A People’s Church:
A History of the Church of England by Jeremy Morris Profile Books, 480 pages, £30
The formal history of the Church of England begins with the Act of Supremacy of 1534, which declared King Henry VIII to be “the only Supreme Head in earth of the Church of England called Anglicana Ecclesia”. Yet, as Jeremy Morris demonstrates in this accessible and engaging book, the roots of Henry’s church lay firmly in the early Middle Ages. So much so that his Church of England could be understood “as the Church in England as it had been from time immemorial”.
Morris deftly guides the reader through the complex narrative of the church’s shifting fortunes, moving from the turmoil of the Reformation years, through evangelical and high church revivals, constitutional reform and the church’s responses to world wars, to the religious “crisis” of the 1960s and beyond. After a brief prelude looking at the medieval (“Catholic”) centuries, the book is divided into three sections: the “Age of the Monarch”, the “Age of the Oligarchy” and the “Age of the People”. In a postscript Morris uses a horticultural metaphor to contrast the church at its best – “like a well-rooted tree in a storm, bending to survive, but with roots which go down deep into Christian revelation, history and tradition” – with its less successful incarnations as “a tangle or knot of incommensurate claims and counter-claims, like an overrun garden gone to ruin”.
Monarchs, bishops and senior clergy necessarily dominate the narrative, but Morris illustrates the book throughout with vignettes about individual clergy and, where possible, lay people. Larry Banville, a 19th-century Norfolk gamekeeper, admired but doubted the sincerity of a sermon his parson preached about charity, not believing that “he would give a penny to a poor man if it would save his life”. William Taylor, a London footman who kept a diary in 1837, found his local Anglican church so full one Sunday that he could not get in, and thus ended up at a Methodist “Chapple”, where he stayed “but a very short time”. Sunday observance coloured the childhood of Molly Hughes, author of the London Girl autobiographies, who remembered afternoons that “hung heavy” when “it seemed always to be three o’clock”.