Dean of St Paul's Cathedral

“ The clergy of St. Paul's then were seculars. There were thirty of them, called Canons, as being entered on the list (κανών) of ecclesiastics serving the church. Each man was entitled to a portion of the income of the cathedral, and therefore was a "Prebendary," the name being derived from the daily rations (præbenda) served out to soldiers. There were thirty Canons or Prebendaries attached to St. Paul's, and these with the Bishop and Dean formed the Great Chapter. To them in theory belonged the right of electing the Bishop ”

“ Paul’s. In the middle of the fifteenth century the cathedral body consisted of the following officials: The Bishop, the Dean, four Archdeacons, a Treasurer, Precentor, and Chancellor. To these must be added a body of thirty greater canons, twelve lesser canons, a considerable number of chaplains, and thirty vicars.
St. Paul’s is one of the nine cathedrals of the old foundation; eight belong to the new foundation, five were founded by Henry VIII., and the remaining Sees in modern times. The churches of the old foundation were churches of secular canons ”

“ Paul's the civic representatives attended in full state, and Bishop Compton, Dean Sherlock, and the cathedral staff, occupied the new stalls of Grinling Gibbons. The temporary organ accompanied the chanting, and a special prayer incorporated into the Communion office ran: "We offer our devout praises and thanksgivings to Thee for this Thy mercy, humbly beseeching Thee to perfect and establish Thy good work. [71] Thou, O Lord, dwellest not in houses made with hands; heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; but though Thy throne is in heaven, earth is Thy footstool ”

“ These houses became very unpopular, as being colonies of foreigners whose interests were not those of England, and they were abolished in the reign of Henry V. When Henry VIII. went further and dissolved the monasteries altogether, it became needful to reconstitute those cathedrals which were administered by monks. St. Paul's not being such, remained on the old foundation; Winchester, of which the Bishop was Abbot of the Monastery of St. Swithun, was placed under a Dean and Canons, as was the great Monastery of Christchurch, Canterbury. The last Prior of Winchester became the first Dean. ”

“ Paul's, by Sir William Dugdale (Ellis' edition, 1818) .
Repertorium, by Richard Newcourt (London, 1708) .
Radulfi de Diceto, Decani, Lundoniensis Opera Historica (vols. i. and ii., edited for the Master of the Rolls by the Bishop of Oxford) .
[viii] I have to thank the Dean for permission to consult the Chapter copy of the Registrum Statutorum, edited for private circulation (1873) by that enthusiastic and accurate St. Paul's scholar, the late Dr. Sparrow-Simpson, one of the last of the Minor Canons on the old foundation, Librarian and Sub-dean. There is a supplement (1897) . ”

“ A certain amount of yearly residence is enjoined; and it is expected, of course, that a dean should show himself in his own cathedral. Let him reside and show himself, and the city which he graces by his presence will hardly demand from him other services.{34}
In truth, the lines of deans have fallen in pleasant places. Man, being by nature restless and ambitious, desires to rise; and the dean will desire to become a bishop, though he would lose by the change his easy comfort, his sufficient modest home, and the grace of his close in which no one overtops him. ”

“ A man of ability and zeal, to whom the cathedral and everything about it supplies some labour of love at every step, who knows and loves every stone of the fabric, whose heart answers to every note of its services, to whom [Pg 56] every tittle of its history is a living thing, will not find the office of a Dean an idle or an irksome one. Unencumbered by any parochial charge, he will influence men's minds as the chief preacher of the cathedral church, and as continuing the old missionary functions of capitular bodies by preaching on fitting occasions in other parts of the diocese. ”

“ It was at one time held that a layman might be dean; but since 1662 priest’s orders are a necessary qualification. Deaneries are sinecures in the old sense, i.e. they are without cure of souls. The chapter formerly consisted of canons and prebendaries, the dean being the head and an integral part of the corporation. By the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act 1841, it is enacted that “all the members of the chapter except the dean, in every collegiate and cathedral church in England, and in the cathedral churches of St David and Llandaff, shall be styled canons.” ”

“ In consequence of the elevation of Tillotson to the See of Canterbury, the Deanery of Saint Paul's became vacant. As soon as the name of the new Dean was known, a clamour broke forth such as perhaps no ecclesiastical appointment has ever produced, a clamour made up of yells of hatred, of hisses of contempt, and of shouts of triumphant and half insulting welcome; for the new Dean was William Sherlock. ”

“ Their salary is very trifling, supposed only to cover the cost of their journeys. A prebendary has a right to a stall in the choir of a cathedral church and vote in the chapter, and to the receipt of certain revenues for the performance of certain duties in that or a collegiate church. The office was instituted in the eleventh century, and may be held by a layman, although such cases are rare, if actually existing. A rural dean is a beneficed clergyman charged with the inspection of a deanery, or sub-division of an archdeaconry, under the supervision of his bishop. ”

“ Our Dean—he is also rector of our parish—is a man of a wholly different kind. He is, for one thing, wholly unconnected with any cathedral and has probably never paced a lawn beneath the shadow of historic towers in all his life. This kind of detached, independent dean is not found, I believe, anywhere except in Ireland. He is tall, cadaverous, rugged, and he can open his eyes so wide that the whites of them show all round the irises. Besides being a dean and the rector of our parish, he is honorary Grand Chaplain to the Black Preceptory of the Orange Order. ”

“ It is always the dead who breed. Crush the ripe fruit, and cast it aside, Yet its seeds shall fructify, And trees rise where your huts were standing. But the little people are ignorant, They chaffer, and swarm. They gnaw like rats, And the foundations of the Cathedral are honeycombed. The Dean is in the Chapter House; He is reading the architect's bill For the completed restoration of the Cathedral. He will have ripe gooseberries for supper, And then he will walk up and down the path By the wall, And admire the snapdragons and dahlias, Thinking how quiet and peaceful The garden is. ”

“ Say not in death—A good Man never dies.
On the tablet to Bishop Cumberland, 1718, are four Latin lines from Dean Duport's epigram upon the Bishop's confutation of Hobbes. In the south choir aisle, on the tablet to Dean Lockier, 1740, is the only instance of the arms of the Deanery impaling another shield, on a monument. Near this is a wooden tablet executed in good taste, recording the fact that the iron screens are a memorial to Dean Argles, whose munificent gifts to the cathedral are well known. ”

“ The short wings of the reredos have panels and traceried openings, and, on the south, a piscina 100which looks almost too tiny to be real. The top has a toy-like vault of fan-tracery with little pendants.
On the south side of St. Calixtus' chapel is Dean Husse's alabaster tomb (ob. 1305) , which bears some of the best carved work in the cathedral. The effigy itself is good: it represents the Dean clad in the same choir vestments as the figures on the panels below. These panels should on no account be missed. ”

“ No Dean or Canon Residentiary ought to have any other benefice, or any cure of souls, except such as may be attached to the cathedral itself. And if the right kind of men—men very far from scarce in the Church—were always made Deans and Canons Residentiary, they would find their cathedral offices enough for them, and would not go hungering after other functions which are incompatible with their proper discharge. ”

“ Bishop had always considered himself to be the Ordinary of England and Scotland, and knowing that an Ordinary was usually aided by the advice of his Canons, he had appointed a few months before his death, December 10, 1624, a Cathedral Dean and Chapter, the latter consisting of nineteen Canons, the Dean being John Culleton, who without the name had for some time exercised the authority of Arch-priest. ”

“ Deans, I regret to say, are seldom vigorously enterprising. Archdeacons, too, have a tendency to take things easily, too easily."
"What do you think of the Higher Criticism?" asked Bradstock.
"Ha!" said the bishop, "ha! I think—oh, I think a great deal of it. That is, I think of it a great deal. I do not think all enterprise is praiseworthy. Would you like to know the dean?"
They spent the afternoon in the dean's cathedral, and walked on the dean's grass, and about six o'clock Bob rolled into the cathedral close in a fifteen-horse-power Daimler, and drew up in front of the bishop's palace. ”

“ He wished he had not been saddled with Whippham's rather futile son as his chaplain. He wished he had a dean instead of being his own dean. With an unsympathetic rector. He wished he had it in him to make some resounding appeal. He might of course preach a series of thumping addresses and sermons, rather on the lines of “Fors Clavigera,” to masters and men, in the Cathedral. Only it was so difficult to get either masters or men into the Cathedral.
Well, if the people will not come to the bishop the bishop must go out to the people. ”

“ Dean Monk (1822-1830) did much for the Cathedral, though little of his work remains. Since then the tower has been rebuilt (finished in 1886) , much internal decoration added, and the west front rendered secure. Much controversy has raged about the restoration of this west front. Experts on both sides have expressed divers opinions, the relative merits of which it is difficult to decide. Certainly to take down a building stone by stone and rebuild it again is not legitimate restoration. ”

“ In the State Paper Office there is a document by Montague, Bishop of Chichester, containing an exhortation to the clergy of his diocese, giving thirteen reasons for their contributing to the fund for repairing the Cathedral of St. Paul. He dwells upon the dignity of St. Paul's as, in a sort, the mother church of the kingdom, and stimulates the persons addressed to liberality by a consideration of what was done by their predecessors.—Calendar, 1633-4, 384. ”

“ Paul's the Dean proved himself a great preacher, exercising also in private life a powerful influence on all who came in contact with him, alike from the splendour of his intellect and the large-hearted purity of his character. ”

“ The first stone of the present edifice was laid June 21, 1675; the choir was opened for divine service in December, 1697; and the whole was completed in thirty-five years, the last stone on the summit of the lantern being laid by the architect’s son Christopher, in 1710. Taken altogether, St. Paul’s Cathedral is a truly glorious work, and its cupola is matchless in beauty. ”

“ There may be some matters connected with the ordering of the internal arrangements of our cathedral churches, respecting which it may be considered a doubtful point whether the authority of the bishop or that of the dean is supreme. But the consideration of any such question leads at once to the due theoretical distinction between the two. With regard to matters spiritual, properly and strictly so called, the bishop is supreme in the cathedral as far as and no farther than he is supreme in his diocese generally. ”

“ Of course, in so small a body, each Canon has a good deal of personal influence and has his own idiosyncrasies. My principal object has been two-fold: to preach the Gospel of Christ as applied to human life very directly and simply in the afternoon, and to work steadily for the national character of the Cathedral. Whenever any great man in Church or State has died, I have always had a special paragraph in my afternoon sermon. My desire has been that St Paul's should be known to sympathise with the joys and sorrows of the nation ”

“ A bishop of Llandaff is also said to have died a martyr in the Diocletian persecution. And yet, with such high associations, forty years ago this cathedral was the most desolate and neglected in the land. As it stands, it is eloquent of the whole-hearted labours of two men, chiefly: Dean Conybeare and Dean Williams. Previous to 1857, the cathedral was a picturesque ivied ruin of Perpendicular tower and Early-English roofless walls, with a ghastly eighteenth-century conventicle absorbing what is now half the nave and the east end of the building. ”

“ Few men who won distinction in civil life are entombed in St, Paul's, but among them is the gifted architect, Sir Christopher Wren, in whose brain the concept of St. Paul's Cathedral had a mental existence before it materialized in massive marble. His epitaph is plain, brief, truthful, impressive; it is one which each honorable man in all the world may humbly strive for and become the better for the striving ”

“ He must have been in great favour with the higher powers, for, with liberty to retain at least two of his preferments, he was made dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, in 1565, and likewise a member of the Irish privy council. ”