Sacred mysteries

By Christopher Howse

The father of Alice Liddell, the model for Alice in Wonderland, was Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1862, three years before that book was published, Dean Liddell presided over an historic event: the last regular service in Oxford Cathedral (which is also the chapel of Christ Church) to be held in Latin.

This is a bywater of history with which I have only just caught up. After all, the Church of England is known for services in English; indeed one of the Thirty-Nine Features insists that there should not be public prayer "in a tongue not understanded of the people". I had heard that learned societies such as Oxford colleges had been deemed by the reformers to understand Latin, but I had never seen the strange entity of a Book of Common Prayer in Latin until this year. Now I have seen two. The puzzle was that they are slightly different in their wording.

This week by mere good fortune - spotting a pamphlet on a shelf in the London Library when I was looking for something else - I have found the answer to my puzzlement. The pamphlet, Latin Versions of the Book of Common Prayer by Frank Streatfeild, was published in 1964. It explains that Elizabeth I sanctioned a Latin service book in 1560, and that this was revised in 1670, eight years after the familiar 1662 Prayer Book in English, still used today.

The Latin edition of the Book of Common Prayer that I had picked up in a secondhand shop was printed in 1823 by the popular Bible publishers Samuel Bagster. The title-page proclaims it to be Liturgia Britannica and, after the Preface and Morning Prayer and Communion and Collects and so on, all in Latin, are the Thirty-Nine Features, number XXIV being against "lingua populo non intellecta".

What I couldn't make out was whether this version was authorised by Parliament, or Convocation, or was a personal initiative of Samuel Bagster. A complication was the other version I had found, published in 1713 and called Liturgia seu Liber Precum Communium. The version of the psalms appended to it differs from that in Bagster's edition, being attributed to Sebastianus Castellio.

Streatfeild's pamphlet tells me that the 1713 version was just a revision of the one from 1670, and that the psalms in Latin are the work of a 16th-century French Protestant called (in the vernacular) Sebastian Chatillon, whose brother, curiously enough, was a cardinal and is buried in Canterbury Cathedral. Bagster took the psalms of the Latin Vulgate version, as used by Roman Catholics around the world.

So a Prayer Book in Latin was authorised by Charles II in 1670, and both versions that I had seen were regarded as valid for use, at least at Oxford, Cambridge, Winchester and Eton, as specified by Elizabeth I in 1560. Why Dean Liddell (a classicist, and co-author of the celebrated Greek lexicon) did away with its use in 1862 I do not know. I would be interested to hear of any present-day use of Prayer Book services in Latin.

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