And Once Again the Truth is Found (Part 1)

On ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ by M.R. James and its BBC television adaptation by Lawrence Gordon Clark

1. Introduction

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was one of the stories that M.R. James wrote in order to perform for his friends and guests at the famous Christmas meetings of the Chit-Chat Club.  It was subsequently published in Contemporary Review in 1910, and then republished in a book entitled More Ghost Stories (a sequel to his first published volume of stories Ghost Stories of an Antiquary) in 1911.  In an introduction, James describes the fictional Barchester Cathedral as “a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford”, and is clearly also riffing on the Barchester of Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels.  James was a reader of contemporary fiction.

‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was adapted for television by the BBC in 1971.  Under the slightly truncated title ‘The Stalls of Barchester’, this adaptation inaugurated the famous strand of TV films known as the A Ghost Story for Christmas series.

The story was also adapted for television in 2000 by BBC Scotland as one episode of the four part series Ghost Stories for Christmas with Christopher Lee.

2. The Story (including total spoileration)

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ is a murder mystery without a mystery and a ghost story without a ghost.

There follows a necessary recitation of the plot.  I strongly urge the reader to experience the story for themselves first.

In the early 19^th century, Dr John Benwell Haynes, the unmarried and widely admired precentor of Barchester Cathedral, succeeds to the post of archdeacon after the death of the extremely elderly archdeacon Pulteney.  Pulteney has died in a fall down the stairs, reportedly as a result of a stair rod being left under the carpet by an inefficient maid servant, Jane Lee.  Lee, we hear, has been dismissed.  In contrast to the deaf and senile Pulteney, Haynes is a zealous and efficient administrator.  A big part of his job seems to be to get the tenants on diocese-owned land to start paying their rents again, something the late archdeacon Pulteney permitted to lapse for years (may the angels guard his grave).  It takes Haynes three years to put the affairs of the cathedral and diocese to rights again.  Once this is achieved, things start to go badly for him.

One evening, during prayers in the cathedral, Haynes is touching “an exquisitely modelled figure of a cat” on his choir stall and, instead of wood, feels fur and a living body under his fingers.  On another occasion, he is touching another carved figure – an ambiguous character with a mutilated face and a noose around its neck, cowled like “a monk, or ‘friar of orders grey’”, who seems to represent Death himself – and feels the dank fabric of its robes.

These quotations come from Haynes himself.  James gives us sections from a letter Haynes drafts (but apparently never sends) to Sylvanus Urban, some time before his supernatural experiences begin.  Sylvanus Urban was the pen name of Edward Cave (1691-1754), the founder, editor, and publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (he thus coined the term ‘magazine’ to refer to a printed periodical).  Clearly, like M.R. James himself, Haynes has (hesitant) ambitions to become a popular printed author aside from his main cloistered career.

Now living in the house where Pulteney died, Haynes is troubled by disembodied ironical whispers, by suggestions of activity in passageways which should be empty, by knockings on his bedroom door, by “wet lips” hissing indistinct words into his ears, and  – seemingly – by the figures from the choir stalls.  He sleepwalks, finds himself on the stairs where Pulteney died, and a large cat, which he mostly just feels and only barely glimpses in the gloom, seems to squirm between his feet, almost tripping him up.  Grey or white robes – presumably those of the carved monk character – are glimpsed receding into the darkness of a corridor by a guest.  The guest takes the grey or white clothing for the uniform of a maid.  Haynes thinks he knows better.

Haynes has already researched the choir stalls owing to the unusual and extremely fine workmanship of the carvings.  “Evidently,” writes Haynes, in his overwrought and pompous style, “the product of no unskilled chisel.”  More than a hundred years old, the carvings are the work of a local artisan by the name of John Austin, and were carved from trees in a local oak copse called Holywood “property of the dean and chapter”, including a now-vanished titan known as the Hanging Oak.  Here, I can do no better than quote Haynes’ own fussy words:

The propriety of that title is confirmed by the fact that a quantity of human bones was found in the soil about its roots, and that at certain times of the year it was the custom for those who wished to secure a successful issue to their affairs, whether of love or the ordinary business of life, to suspend from its boughs small images or puppets rudely fashioned of straw, twigs, or the like rustic materials.

It is not clear whether Haynes connects the origins of the choir stalls to his own situation.  In any case, a campaign of spectral vengeance is being waged against him.  But vengeance for what?  A note from the dismissed maid Jane Lee seems to tell us.

Again, in order to make clear everything that needs to be made clear, I must quote directly from the text.  Here is M.R. James’ attempt to formulate something that might plausibly have been written a member of the working class:

Dr Sr.

I have bin expctin to her off you theis last wicks, and not Haveing done so must supose you have not got mine witch was saying how me and my man had met in with bad times this season all seems to go cross with us on the farm and which way to look for the rent we have no knowledge of it this been the sad case with us if you would have the great [liberality probably, but the exact spelling defies reproduction] to send fourty pounds otherwise steps will have to be took which I should not wish. Has you was the Means of me losing my place with Dr Pulteney I think it is only just what I am asking and you know best what I could say if I was Put to it but I do not wish anything of that unpleasant Nature being one that always wish to have everything Pleasant about me.

Your obedt Servt,

Jane Lee.

(The square brackets and interpolation above are James’, not mine.)

Haynes pays Jane the money she asks for, dutifully putting the regular blackmail payments in his household accounts book like the rectitudinous pedant he is.  The implication is… well, this is a point to which we shall be returning, because the implication is not actually as clear as many seem to assume.  But, in the vaguest terms, it is clear that Haynes murdered Pulteney.  Indeed, this has been clear throughout the story.

Another year goes by.  In the summer months, or when his unmarried sister is living with him, things are not so bad for our bloody archdeacon.  In “the dark season”, and when he is alone, he begins to come apart at the seams, as can be seen in the sections of his journal where he scrawls the words “I must be firm!” over and over again, sometimes with such force that he breaks both page and pencil.  In extremis, he also seems to have written a private confession and then scratched it out, leaving legible only the fragment: “…acted for the best.”  He tries to write his magnum opus, a “defence of episcopacy”, but finds that it does not distract him from his supernatural persecution.

Eventually, one blustery February night, Haynes’ final reckoning comes.  He is discovered dead at the foot of the stairs, in the same spot as Pulteney before him, the stair carpet once again loose.  This time, however, the corpse is not just broken-necked but also horribly mutilated in the face, to the point of being unrecognisable, as if by the razor sharp claws of a savage beast.

I have, so far, left out a crucial aspect of the story.  We are hearing it relayed to us as a fragmentary and speculative reconstruction of events, by a narrator – presumably M.R. James himself, or some version of M.R. James.  The narrator is piecing it all together from the documentary record he has discovered in an old chest full of papers, donated by Haynes’ sister to her late brother’s old Cambridge college.  This is how James – provost of Kings College, Cambridge at the time he wrote the story – contextualises his own notional encounter with the facts of the case.

The James-ish or crypto-James narrator goes on to tell of his own subsequent researches.  The choir stalls of the story no longer exist.  The narrator speaks to the curator of a local library near Barchester and learns that part of one of the stalls – the one bearing the carved monkish figure of Death – came into the hands of a local man, who discovered inside it a scrap of paper bearing a poem or spell written in an old fashioned hand.

Again, at this point I can do no better than to quote the original:

When I grew in the Wood
I was water’d w’th Blood
Now in the Church I stand
Who that touches me with his Hand
If a Bloody hand he bear
I councell him to be ware
Lest he be fetcht away
Whether by night or day,
But chiefly when the wind blows high
In a night of February.
This I drempt, 26 Febr. Anno 1699. JOHN AUSTIN.

The reader will notice that, as I said at the outset, there is no mystery – that Haynes murdered Pulteney is never really unclear – and no ghost – the spectre of the murdered Pulteney does not appear.  Whatever the nature of the phantasms that plague Haynes, they are not the dead.

3. “…a couple of names in the Chronicles”

It seems to me that James was quite heavily influenced by Trollope’s Barsetshire novels – most particularly the first two, The Warden (1855) and Barchester Towers (1857) – beyond borrowing the fictional cathedral name.  As it happens, looking at the Trollope books is quite a good ‘way in’ to a lot of what we need to discuss.

As Barchester Towers opens, the archdeacon of the cathedral, Dr Grantly, the son of the reigning bishop, is expecting to effectively inherit the position of bishop upon his father’s death, which is imminent.  However, in the Anglican system, bishops are appointed by prime ministers… and the government is about to switch from Tory to Whig (proto-liberal).  Grantly knows that if the appointment is in the gift of the new Whig government, his hopes will come to nought.  He prays for forgiveness when he finds himself wishing that his father would hurry up and die.  As it turns out, his father does not die soon enough.  The decision goes to the incoming government, which appoints Dr Proudie.  Proudie is a weak and pliable man of modest background, government connections, low church, and no principles.  He brings with him his ‘domineering’ wife and their oily but clever chaplain / protégé Mr Obediah Slope, both of whom wish to be the power behind the throne.  Mrs Proudie and Slope eventually end up enemies, but start as ideological allies, united in their moralistic disdain for the laxity and pretentions of the high church.  Despite their self-seeking behaviour, both have genuine principles.  A schemer, Slope is nonetheless truly offended by what he perceives as the high church’s irrelevant, perhaps blasphemous flummeries.  Together, he and Mrs Proudie represent what John Sutherland, in his Introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Barchester Towers, calls ‘the new energies drawn from Nonconformity’.  ‘New’ in the mid-19^th century establishment church, that is.

These stories are steeped in Anglican Church politics.

The Church of England has long been informally divided into what are usually called the ‘high’ and ‘low’ varieties.  To be deeply simplistic about it, the high church is the version of Anglicanism which is closer in theology and practice to Catholicism.  It tends to put more emphasis on ceremony, ritual, musical worship, sacraments, vestments, altars, tradition, and priestly authority.  It tends to be more conservative in outlook, and to self-consciously consider itself traditional.  Its ideological origins lie in opposition; opposition to reform, opposition to the toleration of dissent within the church (such as the Latitudinarian wish for a ‘broad church’), and opposition to Puritan demands for the scrapping of the liturgical, episcopal, and ceremonial remnants of Catholicism.  The high church was long in alliance with Toryism, and thus with landed property.  To be crude about it, the church was, and remains, a massive landowner and beneficiary of rents.  Even more fundamental, perhaps, is the issue of patronage.  And that goes right back to the Reformation.

Professor Alec Ryrie – Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University – writes in The English Reformation – a Very Brief History that

even now most English parish priests are ‘presented’ for appointment by ‘patrons’ who are often local landowners, or corporate entities like cathedrals or colleges. This system is much less corrupt than in the days when it provided the narrative spine of many a nineteenth-century novel, but it still ensures that the congregations that constitute (and fund) the Church of England have a remarkably muted voice in their own pastoral care and governance. This is a direct legacy of the Tudor Reformation. The system has medieval roots, but it was when swathes of church lands were given into secular hands in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI that the rights of patronage associated with those lands were transferred to their new, lay owners. There was no shred of theological justification for this, but those rights were property in the eyes of the law, and the new owners were unwilling to renounce them – not least because they were often able to use them to cream off substantial amounts of church income. Even at the time this looked indefensibly corrupt.

…

Over the centuries this stranglehold has been loosened, chiefly because landed wealth no longer dominates England as it once did, but the old lines of control persist. It was no accident that for many generations the Tory party, which represented England’s landed interest, was also the political face of Anglicanism.

The political situation at the start of Barchester Towers comes into focus.  The question of who will be the next bishop is to be decided not by the church but by the secular government authorities.  When those authorities are under the control of the Tory Party – i.e. the big land owners, the rentier class – then the question will be settled by, essentially, the patronage system.  The high church is not just in a political alliance with this class; as we saw in our summary of ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’, as a property owning and rent-collecting concern, it is part of it.  But these days there is also the Whig Party occasionally in power, representing the middle classes and mid-to-big bourgeoisie, whose ideology is free trade.

Karl Marx wrote this for the New York Tribune after the British General Election of 1852:

Up to 1846 the Tories passed as the guardians of the traditions of Old England. They were suspected of admiring in the British Constitution the eighth wonder of the world; to be laudatores temporis acti [those who laud the past], enthusiasts for the throne, the High Church, the privileges and liberties of the British subject. The fatal year, 1846, with its repeal of the Corn Laws, and the shout of distress which this repeal forced from the Tories, proved that they were enthusiasts for nothing but the rent of land, and at the same time disclosed the secret of their attachment to the political and religious institutions of Old England. These institutions are the very best institutions, with the help of which the large landed property — the landed interest — has hitherto ruled England, and even now seeks to maintain its rule. The year 1846 brought to light in its nakedness the substantial class interest which forms the real base of the Tory party. The year 1846 tore down the traditionally venerable lion’s hide, under which Tory class interest had hitherto hidden itself. The year 1846 transformed the Tories into Protectionists. Tory was the sacred name, Protectionist is the profane one; Tory was the political battle-cry, Protectionist is the economical shout of distress; Tory seemed an idea, a principle; Protectionist is an interest. Protectionists of what? Of their own revenues, of the rent of their own land. Then the Tories, — in the end, are Bourgeois as much as the remainder, for where is the Bourgeois who is not a protectionist of his own purse? They are distinguished from the other Bourgeois, in the same way as the rent of land is distinguished from commercial and industrial profit. Rent of land is conservative, profit is progressive; rent of land is national, profit is cosmopolitical; rent of land believes in the State Church, profit is a dissenter by birth.

(It is outside the scope of this essay to ponder the ways in which these insights might be adapted to our present moment, in which the USA’s fascistic rearguard defence of the monopoly interests and property originated in the neoliberal era is now organising around a fanatical policy of… tariffs.)

The Corn Laws Marx refers to were a series of import restrictions and tariffs on corn, wheat, oats, and barley, instituted by the British parliament from 1815 onwards.  They were designed to raise the prices of domestically produced corn etc in order to benefit domestic farmers, and thus the owners of farming land.  They achieved their aim, massively increasing the wealth and political power of land owners.  As a result, they also retarded the growth of other sectors such as manufacturing industry, and impoverished the common population.  They can be seen as part of the struggle by landed property against the inexorable rise of the economic and political power of manufacturing industry, and thus as one of the class struggles internal to the British ruling classes during the Industrial Revolution.  As Marx says, these are struggles not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie (the urban and rural proletariat are collateral damage in this fight), or between the bourgeoisie and an actual feudal class of landowners (they’re long gone), but rather between different forms of bourgeois property, i.e. industrial capital vs. farming / land rentier capital.

These protectionist laws were repealed in 1846, ostensibly in response to the Great Irish Famine, by the Conservative prime minister Robert Peel, who had to join with the Whigs and Radicals to get it done in the teeth of opposition and protest inside his own party.  I say ‘ostensibly’ because Peel’s actual motive was his conversion to Free Trade ideology; there is no sensible way to view the repeal of the Corn Laws as an emergency measure to help the Irish.  Even so, it brought down his government.  Peel, despite his own intense anti-Catholicism, was also the drafter (while serving in the government of the Duke of Wellington) of the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act , to which we shall return.

Peel is a pivotal early figure in the transformation of the Tory Party away from its original arch monarchist, protectionist, high church, landed property orientation – essentially a kind of survival of feudal ideology into modernity, serving the interests of landed capital – towards the evolving beast that it became, towards its dominant coalition with free trade, manufacturing capital, and finance.

Also, the Barsetshire novels were written and published in the years following the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’.  This was the rather hysterical term used by some at the time to refer to Pius IX’s 1850 papal bull declaring the reconstruction of the Catholic Church’s diocesan and episcopal hierarchy in England after centuries of extinction following the Reformation.  The move prompted an anti-Catholic backlash in England, and a wave of paranoia about the health and safety of Anglicanism.

The Pope’s move was prompted by the British state’s legal moves in recent decades towards ‘emancipation’ and ‘toleration’ of the Catholic faith, most particularly the 1829 Roman Catholic Relief Act.  Rather than restoring the old, abolished Catholic church structure, a new hierarchy of bishops, with one archbishop, was erected.  (Wales also got a new structure, and Scotland got its old structure restored.)

So we join Trollope’s Barchester Cathedral at an interesting point in the politics of the Anglican church.  The stability of the high church / high Tory alliance is… if not breaking down then at least becoming a little internally wobbly, unrealisable, and confusing.  The church couldn’t always count on the Tories to be in power.  And Toryism in government has just repealed its own protectionist laws, which did so much to give its base – including the church – their power and profits.  Despite its relative closeness to Catholicism in form, the high Church of England is anti-Catholic in political practice, being an inherently exclusionist, intolerant, and authoritarian version of Anglicanism… and yet its own parliamentary representatives have, despite their own basic desires, brought on a reconstruction of Catholicism in Britain out of a desire to avoid social strife.

Earlier, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act of 1840, enacted by the pre-Peel Whig government of Lord Melbourne, was the most sweeping reorganisation of the Church of England since the Reformation, creating new dioceses and bishops.  Also known as the Cathedrals Act, it directly affected places like the fictional Barchester.  Sinecures and patronages were ended or at least reduced, and the economic organisation of cathedrals was centralised under commissioners.  (A form of sneaking Presbyterianism?)  Money was redirected from cathedral chapters to parish churches, particularly in poorer rural and industrial areas.

To quote from John Sutherland’s Introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Barchester Towers:

 The early nineteenth-century torpid consensus about the English faith was fissured by fault lines and stirred up by any number of new brooms. Old corruption in the Church had attracted the zeal of the Whigs, following their triumph over their Conservative opponents with parliamentary reform in 1832. No more should the Church of England be the Conservative Party at prayer. It should be Whiggism (what would later evolve into Liberalism) militant. Evangelicalism (the ‘Low Church’ tendency) was passionately opposed by the Oxford Tractarians, who yearned for reunion with Rome as an orphaned child yearns for its mother’s breast.

…

While Trollope wrote Barchester Towers, Anglicanism was fighting hard on four fronts: against in surgent Dissent; against Catholic ‘aggression’; against scientific ‘agnosticism’ and utilitarianism; against political and journalist critics who argued—with all too many examples—that the Church was incompetent to run its own temporal affairs.

…

the Church of England absorbed and blunted elements of its opponents’ attack, developing a Low Church fringe (where Anglicanism blurred invisibly into Dissent and Nonconformity) and a High Church fringe (where it was indistinguishable from Catholicism).

It seems to be this dynamic of peaceful conflict, with the high church on the back foot, and the centre under increasing pressure, which The Warden and Barchester Towers dramatize.  In both these novels, the conflict is not so much between the low and the high as it is between the low and the centre.  The centre is represented by Mr Harding, the precentor of Barchester Cathedral, and Dr Grantly the archdeacon, and son of the bishop at the start of the story.  The low church takes the form of the new incoming bishop Dr Proudie, Mrs Proudie, and their slippery Slope.  The low (allied with Whiggism, and thus liberalism, and aspects of Dissent and Nonconformity) is ascendant.

This ascendance happens via the reforming liberal government, and the peculiar authority structure of the Anglican church, which has its version of episcopacy languishing under the control of democratic (or at least elected) governments.  These governments, by the 19^th century, constitutionally exercise the sovereign power of the crown.  And that power includes power over the English Church.  Originating in the desire of Henry VIII to control the political and economic power of the church in England, this system ends up – after centuries of wrangling and civil war to decide the issue of crown vs. parliament – putting the church, at least as far as bishop appointments go – in the hands of the state.  The irony is that the issue of religion – most particularly Catholicism in kings and queens vs. an English Protestant establishment – has been a massive factor in the oscillations back and forth between crown and parliament power.

The antagonism of the low church towards the centre (the middle-of-the-road, non-ideologically conservative, ‘normal’ church – at least in Trollope’s telling) is tinged with a degree of paranoia about the centre’s tolerance of the same aspects of church practice which are championed in a more extreme form by the high.  In Barchester Towers, the high and centre eventually come into a kind of alliance – albeit one which represents no victory beyond the moral and personal – when Mr Harding’s daughter marries the high church Mr Arabin.  But the high is more a sort of invisible ideal towards which the low and the centre constantly react, the former in frustrated hostility and the latter in a sort of hazy, idealistic (yet also opportunistic) aspiration.

But it is not so much that Slope is depicted as bad because of his politics.  It is more that he is depicted as bad because he has politics.  In Trollope’s schema, the low is ideological whereas the centre is non-ideological; Whiggism (proto-liberalism) is political content whereas Toryism is a political ‘null hypothesis’, a neutral basic setting.  It is the presence of a Whig administration which introduces politics into the business of who gets to be bishop.  And it is the new low church bishop (via his entourage) who introduces politics into the otherwise and hitherto ideologically neutral benevolence of the centrist establishment in Barchester.  And the politics is reform.

Slope and the Proudies may not be linked to the more radical types of Nonconformity but, modernisers and critics of the antiquated plumbing of the ancien regime that they are, they are too radical for Trollope.  The problem is a class one more than an ideological one.  Low church as he is, Slope is no ideological anti-episcopalian.  But, in a strange way, he is opposed to the power of bishops – precisely because, as a striving middle-class careerist – he sees himself as being the rightful power behind Bishop Proudie.  And both he and Mrs Proudie certainly see themselves as new brooms, much needed to sweep the cathedral (and thus the church itself) clean.  (Readers of Tom Sharpe will see how much he owes to Trollope in novels like Porterhouse Blue.)  If Slope is ideologically muddled as a figure then it is a telling muddle; in his simultaneous upholding and undermining of episcopal prerogatives he is much like English Protestantism itself.  And he is clear as crystal as a class depiction.  In true bourgeois fashion, he allies himself to established structures of authority to the extent that they facilitate his own rise, his own upward class mobility, and then uses and abuses them in Machiavellian fashion when necessary – and all with the alibi of truly felt disdain for the decadence of the old, even as he uses that decadence as a ladder up which he can clamber.  He is the episcopal vs. presbyterian debate – rule by bishops vs. rule by assemblies – boiled down to its essence, most particularly because, like English Protestantism itself, he contains both, as his interests demand.  In practice, Anglicanism was always a vast political balancing act, occurring within the rise of bourgeois modernity, with all its shifts of power between church, crown, parliament, feudal property, different wings of rising bourgeois property, and the emerging working class.  Slope is thus the uneasy truth of Anglicanism: for all its alliance with ancient structures of power and authority, in the modern era it is built upon the property, and the striving for property, of the new classes of modernity.  As Marx points out above, even the land owners are, in the modern era, bourgeois.  The Anglican church is integrated with the modern bourgeois state – as the system for appointing bishops shows.  It is integrated with bourgeois property in all forms – as the internal wranglings between low and high illustrate.  This all goes right back to the birth of the Church of England in the English Reformation, itself a product of the same process of primitive accumulation which saw feudal property and landholding (common and lordly) become bourgeois property and bourgeois land ownership in the enclosures.  The dissolution of the monasteries – a key part of Henry VIII’s Reformation – was just another form of this process.

It is important to stress that the bishop system was always bound up with the imposition of power.  The original bishops were imposed from Rome by the Christian emperors.  Much later, after the fall of Roman Britain and the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, Pope Gregory the Great tried to reimpose Roman Christian power in Britain by instituting the dioceses and the monasteries which became the basis for the medieval cathedrals.  After the conquest, the Normans set up cathedrals in much the same way they set up castles, peppering the country with the engines of their rule.  The tug of power between the growing power of the state – in the form of the crown – and the church abroad was a recurring feature of the middle ages.  The most consequential of such tussles, the one with the most drastic and lasting effect, was, of course, Henry VIII’s break with Rome.

Professor Ryrie again:

Many of the historic oddities of the Church of England – its weird mixture of firmly Protestant doctrinal articles with much more traditional liturgy and ceremonial; its retention of cathedrals, entities which served no coherent purpose in a Protestant church but which nurtured the musical traditions Elizabeth I enjoyed – are the result not of some genius of Anglicanism, but of placing a church under the control of a series of lay people with amateur theological interests and no one to stop them. Alongside these harmless quirks is, naturally, a pervasive commitment to royal authority itself. The Church of England retained bishops, not because they were essential to true Christianity, but because they were appointed by the Crown and served the royal dignity. James I’s tart reply to proposals to abolish bishops – ‘no bishop, no king’ – was about power politics, not theology. Likewise, the ambition cherished by Protestant reformers from Archbishop Cranmer onwards for the English Church to create a fully comprehensive system of moral discipline was repeatedly rebuffed: not for any reason of theological or legal principle, but because no monarch was willing to countenance a new system of church law that might defy secular authority.

The episcopal vs. presbyterian argument is, ultimately, always a struggle between hierarchy and democracy.  None of these terms are absolutes, and so we are not talking about absolute hierarchy vs. absolute democracy, no more than we are ever talking about a simple division between episcopacy and presbyterianism.  There is certainly no necessarily radical egalitarian spirit animating much of Presbyterianism, and episcopacy does not necessarily entail the complete rejection of devolved rule, or absolute insistence upon rule by bishops, and thus church.  The Church of England evolved to be a compromise or balancing act in which the hierarchical structure of the church, instantiated in the bishop system, was retained from Roman Catholicism while also being subjugated to the crown and thus, over time, to governments to which the powers of the sovereign were gradually more and more devolved, and thus more and more democratic.  Not perfectly democratic, of course.  But certainly more democratic.  And not only did the rise of bourgeois property lead to the rise of Whiggism and liberalism – political expressions of free trade, essentially – but is also led to the rise of a working class who increasingly fought for, and attained, greater levels of democratic power.  The Church, still organised as an episcopal system, thus found itself subject to progressive impulses from above and below.

So hopefully we can see how Trollope’s Barchester Cathedral clearly informs James’.  James – as Borges would say – makes Trollope one of his precursors.  He picks up themes that are explored in Trollope and utilises them with ruthless utilitarian precision in his ghost story of several decades later.  But he is clearly referring back to Trollope as he writes of the internal struggles, instabilities, and – dare I say it – neuroses of 19^th century Anglicanism.  He also seems to be referring to some of the later politics of Anglicanism, to struggles nearer his own time.  But putting Trollope in context helps us to put James’ story in context.  James, however, even as he pares down Trollope’s amiable ramblings (taken together, as they naturally are, The Warden and Barchester Towers run to more than 400 pages), also expands the scope to encompass not only, by implication, the entire history of the Church of England and the Reformation, but also the pre-Christian, and even upwards to the numinous, the cosmic, and the ineffable.  As we shall see.

*

‘The Stalls of Barchester’ was meant to be a single essay but, as is the way of things around here, it has gotten away from me somewhat and is expanding.  The above is not really coherent as an essay by itself for the simple reason that it isn’t one, and was never meant to be one.  It is the (bloated) opening to an even larger piece, which I hope to give you in instalments as we go forward.  Once again, I apologise to my Patreon subscribers for not being able to let them have this in advance of publication.