15 August 2022

Saint Margaret Pattens,
a City church by Wren
with an unusual name

Saint Margaret Pattens, a guild church on Eastcheap, seen from Saint Mary-at-Hill (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Patrick Comerford

Two of us spent a few hours in the City of London one evening last week, and I found time to visit a number of City churches, including Saint Margaret Pattens, a guild church on Eastcheap.

A church dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch has stood on this site for more than 950 years. The first church on the site dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch was recorded in 1067, when the church was probably built from wood.

The church was rebuilt in stone at a later date but fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1530 and rebuilt in 1538.

The church was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. The present church was built by Sir Christopher Wren between 1684 and 1687.

The church exterior is notable for its 200-ft high spire, Wren’s third highest and the only one that he designed in a mediaeval style. This is sometimes referred to as Wren’s only ‘true spire.’

Inside, the church is a simple rectangle with some unusual fittings. These include the only canopied pews in London. They date from the 17th century, and were intended for the churchwardens. The initials ‘CW’ in one of the pews have been thought to refer to Christopher Wren, but they may also signify ‘church warden.’

Other interior features include a punishment box carved with the Devil’s head where wrongdoers had to sit during church services.

Saint Margaret Pattens has a 200-ft high spire, Wren’s third highest and the only one that he designed in a mediaeval style (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Saint Margaret Pattens is one of only a few City churches to have escaped significant damage in World War II, and it was designated a Grade I listed building in 1950.

The church ceased to be a parish church in 1953 and became one of the City’s guild churches, within the living of the Lord Chancellor and under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. The church is the Guild Church of the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers and the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers, two of the City livery companies.

The church has a regular weekday congregation, rather than Sunday congregation, drawn mostly from people who work in offices nearby. A traditional service of Holy Communion is celebrated at 1 pm on Thursdays, with a short address and music.

The priest-in-charge of Saint Margaret Pattens is the Revd Andrew Keep. The tower accommodates the office of the Archdeacon of Hackney.

Saint Margaret Pattens was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1684-1687 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Several churches in London were dedicated to Saint Margaret. For example, Saint Margaret Lothbury, is dedicated to Saint Margaret of Antioch. So too is Saint Margaret’s in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, which is the parish church of the House of Commons. So, Saint Margaret’s on Eastcheap became known as Saint Margaret Pattens.

The name is traditionally said to derive from pattens, wooden-soled overshoes, later soled with raised iron rings. These raised shoes enabled people to walk about the streets of London without muddying their feet. Parishioners were asked to remove these pattens as they entered the church.

Another suggestion is that the name commemorates a benefactor, possibly Ranulf Patin, a mediaeval canon at Saint Paul’s Cathedral, although it would be most unusual for a benefactor to be commemorated in this way.

Saint Margaret Pattens has a traditional service of Holy Communion at 1 pm on Thursdays (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Saint Margaret of Antioch is known as Saint Marina the Great Martyr in the East, is celebrated as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches on 20 July and on 17 July in the Orthodox Church.

She was a virgin and martyr whose tortures and martyrdom became famous in early church history.

According to the legend, she was the daughter of a third or fourth century pagan priest in Antioch. She was either thrown out of the house by her father when she converted to Christianity or was converted by her nursemaid. She was noticed by the local prefect who wanted to marry her, but she spurned him and vowed to keep her virginity for Christ.

He handed her over to the Roman authorities. In prison she was swallowed by Satan in the form of a dragon. But the cross she was carrying irritated his throat, and he spat her out unharmed.

Her persecutors tried to kill her by fire and by drowning, but each time she survived, converting the growing crowd of onlookers. Finally, she was beheaded, along with her many converts, by Emperor Diocletian (245-313 AD). She was buried at Antioch, but her remains were taken later to Italy where they were divided between shrines in Montefiascone and Venice.

Saint Margaret Pattens is the Guild Church of the Worshipful Company of Pattenmakers and the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Praying with USPG and the music of
Vaughan Williams: Monday 15 August 2022

The icon of the Dormition completed by Alexandra Kaouki for a church in the old town of Rethymnon in Crete

Patrick Comerford

Today in the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship is marked simply as ‘The Blessed Virgin Mary’ (15 August 2022), without any indication of any event in her life or any commemoration.

In some traditions in the Church, this is the Assumption, in others the Dormition, in others this day recalls her death. I have discussed the differences in these traditions in previous blog postings on this day.

The reflection in the parish leaflet in Stony Stratford and Calverton yesterday described the Assumption as ‘the taking up of Mary into the glory of the Resurrection.’ It added, ‘In sharing in the fullness of God’s life and love, we remember that the same promise is made to all believers, as we turn to the Lord for grace and mercy.’

Before the day gets busy, I am taking some time this morning for reading, prayer and reflection.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music is celebrated throughout this year’s Proms season. In my prayer diary for these weeks I am reflecting in these ways:

1, One of the readings for the morning;

2, Reflecting on a hymn or another piece of music by Vaughan Williams, often drawing, admittedly, on previous postings on the composer;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary, ‘Pray with the World Church.’

The icon of the Dormition was completed by El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos) in Crete, probably before 1567

Luke 1: 46-55 (NRSVA):

46 And Mary said,
‘My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
48 for he has looked with favour on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
50 His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
51 He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
53 he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
54 He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’

Wilderhope Manor, on Wenlock Edge, Shropshire … here I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams (Photograph: Graham Taylor. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s reflection: ‘On Wenlock Edge’ (1)

Ralph Vaughan Williams was the composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, and film scores, a collector of English folk music and song. With Percy Dearmer, he co-edited the English Hymnal, in which he included many folk song arrangements as hymn tunes, and several of his own original compositions.

For the rest of this week, I intend listening to On Wenlock Edge, a setting by Vaughan Williams of six poems from AE Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

I wrote over the past few days that I was first introduced to the music of Vaughan Williams when I was a 19-year-old and while I was spending some days in Shropshire.

I was staying in Wilderhope Manor, a 16th-century Elizabethan manor house on Wenlock Edge, seven miles south-west of Much Wenlock, seven miles east of Church Stretton. Wilderhope Manor was built in 1585 for Francis Smallman. The house was in a poor state and uninhabited when it was bought in 1936 by the WA Cadbury Trust and opened as a youth hostel in 1937. Many of the original features, including the oaken stairways, oak spiral stairs and plaster ceilings have survived.

In the early 1970s, although I had little musical education and no musical background, I was interested in English folk music, and I was enjoying the way it was being interpreted by folk rock bands such as I was enjoying the music of English folk rock bands such as Steeleye Span, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Lindisfarne and Jethro Thull.

That interest drew the suggestion while I was staying in Wilderhope Manor that I should listen to the music of Vaughan Williams, and, as I was staying on Wenlock Edge in rural Shropshire, that I should listen to On Wenlock Edge and read Housman’s Shropshire Lad.

This became my first memorable introduction to the great English composers. I spent some time on Wenlock Edge and visiting the neighbouring villages before hitch-hiking back to Lichfield – a journey of about 50 miles.

Back in Lichfield, I experienced a self-defining moment in the chapel of Saint John’s Hospital, and was invited for the first time to the Folk Masses in the Dominican Retreat Centre at Spode House, near Rugeley, about six miles north of Lichfield.

Ever since, I have associated the music of Vaughan Williams, especially his setting of On Wenlock Edge, with my understanding of my own spiritual growth and development.

This morning [15 August 2022], I am listening to ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the first of the six settings by Vaughan Williams of these poems by AE Housman (1859-1936), published in March 1896.

Alfred Edward Housman was born at Fockbury, near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, on 26 March 1859, the eldest child of Sarah and Edward Housman. His mother died on his twelfth birthday, and the anguished created by this cruel coincidence, led to strong questioning of his Christian faith, although he did not abandon the idea of a God.

Housman studied Classics at Saint John’s College, Oxford, and was Professor of Greek and Latin, University College, London (1892), Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge (1911), and a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, where Vaughan Williams had been an undergraduate from 1892 to 1895. He died on 30 April 1936.

In reacting to the Boer War, in which his brother Herbert was killed, Housman also anticipated the horror and futility of World War I, and his poems would find fresh relevance of with the outbreak of World War I.

His landscape is a mythical, idealised Shropshire, similar to the Wessex of the novels of Thomas Hardy. His dominant themes are love, and a post-industrial pastoral nostalgia, infused with expressions of disillusionment at the sacrifice of the young soldiers going to war, never to return.

A younger brother, the author and playwright Laurence Housman (1865-1959), first worked as a book illustrator, and the first authors he illustrated included the poet Christina Rossetti. Laurence Housman also wrote and published several volumes of poetry, a number of hymns and carols, and socialist and pacifist pamphlets, and he edited his brother’s poems which were published posthumously.

In 1945, Laurence Housman opened Housman’s Bookshop in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, founded in his honour by the Peace Pledge Union, of which he was a sponsor. In 1959, shortly after his death, the shop moved to 5 Caledonian Road, London. I was first introduced to Housman’s in 1976 by its co-founder and manager, Harry Mister, after meeting him with Bruce Kent of CND at the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick that year. Housman’s Bookshop remains a prime source of publications on pacifism and other radical values.

Vaughan Williams composed On Wenlock Edge – a cycle of six songs for tenor, piano and string quartet – in 1909, a year after he had spent three months in Paris studying under Maurice Ravel, the French composer, who was three years younger than him. The first performance took place in the Aeolian Hall in London on 15 November 1909.

After a performance of the cycle in May 1920, Ivor Gurney wrote: ‘The French mannerisms must be forgotten in the strong Englishness of the prevailing mood – in the unmistakable spirit of the time of creation. England is the spring of emotion, the centre of power, and the pictures of her, the breath of her earth and growing things are continually felt through the lovely sound.’

Housman, who only heard the first two songs, wrote to his publisher in December 1920: ‘I am told that composers in some cases have mutilated my poems – that Vaughan Williams cut two verses out of ‘Is my team ploughing?’ I wonder how he would like me to cut two bars out of his music.’

When he was asked about this after Housman’s death in 1936, Vaughan Williams showed no remorse, claiming ‘the composer has a perfect right artistically to set any portion of a poem he chooses provided he does not actually alter the sense … I also feel that a poet should be grateful to anyone who fails to perpetuate such lines as ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’.’

In the 1920s, Vaughan Williams made an arrangement of On Wenlock Edge for full orchestra that was first performed on 24 January 1924 by John Booth, with the composer conducting. Vaughan Williams preferred this version to his original.

In the accompaniment of the first song, ‘On Wenlock Edge,’ the strings are flaring and quivering in powerful simulation of the gales that trouble Wenlock’s woods, and the emotional gales that have troubled the life of humanity since time began.

Vaughan Williams’s approach to the text works on two levels – that of word-painting, and that of bringing out the meanings inherent in phrases or in an entire text. In this first song, for example, he paints words like ‘high’ and ‘gale,’ and depicts the sense of foreboding in phrases like ‘the wood’s in trouble’ and ‘His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves’ in the accompaniment.



1, On Wenlock Edge

On Wenlock Edge the world’s in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it piles the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.

’Twould blow like this through hot and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.

Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.

There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.

The gale, it piles the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.

Afternoon light pours into the Lady Chapel in Saint Laurence’s Church, Winslow, Buckinghamshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Today’s Prayer:

The Collect:

Almighty God,
who looked upon the lowliness of the Blessed Virgin Mary
and chose her to be the mother of your only Son:
grant that we who are redeemed by his blood
may share with her in the glory of your eternal kingdom;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post Communion Prayer:

God Most High,
whose handmaid bore the Word made flesh:
we thank you that in this sacrament of our redemption
you visit us with your Holy Spirit
and overshadow us by your power;
strengthen us to walk with Mary the joyful path of obedience
and so to bring forth the fruits of holiness;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Monday 15 August 2022 (The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary):

The theme in the USPG prayer diary this week is ‘Human Trafficking in Durgapur.’ This them was introduced yesterday by Raja Moses, Project Co-ordinator of the Anti-Human Trafficking Project, Diocese of Durgapur, Church of North India.

The USPG Prayer Diary invites us to pray today in these words:

Today we celebrate the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. May we be inspired by her story and encouraged by her words.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

The Assumption depicted in a stained-glass window in the Church of the Assumption in Dalkey, Co Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org