Diocese of Exeter

“ He was presented by the dean and chapter of Exeter to the vicarage of Thorverton, Devonshire, in 1858, was appointed a prebendary of Exeter Cathedral in November 1861, one of the four residentiary canons in 1864, and acted for some time as examining chaplain to the bishop of the diocese. ”

“ She gave my name and address, and sent his letter on to me. I immediately wrote to his lordship, saying that I had not applied for the living, nor did I want it; but, for all that, I received by return post the nomination; and actually, it was to go back to the diocese of Exeter! I did not think the Bishop would institute me, as I had committed a great many irregularities since his lordship had taken off my harness. But he did.
Somehow I was unwilling to go to this living, but was put into it in spite of myself. Here I had a good house, garden, and church, provided for me, with so much a year. ”

“ Exeter continues in my mind to be a mediæval city, its inhabitants a people of the middle ages. To enjoy the height of respectability it was necessary to have a visiting connection with the bishop of the diocese, and this secured the unenviable acquaintance of the dean, the Mr. Dean, the divinest of doctors, and the whole chapter, which, judging from its antecedents, owed its importance to and was in itself a mere Chapter of Accidents. To think how men, ignorant of all things save privilege and dogma, can testimonialize their fellow-citizens by means of a nodding smile! ”

“ In no diocese of England, since Exeter in 1851, has a Diocesan Synod been held; but the idea of the necessity of such institutions is steadily gaining ground, and any irregular gathering of Churchmen is a fresh argument in favour of their orderly revival. Only we trust that the Bishop who convokes the next will have duly weighed the various constitutions that he can give to the body, before endowing it with life. A synod of all the clergy of any diocese would probably be too unwieldy for cool deliberation, and so would sink into a machine for registering the Bishop's determinations. ”

“ The best views of the building are those to be got from a distance. In some ways this is not without compensation; for the cathedral church was, and is, not only splendid as a building, but the centre of the spiritual life of the diocese. It is, therefore, appropriate that it should seem most beautiful to the dwellers in the villages and hamlets beyond the city, giving them, as it were, a kind of property in the building, which they might not have felt had it been less visible. Nearing Exeter by train, from the Plymouth side, the noble roof and towers are seen above the red houses of the city. ”

“ From this time Exeter increased to such importance and wealth that in the reign of Edward the Confessor it was deemed advisable and for better security to make it the head of the Diocese.
For this purpose the Sees of Crediton and St. Germans (Cornwall) were united under one bishop. To uphold worthily the new dignity, the abbey church of St. Peter was erected into a cathedral by the Confessor, who appointed his chaplain Leofric as first bishop of the united see. Leofric had the monks removed to Westminster Abbey, and installed in their stead were twenty-four secular canons. ”

“ As men who had frequently travelled much and studied deeply, they summoned to their aid in the building and beautifying of their churches the most skilled artists end artificers of their time; so, with the story of the lives of the bishops of a diocese, the history of a cathedral's building is inextricably woven. To be elevated to a bishopric generally meant to be put into possession of great wealth—when Veysey became bishop the revenues of the see of Exeter have, by some authors, been computed at £100,000 ”

“ Afterwards this collegiate church, thus founded and endowed, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, received a greater augmentation of wealth, lands, and revenues from John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, 1358, who had persuaded all rich priests of his diocese to make him his heir and executor, in order to build and endow churches with their riches ”

“ A public meeting in the Guildhall at Exeter and the testimonials that emanated from it proved how entirely the bishop had won his way. The clergy of the diocese, who had protested against his election in 1869, almost unanimously signed a memorial of regret at his departure. He was enthroned in St. Paul's in April 1885. He threw himself with his accustomed vigour into the work of the diocese and into all the great social questions of the day. In accordance with his views on self-government he introduced the plan of allowing the clergy to elect their own rural deans. ”

“ Traces of one of these have been found at the end of the third bay of the north choir aisle. Bronscombe and Quivil (see p. 5) began their reconstruction at this end, and by adding the ambulatory and Lady Chapel linked together the sites of the old and new churches.
With the episcopate of Leofric, Exeter first assumes the rank of a cathedral city. The sees of Devon and Cornwall had been held together by Lyfing, the last bishop of Crediton. But Crediton, an unfortified "vill," was an easy prey to the Irish, Danes, and other pirates, who devastated the diocese from time to time. ”

“ In November and December of that year he was at Exeter, arranging the affairs of the diocese, and in January 1553–4 he returned to Sutton Coldfield. He died there, at his house of Moor Hall, on 23 Oct. 1554, aged about eighty-nine—the inscription on his monument says 23 Oct. 1555, in his hundred-and-third year—and was buried in the north aisle of the church. A very handsome monument was erected to his memory. The bishop is represented as a recumbent figure with hands uplifted, and in the pre-Reformation episcopal vestments, with mitre and pastoral crook. ”

“ Therefore he had liberty to retain one of his former dignities, which seems to have been the subdeanery of Exeter, and also to take the rectory of Kingston Seymour, in the diocese of Bath and Wells. On 26 July 1603 he was presented by Lord-keeper Egerton to the rectory of Shere Newton, Monmouthshire. On 14 Oct. 1607 he wrote from Malvern to Sir Thomas Lake begging his interest to procure him the archdeaconry of Gloucester, vacant by the preferment of the Bishop of Gloucester to the see of London. ”

“ There is great reason to doubt the authenticity of this information concerning a Devonshire tutelar saint. Mr. Charles Butler has kindly communicated the researches of a Catholic clergyman, residing at Exeter, who having examined the voluminous registers of the See of Exeter, and numerous MSS. and records of the diocese, cannot trace that any such saint was particularly honoured in the county. It is lamentable that ingenious writers should invent fictions for authorities ”

“ He refused the deanery of Exeter in 1763, but relinquished this promise of the see of Salisbury for the deanery of Windsor, which became vacant first, and to it he was appointed, with the registrarship of the order of the Garter, in 1765, the general comment being that ‘all things are crowded into three or four people's pockets.’ He spent large sums of money in improving the episcopal palace at Exeter and in relieving the needs of the poorer clergy in his diocese. ”

“ The official introduction of the feast of our Lady’s Conception in England only commenced in the thirteenth [252] century, and only spread slowly. The provincial Synod of Oxford in 1222, Canon VIII., refused to recognise it as a feast of obligation, although it established its private observance. The diocesan Synod of Worcester does not mention it in its list of festivals. On the other hand it was celebrated at St Albans in 1228, [538] and the diocesan Synod of Exeter in 1287 formally adopted it by a decree which naturally affected that diocese alone. ”

“ Charles II., August 19.
[468] "It is said, my Lord of London hath sent to those pastors that have quitted their flocks, by reason of these times, that if they return not speedily, others will be put into their places."—Ellis' Letters, vol. iv.
[469] Neal, iv. 403. The returns dated 1665 from Exeter, St. David's, and Bristol, are among the Tenison MSS. (Lambeth) ; also the Bishop of Exeter's (Seth Ward's) certificate of the hospitals, and almshouses, pluralists, lecturers, schoolmasters, physicians, and Nonconformists in his diocese. ”

“ Evan Morice of Carnarvonshire, who was chancellor of Exeter diocese in 1594, and died in 1605. His mother was Mary, daughter of John Castle of Scobchester in Ashbury, Devonshire; she became in 1611 the third wife of Sir Nicholas Prideaux of Solden, Devonshire, and died on 2 Oct. 1647. His younger brother, Laurence, died young, and the whole property came into the possession of the elder boy. William was educated 'in grammar learning' at Exeter, and entered at Exeter College, Oxford, as a fellow-commoner about 1619, when he was placed under the care of the Rev. ”

“ There was no dirt in Exeter Cathedral to dim its complete and finished loveliness, and all its surroundings were in character and keeping with it, "composed" by time and circumstance to make the picture perfect—especially on a golden autumn day. What should be the cast of mind of a bishop privileged to live in such a house and grounds as lie, peaceful and stately and exquisite, under the shadow of the south tower? I like to remember that one bishop of Exeter had a son who was the father of my Eden Phillpotts, whose intellectual inheritance is the love of beauty, uncloistered, unsophisticated ”

“ These included the rectories of Calstock in Cornwall (1724) and Shobrooke in Devonshire (1724) ; the treasurership, with a canonry, of Exeter Cathedral (1724) , and the archdeaconry of Exeter (26 Jan. 1731–2) . He lived mostly at Exeter, rarely coming to the meetings of parliament, and is said to have been too apt to treat his clergy as if they were boys under him at school. ”

“ Moreover, all lovers of the great in art, all who love what is beautiful, as all may with a little trouble, will not be sorry to have even a passing acquaintance with those who have wrought so nobly. And this short notice of the most famous of the bishops of Exeter proves that they were for the most part chosen, not for their lineage, however splendid, nor the favour they had gained as gracious courtiers, but for their excellent lives, their plain living and high thinking, their taste and learning, and for qualities which, if rarer now, were not common even hundreds of years ago. ”

“ Used to the more familiar type of cathedral city, dreamy old places where the atmosphere of the Minster is all-pervading, and where the Bishop, the Dean and Chapter, and their doings hold the foremost rank in men’s minds and talk, we were not prepared to come upon so busy a place as Exeter, where the ecclesiastical element is only one among many and is not pre-eminent. ”

“ The privy council had ruled there was nothing illegal in the figures, and the legislature had granted to the bishops discretionary power to stop proceedings. Accordingly, as bishop of London he refused to allow the case to proceed. His speeches while bishop of Exeter, in the House of Lords on the university tests bill (1870) and the bill for opening churchyards to non-conformists (1880) , showed him true to his liberal principles. While bishop of Exeter he became a member of the governing body of Rugby School, and for the last ten years of his life was its chairman. ”

“ No cathedral, not even Lincoln, boasts a more lovely and appropriate position. "In the minds of all early Christians," says Mr. Ruskin, "the church itself was most frequently symbolized under the image of a ship," There is no country so saturated with traditions of the sea as Cornwall and Devon. "Exe terra"—out of the earth—is sometimes declared to be the derivation of the name Exeter. ”

“ At Bristol the cathedral church, even when restored to its old proportions, will still have at least an equal rival in the stateliest parish church in England. In these cities the bishoprick, its church and its chapter, are institutions of yesterday; the cities themselves were great and famous for ages before they were founded. So at Exeter, though the bishoprick is of far earlier date, yet Exeter was a famous city, which had played its part in history, long before Bishops of Exeter were heard of. ”

“ Do you not observe behind his grace, that little yellowish man with the eye of a caged tiger, constantly moving himself about, now leaning forward, now appearing so impatient, playing and jumping about on his bench: it is the bishop of Exeter, one of the sturdy pillars of the fanatic church militant. This man is the most cunning and dangerous foe to liberty; his evil nature clothes itself with all the seduction of the most amiable manners. ”

“ A convent of Franciscans was founded between 1220 and 1240, and a convent of Dominicans about the same time.
In the early part of the thirteenth century there seems to have been some arrangement of the parochial [Pg 498] organization of the city. For in the reign of King John, we learn from the will of Peter de Paterna and Isabel his wife, who bequeathed 1d. to each of them, that there were twenty-eight chapels in the city of Exeter. In the year 1222 there was a settlement of the parish churches which were fixed at the number of 19. ”

“ Now we have, indeed, swept into a younger day, and society makes lions of men of whom our fathers would have taken no heed. We have become more tolerant—even Exeter Hall has moved with the times. Perhaps one of the boldest things connected with it was the attempt to utilise it for public religious worship on the Sunday. Originally some of the Evangelical clergy had agreed to take part in these services, but the rector of the parish in which Exeter Hall was situated disapproved, and consequently they were unable to appear. ”