ANY BOOK that contains the glorious note to an illustration “shingled spire, Piddinghoe, topped by a salmon” was always bound to be a hit, in my view. This nestles alongside hundreds of other such gems in Justin Lovill’s masterly Old Parish Life, in which we are taken through every possible aspect of the past lives of the various churches that many of us think we know so well.
It has chapters on parish registers, on pulpits, and on the people who used them. Perhaps the most engrossing book I have read, it brims with details of church life through the centuries: how it changed, what it required, and, bubbling up throughout, the people whose lives were lived in the context of it.
We learn of parishioners in Kent with “a great longing for eels”, records of purchases for all sorts of things, from bread to clothing to labour in the churchyard. Alongside Piddinghoe’s salmon weather vane, there are all sorts of little quirks of architecture or interior or record. There is inspired bitchiness in the margins of registers and accounts, and there are little tales of personal tragedy told by receipts or gravestones. It made me want to traverse the country, as Lovill clearly has, and view all these marvellous everyday treasures: all ordinary, but, to paraphrase George Herbert, heavenly so.
This particular dynamic is why Old Parish Life is a masterpiece: because it is an innately theological book. It almost goes without saying that its collection of stories of objects, cleverly told, is worth having for any historian or curio addict; but there is a deeper truth that it manages to convey.
It positively drips with the beautiful truth of the incarnation. It makes parish chests seem to be repositories of heaven, and churchwarden’s accounts addenda to the Book of Life, such is the vim and life that Lovill manages to evoke from his material. There is a tangible sense of the purpose of worship powering through the book. By drawing attention to the smaller things, the oft overlooked and forgotten, it somehow magnifies the beauty of the greater whole. It is no mean feat for a collection of bell ropes and weathervanes.
Bell-ringers, in an image based on an 18th-century woodcut, in Old Parish Life
More than that, by bringing to light their ordinary doings, it makes more human those whose prayers made our churches valid. It puts flesh on the skeletons that lie in our crypts and gives faces and personalities to those whose names are etched in marble or wood on our church walls and floors. It serves as an all-too-important reminder that churches are places of communion between us, those whom we love and see no longer, and those whose being we cannot yet even begin to conceive, all bound together in the eternity of God.
In the context of our current situation — less “old parish life” and more “new multi-church deanery strategy” — there is a quiet sadness to reading the book. It certainly evoked a wistfulness for a lost world in me. But perhaps I am being short-sighted: it is possible that future generations will look upon digitised invoices for PowerPoint screens and beanbags with just as much heartful affection as we look upon scraps of accounts for wine at Easter or flowers at Whitsun.
Whatever the future holds for our churches, this book reminded me most saliently about the many things that I love about what churches are, and taught me innumerable things about what they were; it would also be a good book to reflect on for those seeking to work out what it is that they might, in future, be.
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie is a priest and a writer.
Old Parish Life: A guide for the curious
J. Lovill
The Bunbury Press £20
(978-0-9562046-2-2)
Church Times Bookshop £18