15 August 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

Saint Mary-at-Hill Church
and a reminder of the old
lanes in the City of London

Saint Mary-at-Hill stands between two of the most ancient, cobbled and narrow lanes of the City of London (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 Mary-at-Hill, a parish church off Eastcheap, between the steep, cobbled street known as Saint Mary-at-Hill and Lovat Lane, among some of the city’s most ancient lanes.

The Church of Saint Mary-at-Hill was founded in the 12th century as ‘Saint Mary de Hull’ or ‘Saint Mary de la Hulle,’ and an ‘ancient church’ on this site is mentioned in a legal document dated 1177.

Billingsgate Quay was an important harbour in the 10th and 11th centuries. The route north into the old city led past the church, and the steep rise up from the River Thames gave it the name of Saint Mary at or on the Hill.

The north aisle was rebuilt at the end of the 15th century, and a south aisle and steeple were added a little later. The churchwardens’ accounts from the 15th century refer to side chapels dedicated to Saint Stephen, Saint Katherine, Saint Ann and Saint Christopher.

A new rood was installed at Saint Mary-at-Hill in 1426, at a cost of £36, a very considerable sum at the time. Half a century later, the church paid ‘Christopher the Carpenter’ 20 shillings to take down the spire in 1479, and 53 shillings to rebuild it.

The organ-builder Mighaell Glocetir worked at Saint Mary-at-Hill from 1477 to 1479. The choir of the Chapel Royal sang there from 1510. The composer Thomas Tallis was the organist at Saint Mary-at-Hill in 1538-1539.

John Stow, writing at end of the 16th century, described it as ‘the fair church of Saint Marie, called on the Hill, because of the ascent from Billingsgate.’

Sir Christopher Wren redesigned the interior and east end of Saint Mary-at-Hill after the Great Fire of London (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

The church was severely damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666, which started nearby in neighbouring Pudding Lane. The church was only partially rebuilt and Saint Mary’s parish was united with the parish of Saint Andrew Hubbard, where the church was not rebuilt.

Sir Christopher Wren redesigned the interior and east end of Saint Mary-at-Hill, retaining its medieval walls on the other three sides, and the west tower to which he added a lantern.

Wren’s design included a Venetian window at the east end, now blocked up, and a pediment, now broken. His interior displays four free-standing Corinthian columns, supporting barrel vaults in a Greek cross pattern, and a coffered central dome. The church is 96 ft long and 60 ft wide.

Saint Mary-at-Hill was one of the first churches rebuilt after the Fire, and was completed in 1677 at a cost of £3,980. Robert Hooke supervised the rebuilding project while Wren was concentrating on Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

Hooke was responsible for building the internal wall under the tower at the west end. The original north and south walls were rebuilt and the building was extended a little to the east, with an ornate main frontage of exposed stone.

Several accounts recall the Costermongers’ Festival held there every October. It was also known as the ‘Fish Harvest Festival’ or ‘Harvest of the Sea,’ associated with the fish market then at Billingsgate. Another tradition was the Beating the Bounds, where parishioners and children processed around the boundaries of the parish on Ascension Day.

A hoard of coins, now known as the Mary Hill Hoard, was found in a basement near Saint Mary-at-Hill in the 18th century. The hoard included the only known example of a coin from the Horndon mint.

Saint Mary-at-Hill has been much altered since, although some of its mediaeval fabric survives. The Church of Saint Mary-at-Hill has a large double-faced clock extending several feet into the street.

George Gwilt rebuilt the west wall in 1787-1788, and replaced the tower in brick.

James Savage installed round-headed iron-framed windows in the north wall in 1826-1827 and replaced the vaults, ceilings and plasterwork. On the street of Saint Mary-at-Hill, the adjacent Grade II brick and stone rectory was designed by James Savage in 1834, and incorporates a late 17th century vestry.

A skull and crossbones carving in the pediment above the door of the former rectory, designed by James Savage (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Savage added a cupola to the dome in 1848-1849, and cut windows through the chancel vault. The 17th century woodwork was sympathetically augmented in 1849, and adapted by Gibbs Rogers.

The parish was further united with the parish of Saint George Botolph Lane in 1904, and Saint Mary-at-Hill received the sword rests, plate, royal arms, ironwork, organ and organ case from Saint George.

The church survived the Blitz in World War II unscathed, and was designated a Grade I listed building in 1950. In the post-war decades, the poet Sir John Betjeman said of the church: ‘This is the least spoiled and the most gorgeous interior in the City, all the more exciting by being hidden away among cobbled alleys, paved passages, brick walls, overhung by plane trees …’

The church was severely damaged by a fire in 1988, and the roof and ceiling required rebuilding. Much of the woodwork, including box pews, survived the fire, but it has not been reinstated and remains in store.

The organ, built by William Hill of London in 1848, is the largest surviving example of his early work and reputed to be one of the 10 most important organs in the history of British organ building. It was partly restored after the 1988 fire, but its complete restoration did not begin until 2000. The church is a popular venue for regular concerts and recitals.

The Great Churchyard is now a pretty courtyard garden (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

The Great Churchyard is now a pretty courtyard garden, totally enclosed on all sides. It is only accessible either through the church or through the small alley at the far end of the churchyard that leads onto the street of Saint Mary-at-Hill.

A plaque recalls ‘the burial ground of the parish church of St Mary-at-Hill has been closed by order of the respective vestries of the united parishes of St Mary-at-Hill and Saint Andrew Hubbard with the consent of the rector and that no further interments are allowed therein – Dated this 21st day of June 1846.’

When it closed for burials in 1846, the parish then bought burial rights ‘in perpetuity’ at West Norwood Cemetery.

The Church of Saint Mary-at-Hill has a large double-faced clock extending several feet into the street … the building in the background, 20 Fenchurch Street, is known popularly as ‘The Walkie-Talkie’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Canon Wilson Carlile (1847-1942), founder of the Church Army, was the Rector in 1892-1926. Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the priest-in-charge in 2014-2019, was also Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons (2010-2019), and since then is the Bishop of Dover. She is the first black woman to be a bishop in the Church of England.

In my all-too-brief visit to Saint Mary-at-Hill, I missed the approach from Lovat Lane, off Eastcheap and Great Tower Street, which offers a view of the tower and the west door and an impression of what the narrow City lanes once looked like.

The name Lovat Lane is recent. The lane was originally called Love Lane and was changed around 1939 to avoid confusion with the Love Lane further north off Wood Street. Many early references attribute the original name the lane being frequented by prostitutes. The new name Lovat was chosen because of the quantity of salmon delivered to Billingsgate Market from the fisheries of Lord Lovat.

Sir Christopher Wren retained the west tower, adding a lantern (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)