interfere in the affairs of an enemy nation, and anyway, the canons required the newly consecrated bishop to swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown, something that Seabury as an American was manifestly unable to do.

Disappointed, he travelled north, and discovered in the Scottish Episcopal Church three bishops willing to do the deed: at the time the Episcopal Church in Scotland was (amazingly) not in communion with the Church of England: it was made up of non-juring bishops, who had refused the oath of loyalty to William of Orange. They had strong Jacobite sympathies. Consecrating Seabury would be one in the eye for German George (III) and his bishops. On 14 November 1784, Samuel Seabury was consecrated the first bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States, and the first colonist (ie, non-Englishman, not working within the Church of England) to the episcopacy. As such, his consecration marked the beginning of the world-wide Church of England, otherwise, and more accurately known as the Anglican Communion. (Incidentally, the English Parliament concerned that this marked the beginning of some fiendish Jacobite religious plot to overthrow the English crown, cleared the way for future consecrations to happen in England by removing the requirement for the oath of loyalty).

A word about a word

Finally, a word about a word; Anglicanism. Although, as we have seen “Anglican” appeared, sort of, in Magna Carta, and a play on the word appeared in the story of Pope Gregory the Great and the Angel-Angels, the grammarians among you will have noted that Magna Carta used “Anglican” as an adjective: the “English Church”. When did “Anglicanism” emerge as a proper noun?

Perhaps you would like to have a guess.

The earliest that the OED can date the use of the word “Anglican” to mean characteristic or defining of the established Church of England is [drum roll please] … 1838.

John Henry Newman,