And Did those Feet: The Story and Character of the English Church AD 200–2020 by Patrick Whitworth. Sacristy Press, Durham 2019. Hbk. 662 pages. £40.
You can’t tell a book by its cover or so they say. This book has a splendid dust jacket by Kevin Sheehan in the style of Harry Riley’s British Railway Travel posters of the 1940s and 1950s. Apart from a couple of maps of Medieval Britain and Anglo-Saxon Britain by the same artist, there are no other illustrations.
Oh come on, I hear you say, this isn’t a children’s book. What’s wrong with that? Yes, but And Did those Feet does seek to cover the whole history of Christianity in Britain from 200 AD to the present day in only 500 pages. Furthermore, in writing this comprehensive history, it has, as the author admits, been necessary to cover also the whole social, political and cultural context of the past eighteen centuries. Richard Chartres claims on the cover that it offers a useful primer both for students and the merely curious.
A book covering such a vast topic can only be seen as an introduction. It’s not likely to be a book people will read from cover to cover. It’s something they will dip into to discover the outline of a period, the key characters, the main movements. Some will remember from their student days those beautifully illustrated Lion Handbooks – A Lion Handbook of Christianity / to the Bible / of World Faiths – with highlighted sections on central characters and colourful timelines.
Oh here we go, harking back to the good old days. The book business has changed. Sacristy Press is a small publishing house in Durham, publishing history, theology and historical fiction. It works cooperatively with its authors who will usually jointly support the initial production. The paper version of its books are printed via Print on Demand. This one costs around forty pounds while its e-book counterpart costs around ten. Clearly the scope for lavish illustrations and layout is severely limited.
That said, Patrick Whitworth’s text is clear and concise, factual and free from opinionated writing. But when we read history, don’t we want more than dry facts? We want to dip into fascinating detail, we want argument, we want to know how the churches we attend today relate to the church of 1000 years ago, we want something to arouse our curiosity and inspire us to read more. Here it seems are missed opportunities.
For example, we read ‘Becket was by now Archbishop of Canterbury, Dean of Hastings and Provost of Beverley, all rich livings. He was still a deacon, not yet a priest…’ That Thomas Becket should excel in style, glamour and realpolitik may not shock so much as the fact that the head of the church in England has not been ordained a priest. How was this possible? Clearly the church was a very different animal in those days but nonetheless didn’t it purport to follow the same Christian teachings? I’m not sure today’s reader will have his curiosity satisfied.
Harry Mount, writing in the Catholic Herald suggested that this book be given to every schoolchild, because to understand the history of this nation we do need to know how its life has been influenced by the Christian church. Students today, however, looking for introductions to a subject turn to Google, and the Wikipedia entry ‘History of Christianity in Britain’ wouldn’t be a bad starting point.
I admire the writer’s breadth of historical knowledge but I can’t help feeling that this book text would be better as the basis of a lavish website on the history of the Church in England, with illustrations and hyperlinks to characters and movements.
Ah, and what of Sea of Faith and Don Cupitt? Do they get a mention? We read that after the fire at York Minster in 1984, two days after David Jenkins’ consecration as Bishop of Durham, ‘the tide was turning against the more liberal position of the Sea of Faith movement’ without any explanation of what this movement was. Don Cupitt is omitted from the index but does appear as ‘one of the more forceful contributors’ to the Myth of God Incarnate who ‘published Taking Leave of God two years later’.
Stephen Mitchell is a retired priest and former chair of the SOF Steering Committee. His book God in the Bath was published by O Books (Winchester, 2006) and his Past Perfect by Christian Alternative (Winchester, 2018).