Castle Aching

[Nearholmer]

Don

 

The rather tedious exchange of letters, the ones that are polite enough to publish,  continues, even in the current edition of the Gazette.

 

Despite being into the counter-reformationary sort of 0 gauge, I’m not a member of G0G, but I do get to see the magazine.

 

Kevin

[Regularity]

43 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

"Tarmacadamians"

Surely they came to a sticky end one hot summer's day.

Make sure you get the right sect, otherwise you will be tarring them all with the same brush...

 

Is the “Suffragen Sea” anywhere near the “Accountant Sea”?

[Edwardian]

18 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Make sure you get the right sect, otherwise you will be tarring them all with the same brush...

 

Is the “Suffragen Sea” anywhere near the “Accountant Sea”?

 

Ah the wide accountansea, as sailed by ...

 

[Regularity]

Ah, but the difference is, the accountants do it for profit, but the suffragens do it for prophets...

[Edwardian]

I've always been fascinated by suffragan bishops. I am strange that way, but they represent a modern revival of an ancient form to meet a present need. Terribly British. 

 

What did you do if you needed a sort of junior assistant bishop to help a bishop with a diocese, but you don't have a diocese to give him?

 

Well, before the Reformation, you made him a bishop of a diocese he couldn't go to by choosing a diocese that no longer functionally existed (often ones that had been conquered by muslims and were thus in partibus infidelium), i.e. a titular see. 

 

This little dodge was not available after the break with Rome, which is why we had the aforementioned Suffragan Bishops Act in 1534. Interestingly, our local boys, Thomas Manning, Bishop of Ipswich, and John Salisbury, Bishop of Thetford, were the first bishops consecrated under the Act, in 1536.  The last suffragan bishop appointed died in post in 1607/8.

 

The Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century Church often seems to have lacked spirituality and prosletysing zeal; the stereotype is incumbents of rich livings in the gift of the local gentry and a rather comfortable, complacent clergy with a variety of worldly pre-occupations.  We have seen how Bishop Pelham of Norwich was content to preside over a diocese of 900 parishes; he cannot have been very hands on.  In this context, following the lapse of suffragan bishops by the early Seventeenth Century, no more suffragans were appointed for more than 250 years.

 

 

This somewhat complacent state of affairs was challenged by a spiritual revival, in the form of the break-away Methodist congregation that started to gain ground in late Eighteenth Century.  Spiritual revivals also came from within the Church, with the Evangelicals and the Tractarians (Oxford Movement). The church had other challenges. By 1850 50% of the population was found in the towns. How to reach the urban masses became a real problem for the Church. The old parish boundaries, rather like parliamentary boundaries, no longer reflected population distribution and left many without adequate access to the Church. It is in this context that we might view  the consecration of the first suffragan in over 250 years, with Henry Mackenzie as Bishop of Nottingham in 1870.

 

 

The 1534 Act had authorised the creation of suffragans for 26 named towns.  The Victorian revival of suffragans required a broader allocation so the Suffragans Nomination Act 1888 was passed to enable the creation of new suffragan sees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by Edwardian

[Edwardian]

2 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

 

 

Edited May 3, 2019 by Edwardian

[Tom Burnham]

By the way, I'm reminded that in an hour it'll be exactly 50 years since I was on the last train from Hunstanton to KL....  Where does the time go?

[Compound2632]

27 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

I've always been fascinated by suffragan bishops. I am strange that way, but they represent a modern revival of an ancient form to meet a present need. Terribly British. 

 

What did you do if you needed a sort of junior assistant bishop to help a bishop with a diocese, but you don't have a diocese to give him?

 

Well, before the Reformation, you made him a bishop of a diocese he couldn't go to by choosing a diocese that no longer functionally existed (often ones that had been conquered by muslims and were thus in partibus infidelium), i.e. a titular see. 

 

This little dodge was not available after the break with Rome, which is why we had the aforementioned Suffragan Bishops Act in 1534. Interestingly, our local boys, Thomas Manning, Bishop of Ipswich, and John Salisbury, Bishop of Thetford, were the first bishops consecrated under the Act, in 1536.  The last suffragan bishop appointed died in post in 1607/8.

 

 

Just as a point of order, the modern Roman Catholic Church has suffragan bishops, so the term probably dates from before the Reformation, but these are what one would think of as ordinary diocesan bishops; it is simply that they are subordinate to the metropolitan archbishop of their province. Thus Hallam to Liverpool, Portsmouth to Southwark, etc., five provinces in all - think of it like the relationship of, say, 81E to 81A. A Diocesan bishop can have auxiliary bishops, who can be, but don't have to be, titular bishops. Before the establishment of the modern Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 there were four apostolic vicariates, headed up by titular bishops. 

 

The re-establishment of Catholic dioceses created a rather entertaining panic in some quarters - it was seen as "Papal aggression" and resulted in the passing of the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1851 - one of the greatest dead letters in British legislation - which said that only a bishop of the Church of England could adopt a territorial title, "Bishop of X-ville". The RC Church had in fact been scrupulous in not adopting titles already in use, choosing big cities without an Anglican see - Liverpool, Birmingham; or in other cases places where there was a significant patron, notably Shrewsbury (John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury). The Anglicans did not return the compliment, having no hesitation in creating new dioceses of Liverpool, Birmingham, etc. 

 

In Ireland, on the other hand, there have been continuously two parallel episcopates since the Reformation, headed up by two Archbishops of Armagh.

 

Almost as complicated as the overlapping territorial claims of the London & North Western and Midland Railways!

 

BTW I think the most vigorous objection to Sunday trains came from the Nonconformists.

[Regularity]

We also get the odd anomaly, for example the (suffragan) Bishop of Northampton is RC, so when the CofE created a suffragan bishop for Northampton in 1989, they instead chose Brixworth for the episcopal title, to avoid confusion. Northamptonshire was, of course, a hotbed of recusancy during the Elizabethan/Jacobean period, Catesby house being the home of the Gunpowder plot. Which ironically led to a purge in the area, and subsequent support for the Parliamentary cause in the following Carolingian period. 

 

Relevance to CA: from 1850 to 1976, the (RC) suffragan see of Northampton included Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

[Compound2632]

28 minutes ago, Regularity said:

Relevance to CA: from 1850 to 1976, the (RC) suffragan see of Northampton included Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

 

... and still extends as far south as Slough - now in Berkshire but anciently Bucks - whereas the neighbouring southern end of Oxfordshire - including areas also now in Berks - is in the archdiocese of Birmingham. 

[wagonman]

5 hours ago, Donw said:

 

The remarks were not about the quality of the work they  were about the choices of gauge and standards. The coarse scale enthusiast were as likely to mock scale 7 as fussy than the scale 7 enthusiast was to sneer at coarse scale. You of course would not see that in a scale 7 journal. Did you get any mocking other railways?

Don

 

 

No I didn't. It was all very supportive, but insular – we tend not to look over the fence too often! There might be the odd observation that scratch building a loco is easier with the wheels in the right place, unarguable surely. There is talk of how to convert the growing range of RTR models and attempts to persuade manufacturers to bear us in mind when designing kits (Dave Sharpe has been particularly helpful). It all puts me in mind of the tribulations of using a Mac computer in a PC dominated world – something  I have been doing since 1998.

 

I have been a member of the Guild at various times – my uncle was one of the founder members – but I never really felt comfortable there for the reasons you mention.

 

I am putting my last issue to bed this weekend, then...

[Regularity]

Actually, you get the situation where Caversham (and now part of Reading), north of the Thames, is in Northampton, and Reading, south of said river, is in Portsmouth. 

Which means that you can walk from Northampton to Portsmouth in but a single step, somewhere on the Cavendish Bridge.

[Nearholmer]

I'm still confused by church hierarchy, but will try to keep up!

 

Railways could still buck local, religiously-inspired, Sunday observance/restriction until quite recently: North Wales (all of Wales for all I know) used to be 'dry' on Sundays (I don't think it is any more), but railways were partially exempt, and could sell grog on moving trains. When I was a volunteer of the Festiniog in the 1970s, and even into the 1980s, there used to be a fairly late train Up and Down, known naturally as "The Beer Train", which served as a very convivial mobile pub - I think it ran too late to be of any interest to general tourists, but was always packed with mildly boozy railwayacs.

 

EDIT: Just checked, and from 1881 all of Wales was dry on Sundays, then in 1961 things changed so that dryness or otherwise was decided by poll in each local (I think that means county) council area, the last poll having been in 1996, when every single area voted wet, and in 2003 the law was harmonised with the rest of the UK (or is NI different?).

Edited May 3, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Donw]

1 hour ago, Regularity said:

Actually, you get the situation where Caversham (and now part of Reading), north of the Thames, is in Northampton, and Reading, south of said river, is in Portsmouth. 

Which means that you can walk from Northampton to Portsmouth in but a single step, somewhere on the Cavendish Bridge.

 

The town and county boundary in part of Caversham is like a square wave form. It ran diagonally through our house. Indeed my Father slept with his feet in Berkshire and his head in Oxfordshire. The councils pragmatically agreed that the house rates were paid to Reading and the Garage rate was paid to Henly

 

Don

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

Ever since I discovered Trollope and Barsetshire many years ago I have been fascinated by the depictions of the C of E clergy.  Of course we see clergy in other Trollope novels but the Barsetshire Chronicles especially the first two volumes and the last are where they are the star characters. In the last who can forget how Mrs Proudie (no advocate of Sunday trains she) is finally bought undone by Rev. Josiah Crawley one of the truly eccentric clergy in this series. I suspect that given his reluctance to even accept a proffered ride on a farmer's cart due to matters of principle, he also would oppose Sunday trains. 

 

But overall I am surprised at the rather small occurrence of railway references in the works of Trollope and Dickens (Dombey and Son excepted). Although the adventures of the village ladies in Gaskell's Cranford offer a rather delightful description of how they adjust to a derailment. Dickens was a passenger in the Staplehurst crash and Dombey and Son reflects the clear effects this had on Dickens where the railway references are used for dramatic effect, in fact almost melodramatic. Trollope also scatters some through his works -  in The Way we Live Now we see the use of railway mania and pie in the sky rail schemes as a central part of the complex plot but overall the railways are rather mute. 

 

I wonder if this is because like in all literature of the period the mechanics of life are very much secondary to the interaction of the characters, coupled with the authors being at a distance from their means of transport in real life. Trollope was an avid hunter and his descriptions of hunting and riding are quite detailed, and appear in many of his novels, but on the broader scale both he and Dickens would be driven rather than be driving in the modern sense. Plus much of Dickens' work is set just before the great rail expansion which means that the characters are using stage coaches and are passengers. The discomforts are described where the plot requires or for dramatic effect (e.g. the coach accident in Martin Chuzzlewit) but overall apart from Sam Weller's father (The Pickwick Papers)  the role of the coach driver is quite peripheral.

 

My apologies for the aside.  

Edited May 4, 2019 by Malcolm 0-6-0

[Edwardian]

The railways changed everything so completely that their lack of prominence might be a surprise, but, then, the internet did also.  It is as if both went from not there one day to taken for granted the next.

 

See Wilkie Collins's Armadale for knowledge and the clever manipulation of the railways to mislead as to one's travel plans.  I first read this when I was young and (self)l righteous, and felt just indignation against the whiles of Miss Gwilt. Reading it again last year, I found her a much more attractive and sympathetic character. 

 

See The Prime Minister for Trollope putting the railway centre stage, as the location and means of Ferdinand Lopez's suicide at Tenway Junction (Willesden).

 

On the less melodramatic side, see The Wrong Box for a railway crash as a plot device and Three Men in a Boat for the delightful plus ça change scene in which no one (including the driver) at a busy London station knows where the train is supposed to be going (they left Waterloo on the 11.05 for Kingston, which had been the Exeter mail until they slipped the driver half a crown). 

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

1 hour ago, Edwardian said:

The railways changed everything so completely that their lack of prominence might be a surprise, but, then, the internet did also.  It is as if both went from not there one day to taken for granted the next.

 

See Wilkie Collins's Armadale for knowledge and the clever manipulation of the railways to mislead as to one's travel plans.  I first read this when I was young and (self)l righteous, and felt just indignation against the whiles of Miss Gwilt. Reading it again last year, I found her a much more attractive and sympathetic character. 

 

See The Prime Minister for Trollope putting the railway centre stage, as the location and means of Ferdinand Lopez's suicide at Tenway Junction (Willesden).

 

On the less melodramatic side, see The Wrong Box for a railway crash as a plot device and Three Men in a Boat for the delightful plus ça change scene in which no one (including the driver) at a busy London station knows where the train is supposed to be going (they left Waterloo on the 11.05 for Kingston, which had been the Exeter mail until they slipped the driver half a crown). 

 

I had quite forgotten Ferdinand Lopez and his dramatic denouement (The Prime Minister is an interesting novel in its quite candid depiction of the true meaning of the class system), probably because my focus when I read it is on the relationship between Palliser, the reluctant Prime Minister, and his wife rather than the Wharton family.  

 

Yes you are correct in your interpretation of the railways then as being something that acquires a quick familiarity just as the internet has for our times. It becomes part of the accepted background to life. I suppose when matter transference becomes our principal means of transport it also will slide into the background.   

Edited May 4, 2019 by Malcolm 0-6-0

[Nearholmer]

Which all assumes that people went anywhere much, which they largely didn’t.

 

Aside from commuters, and a few fairly well-off people who had regular business ‘in town’ (whichever town), a great many people almost certainly didn’t have many occasions to use the trains. Urban workers and their families might go on an annual outing to the seaside, maybe two outings each year, but I don’t think that the ‘market penetration’ of railways for passenger transport in rural areas was as great as we often assume.

 

The impact was probably more subtle, almost below the level of consciousness, in things like coal not being as expensive as otherwise, and factory made food coming onto the table every now and then, and being able to send rabbits to the London markets.

 

Even quite recently, the 1960s, for a great many people, especially the older ones, a trip outside their home town/village, to the ‘big town’ was a tiny bit special, not a daily or weekly event. When I was a boy, we had no car, used the bus maybe a dozen times each year, and the train (massive, exciting highlight) no more than twice, which wasn’t untypical c1960, but was a decidedly old-school lifestyle by c1975 (i’d Long got fed up with staying at home all the time by then, and was off all over the place by bike, bus and train). My mother still pursues this lifestyle, and it is now nouveau fashionable, because it is very green!

Edited May 4, 2019 by Nearholmer

[Edwardian]

10 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Which all assumes that people went anywhere much, which they largely didn’t.

 

Aside from commuters, and a few fairly well-off people who had regular business ‘in town’ (whichever town), a great many people almost certainly didn’t have many occasions to use the trains. Urban workers and their families might go on an annual outing to the seaside, maybe two outings each year, but I don’t think that the ‘market penetration’ of railways for passenger transport in rural areas was as great as we often assume.

 

The impact was probably more subtle, almost below the level of consciousness, in things like coal not being as expensive as otherwise, and factory made food coming onto the table every now and then, and being able to send rabbits to the London markets.

 

Even quite recently, the 1960s, for a great many people, especially the older ones, a trip outside their home town/village, to the ‘big town’ was a tiny bit special, not a daily or weekly event. When I was a boy, we had no car, used the bus maybe a dozen times each year, and the train (massive, exciting highlight) no more than twice, which wasn’t untypical c1960, but was a decidedly old-school lifestyle by c1975.

 

True, but the Nineteenth Century novel was primarily authored and read by the Middle Classes, who could, and did, use the railway. 

[Nearholmer]

The middle classes always love social climbing and picking other people to pieces over social mores. Could it be that railways weren’t aspirational enough for them, and didn’t serve much social dissection purpose?

[Edwardian]

Much in the way that Young People these days use internet dating to overcome the fact that the only people they otherwise meet are those they share an office with, the ability to meet members of the opposite sex was quite restricted for the Victorian Middle Class youth.

 

I am surprised that the opportunity of chance encounters afforded by railway travel was not more often exploited in the novels of the period. 

 

It was represented in painting at least once .... 

 

 

[Andy Kirkham]

13 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

The RC Church had in fact been scrupulous in not adopting titles already in use, choosing big cities without an Anglican see - Liverpool, Birmingham; or in other cases places where there was a significant patron, notably Shrewsbury (John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury). The Anglicans did not return the compliment, having no hesitation in creating new dioceses of Liverpool, Birmingham, etc. 

 

 

Interesting; so that is why in Bristol the Catholics have Clifton Cathedral http://www.cliftoncathedral.org/

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

49 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Much in the way that Young People these days use internet dating to overcome the fact that the only people they otherwise meet are those they share an office with, the ability to meet members of the opposite sex was quite restricted for the Victorian Middle Class youth.

 

I am surprised that the opportunity of chance encounters afforded by railway travel was not more often exploited in the novels of the period. 

 

It was represented in painting at least once .... 

 

 

 

 

And the young Naval officer has just given his email address to the young lady's father. The father has just consented that the young officer (sterling chap) be her Facebook friend. Aaaah young love in the 19th century, and a first class carriage with free WiFi to boot. Note the well disguised smart phone.

 

But that alternative world aside. I wonder also if authors like Dickens and Trollope lacked the descriptive language to properly convey the power of the railways. Certainly both seem to invoke that power as almost stormy and uncontrollable (the famous Punch? cartoon of the railway monster devouring the suburbs) but their language is rooted in the formative world of their youth when coaches and sail driven boats represented speedy transport. Our descriptive powers are coloured by our general exposure to cars, aircraft and other fast comfortable means of travel and so much of what we receive from the literature of our times is already subliminally imposed by our experience. The father of Biler in Dombey and Son is presented as a soot stained coach driver not as an engine driver for an example of the power of subliminal language. Dickens' contemporaries would recognise him but we (or perhaps only I) look for more in the description.

 

It is presumptive I think to write this off to a divide between intellectuals and artisans and their class differences. By the 1850s the growth of wealth from artisan based activities like the railways had long produced a new class of wealthy and politically powerful people who had moved into the ruling classes. And concomitantly it had raised those below them in the working force to the higher levels of respectable trades people. It just seems to me that the descriptive language of the chroniclers of this transformation had lagged. In this case the artists were being led by the artisans.    

[Edwardian]

The Victorian novel is full of examples of those whose status had risen, or who felt that it should be recognised as such.  You will find this in the case of professions, arts and sciences; doctors, other men of science, respectable family solicitors, artists and literary types.  Men (invariably) in other words, of the same social class as the novelist.   

 

The equally important shift you describe, whereby the railways helped create working class aristocracies or lower middle class respectability, like the status of an engine driver or the pillar of community that was the station master, is, perhaps, less often or obviously observed in the Victorian novel.  Again, I suggest this is because the Victorian novel was a characteristically middle class phenomenon.

[webbcompound]

I should think the age of the writer is also an issue. Very few older authors today understand how the internet and enabled devices impacts on the younger segment of the population. Consequently anything they write will look strange to readers in a generation's time (in whatever form they exist). They know it exists, they may even use bits of it, but they have no conception of its true impact and penetration. The same probably goes for railways initially. Few people will have really grasped the impact on the society and economy that railways were going to have before the latter half of the 19th century. Equally those who did often included those who could immediately see them as a way of making money from criminal endeavour. This indicates the similarity between the role of the railways then, and the internet now.  Though unpalatable it seems to me that Castle Aching would be the ideal base for a baby farmer, with its rail connections to the centers of population where "adoption services" could be advertised in the daily press.

 

Edited May 4, 2019 by webbcompound