John Mason Neale
Born: 1818, London, England
Died: 821, Angiers, France.
We know John Mason Neale (1818-1866) today as
a hymnographer, the translator or adapter of ancient and medieval hymns.
Neale was born in London, England, the son of a clergyman,
his father dying when he was five years old. At Cambridge (1836-1840), Neale
became a High Churchman, and developed a fascination with church architecture.
Even at this youthful age, Neale participated in the catholic revival of the
Established Church, as he and some friends founded the Cambridge Camden Society
of antiquarians. Their periodical promptly addressed itself to the dilapidated
condition of many English church buildings; their recommendations were very
influential in the Victorian campaign of church construction, and they came to
have many supporters in Church ranks.
Americans apt to think affectionately of the tastefulness and
charm of English churches will be impressed by the descriptions of ruinous
buildings encountered by Neale and his contemporaries. Neale also crusaded
against the ugly stoves that were placed in some churches to heat them. One
issue of The Ecclesiologist, for example, recorded “a large Arnott
stove” in the middle of the chancel, whose flue rose to the height of the
priest and crossed his face before exiting the building via a hole in the glass
of the north window. Neale especially raged against the high walled box pews —
“pues” or “pens,” the Society called them — where wealthy families
sequestered themselves in the midst of the common people. In their pews, they
might recline at their ease upon sofas, and one local aristocrat even ate lunch
during the service.
The Cambridge Society championed the cause of “Victorian
Gothic.” The edition of a medieval text on ecclesiastical symbolism that Neale
and a friend prepared set forth their convictions about architectural details.
Neale’s health prevented his remaining a parish priest (he
was ordained in May 1842), but, in his semiinvalidism, he had much time for
antiquarian and scholarly endeavor. From May 1846 on, he was Warden of Sackville
College, an institution resembling that of a fictional Victorian clergyman,
Anthony Trollope’s “Warden,” Septimus Harding. Like Harding, Neale
gave much thought to church music.
Neale held that the hymns of Isaac Watts and other popular
composers imparted erroneous doctrine, as well as offending against taste. So in
1842, for example, Neale produced Hymns for Children. However, aside
from his carol, Good King Wenceslas, it is not Neale’s original
compositions that are most widely recognized, but his translations and
adaptations of ancient and medieval works, which he worked on throughout his
life. The various editions of the annotated hymnal he and his associates
prepared—the Hymnal Noted—and his hymns of the Orthodox churches
have contributed hymns such as those listed below. It is estimated Neale and his
collaborators produced over 400 hymns, sequences and carols.
Another object of Neale’s interest was the history of the
Eastern Churches. In 1847, Neale’s book on the Patriarchate of Alexandria
appeared. In 1850, it was followed by a General Introduction to the Orthodox
church of the East. A third volume, edited by George Williams, appeared in 1873.
One aspect of Neale’s outlook not dwelt upon much by his
biographers is his conviction that divine judgment was the lot of those who
appropriated property that had been consecrated. With an associate, in 1846 he
published, anonymously, an updated edition of Sir Henry Spelman’s History
of Sacrilege. The book shows how disasters, the failure of the male line,
and/or great excesses of moral depravity came upon persons who took land that
had been given to the Church, or their successors. When such lands had belonged
to the Church, revenues from these lands had been employed to feed the hungry as
well as to support the sometimes luxurious way of life of certain clergymen.
Here we see the antiquarian and the man of Christian compassion united.
Such a union is very evident in Neale’s foundation of the
Society of St. Margaret, one of the first Anglican conventual sisterhoods
(1855). As Warden of Sackville College at East Grinstead, Neale came to know the
poverty of some of the nearby villagers. Fever victims might die unattended. So
his sisters of charity began their work, with Neale as their
pastor-confessor-administrator. However, the sisterhood was verbally and even
physically attacked as a wedge of “Romanism” in the English Church. In 1857,
the “Lewes Riot” occurred, instigated by an Evangelical clergyman whose
daughter had been one of the Sisters, and who had died of scarlet fever,
bequeathing 400 pounds to the Society. Neale was used to opposition by then.
Years before the Society’s foundation, Neale had been inhibited by the Bishop
of Chichester from exercising his priestly duties in the village, evidently on
account of the bishop’s resentment of Neale’s church furnishings, etc., at
Sackville College.
John Mason Neale had his lighter side, too, as evienced by
a joke he once played on John Keble. As related by Neale’s associate G.
Moultrie and quoted in A. G. Lough, The Influence of John Mason Neale
(London, SPCK 1962, p. 95):
[Neale] was invited by Mr. Keble and the Bishop of Salisbury to assist them with their new Hymnal, and for this reason he paid a visit to Hursley Parsonage [Keble’s residence]…[Keble] related that having to go to another room to find some papers he was detained a short time. On his return, Dr. Neale said, “Why Keble! I thought you told me that the Christian Year was entirely original!” “Yes,” he answered, “it certainly is.” “Then how comes this” And Dr. Neale placed before him the Latin of one of Keble’s hymns for a Saint’s day — I think it was for St. Luke’s. Keble professed himself utterly confounded. There was the English, which he knew that he had made, and there too no less certainly was the Latin, with far too unpleasant a resemblance to his own to be fortuitous. He protested that he had never seen this “original,” no, not in all his life! etc. etc. After a few minutes, Neale relieved him by owning that he had just turned it into Latin in his absence.
Never in his lifetime was Neale adequately appreciated in his own church. Neale’s Doctor of Divinity degree was conferred by Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, in 1860. At Neale’s funeral the highest ranking clergymen were Orthodox. Neale could never have guessed how much he accomplished for the church and for generations of Christians who would sing the hymns he gave them.
His works include: