Latest news with #pre-Reformation
Glasgow Times
02-07-2025
- General
- Glasgow Times
How St Mary and St Anne's became Glasgow's Tron Church
This led to a church being established at the south side of the street of St Teneu or St Enoch, to bear the name of Mary of Loretto and of St Anne, her mother. With the consent of the patrons, one of the chaplainries of the church of St Roche's was, in about, incorporated with the Collegiate Church of St Mary and St Anne. John Bell Minister of the Laigh Church Glasgow Museums (Image: Supplied) The Chaplain of St Roche was appointed a canon of that church, subject to the obligation to say mass and other offices in St Roche's Chapel for the souls of its founder. The Cathedral and the Collegiate Church of St Mary and St Ann both maintained choirs in pre-Reformation Glasgow. The Cathedral choir will have sung daily at Mass and each of the eight regular prayer times for the Divine Office. Boys in both choirs studied at the Sang School. (Image: Supplied) The Collegiate Church of St Mary and St Ann had an organist who directed the choir and taught the three boy choristers who studied in the Sang School where they learned how to sing plainchant and polyphony, how to sing improvised harmonies, and play the organ. The boys were removed from their post when their voices broke, but there was provision for them to continue their education at the Grammar School for another two years. After the Reformation, the church with its cemetery in the Trongate, fell into a ruinous state. (Image: Supplied) It was sold by the council in 1570 and reacquired by them around 1592. They had it repaired to be used as a Church of Scotland. The church, which for more than a quarter of a century after the Reformation had been in a poor state, was repaired by the town and was used as a place of worship under the name of the Tron or New Kirk, sometimes known as Laigh Church. They then needed to find the means of supporting a minister. The old revenues of the church had been given to the magistrates of the city by Queen Mary's Act of 1566-7 to be used to fund for poor scholars at the college. (Image: Supplied) There were allegations that these bursaries had been improperly applied to the support of the richest men's sons. An Act of Parliament was therefore obtained in 1594, cancelled the bursaries, and instead devoted the revenues "to the sustentation of the ministry within the city of Glasgow". The bell house of the old church seems to have been occupied till the alterations were made, as in 1593 a tenant was allowed a reduction of half a year's rent "in respect the steeple was taken down". In 1594, the Scottish Parliament passed an act in favour of the ministry of Glasgow, referring to a gift which, after the Reformation, had been made to the magistrates of the city of the chaplaincies and emoluments of the "New Kirk of the College of Glasgow," meaning apparently the Collegiate Church of St Mary and St Ann. A little over 10 years later, the Tron Church was repaired and restored as a Protestant place of worship and a fourth minister was introduced to the city. In 1599, the ministers applied to the Town Council to ask that the town be divided into two separate parishes to allow each minister to know their flock. The city agreed to this on the understanding that the citizens should not be burdened with the building of more kirks or the support of more ministers than already existed. The Tron was as a result separated from the High Kirk. Additions were later made to the church, and the steeple which formed such a conspicuous spot in Trongate was built in 1637/8. In 1793, the old Church was destroyed by fire, and the Tron or St Mary's Church was built on the same site.
Spectator
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Pope Idol: Leo's singing should be celebrated
'But will anyone be interested?' the vicar asked cautiously. It was a fair response to my latest madcap scheme. One of the vicar's 12 churches, St Candida and Holy Cross at Whitchurch Canonicorum in Dorset, hosts one of the country's only three remaining pre-Reformation saints' shrines with the relics of the saint still present. In this case, the shrine is to St Wite, a ninth-century virgin princess martyred by the Vikings. Her saint's day was coming up. Could we, I asked, recreate a pre-Reformation church service in honour of it? The vicar, the Revd Virginia Luckett, who is sometimes heard on Radio 4, agreed to my proposal – but with trepidation. She is used to conducting pilgrimages to the shrine, and knows the spiritual value of this medieval tradition. But how many people would want to sit through more than an hour of complex Latin plainsong on a Saturday evening in summer, stewing in incense? Maybe half a dozen? I don't think the new Pope would have asked this sort of angst-ridden question. Leo XIV is the first proper singing pope since St John Paul II, and one of his first acts as pontiff was merrily to belt out the Regina Caeli (simple tone) in Latin from the Vatican balcony to the delighted crowds in St Peter's Square. Spurred by this papal expression of confidence in tradition, a Dominican friar, Father Robert Mehlhart, has started offering online singing lessons – 'Let's Sing with the Pope' – using clips of the Holy Father intoning plainchant to educate the many faithful who have never been taught how to do so. There have been hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few weeks. Going by the miserable and mumbling attempts at congregational singing I've heard recently (even in a full Westminster Abbey), we desperately need someone glamorous and full-throated in the Church of England to do something similar. Do we have a bishop musical and valiant enough to get on YouTube and proudly reacquaint us with the best tunes of the hymnal? Oswestry has a fine booming voice that would be the envy of many a Father Christmas impersonator, Ramsbury has released some albums and I hear that Chelmsford is a good musician. Where are you all? There is a ready audience that wants to reconnect with the great English tradition of hymn-singing, now dismally neglected by schools. Are we going to leave this multitude captive to Rome? As I plundered the local churches for vestments for the Whitchurch service (before the Reformation, even choristers generally wore fine embroidered copes), I couldn't help pondering how we have so quickly lost confidence in another national tradition: dressing properly. When Hamlet was apparently going off his onion, we knew about it from the way he dressed: 'his doublet all unbraced;/ No hat upon his head; his stockings fouled,/ Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle'. Yet since lockdown, this now seems to be our national costume. Even in Clubland, where one would hope for the confident maintenance of standards, there is the stench of sartorial decay. While having lunch a couple of weeks ago at a St James's institution which has recently abolished the requirement for neckties, I gloomily marvelled at how this relaxation has suddenly cast a tramp-like appearance on many of its members. Crumpled shirts and escaping chest hairs are now rampant. If dressing properly is a sign of good mental health, not to mention courtesy to others, what does this say about the current state of the nation? Ties aren't the only thing disappearing from the great dining rooms – portraits are too. Dinner recently at Clare College Cambridge, to find in Hall bare stretches of blank white walls where grand canvases of eminent alumni recently hung. After dinner I discovered one, Charles Townshend, an 18th-century Chancellor of the Exchequer, awkwardly stuffed at the top of an inaccessible staircase. The Indian Governor-General Lord Cornwallis and the completely inoffensive Archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson were nowhere to be seen. The Reformation martyr Bishop Hugh Latimer is apparently off being restored, but he might not make it back into Hall on his return. I suppose all this is just, in a way, given Latimer's own iconoclastic tendencies – but it's hardly the way to cherish the memory of the college's most eminent sons. More than 100 people filled the church at Whitchurch to hear the pre-Reformation service for St Wite. They sat silent, rapt, contemplative, as the choir – finely arrayed in borrowed copes – made its unhurried way through the Latin psalms, hymns and responsories (singing, I'd say, quite as well as the Pope, though untutored by him). They then, still silently, followed the choir procession out to a recent statue of St Wite on the church tower (iconoclasm can be wound back) and back indoors to her shrine. Both sites were censed and asperged with holy water as we continued to chant. Afterwards, I asked the vicar what she thought. She could not speak. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. These old traditions, offered with confidence, still have their power.
Telegraph
22-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Sacred Mysteries: Two breathtaking Lady chapels and one hammer
It is Lady Day on March 25, next Tuesday, one of the year's four quarter days, when rents become due. As a church feast it marks the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel of the conception of Jesus by the Virgin Mary. The name Lady Day refers to Mary, widely called Our Lady in pre-Reformation times. It was often called Our Lady Day, just as the phrase was attached to a great list of flowers: Our Lady's bedstraw (Galium verum or lady's bedstraw), which once gave the colour to double Gloucester cheese; Our Lady's gloves (Digitalis, foxglove); Our Lady's cushion (Armeria maritima, thrift, the flower that used to appear on the 12-sided threepenny bit); Our Lady's slipper (the slipper orchid) and so on. Despite being called Lady Day, the Annunciation is a feast of the Lord, since it celebrates his incarnation. That is of course why it falls nine months before Christmas (and always in the penitential season of Lent). As with Christmas, it is impossible to leave Mary out of the story. Contrariwise, Mary was the object of devotion only because she acted in such close coordination with her son. The High Middle Ages saw in England an efflorescence of Gothic architecture in the Decorated and Perpendicular styles, coinciding with an expression of devotion to the Virgin Mary. The Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral is one consequence. The chapel is 100ft long and 46ft wide, attached to the cathedral transept only by one corner, so that it is full of light. Undeniably the transparent glass in the big traceried windows makes it seem to float. But it would have been undeniably beautiful in a different way when it was full of coloured glass (like the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris). The Lady Chapel at Ely was being built in the years that followed the collapse of the central tower of the cathedral in 1322 and its replacement with the astonishingly well contrived octagon lantern. Two hundred years later Bishop Thomas Goodrich, acting out of principle, ordered the removal of all images in the churches of his diocese and the return of certificates of their destruction from the clergy. In the cathedral this meant the glass was smashed and at least the head broken off the hundreds of statues in their ornate stone niches. A different fate befell the statuary at the nation's most prominent Lady chapel, Henry VII's Chapel in Westminster Abbey. It was built in the breathtaking stone greenhouse Perpendicular style at the king's behest as a future shrine for his kinsman Henry VI and at the same time a chapel of the Virgin Mary. But Henry VI was never canonised and the chapel became the burial place of Henry VII and monarchs to come. Perhaps the proximity of royalty protected the statues of saints in Henry VII's Chapel. Today there are 96 of an original 107. They were the King's choice and represent a programme of ordinary devotion in the early Tudor period. I am glad to say that St Christopher is there with his tree-sized staff for fording the river. I won't go through them all, but there are saints you'd expect in churches of the time: Barbara with her tower, George with the dragon, Roche with his doggy and Anthony with his piggy; the Evangelist Matthew is wearing specs and the rarer Wilgefortis, a bearded woman, holds the cross of her martyrdom. These saints, gathered round Christ and his mother (Mary also depicted being taught to read by her mother Anne) represented to Henry VII the Church in heaven. Surrounded by their stone images he was buried.
