Offered here is the largest historical study of recruitment to the ministry of the Church of England attempted to date. It takes as its focus the educational backgrounds of men ordained in the late Hanoverian period, from 1780 to 1839 – a period during which the path to the pulpits and parishes of the Established Church was not quite as straightforward as has often been assumed. Certainly a ‘liberal’ or classical education, followed by university, was the most judicious way forward. Oxford fellow, clerical schoolmaster and essayist, Vicesimus Knox, gave this advice in 1782: ‘To facilitate the tenure of some preferments, and to satisfy the prejudices of the world, it will be necessary to take academical degrees. This cannot reputably be done without becoming a member of an English university.’ But Knox's choice of words is telling. ‘Some’ preferments did indeed require a degree, but what about the young man who did not aspire to a deanery or even to hold in plurality? What about those prepared to disregard the ‘prejudices of the world’? And if the English universities were the reputable way into the Church, what about the less reputable routes? Knox's advice was excellent, but even he might disregard it: in 1805 he helped his assistant, John Oxlee, to take orders, although Oxlee had never attended university.

Throughout the period of this study it was possible to describe a man as having been educated for the Church, without necessarily suggesting that he had been intended for university. Parents might prepare a biddable, bookish son by giving him a classical education and maintaining him, without setting him to secular trade or business (school-keeping excepted), until he was of age to take orders. It would have been possible to point to non-graduate role models, both of national reputation and from within the local clergy. Amongst the more notable of such men were Bishop William Warburton; archdeacons Joseph Jefferson and Thomas Beynon; evangelical elder statesmen such as John Newton; the bible commentator Thomas Scott; and popular preachers Cornelius Bayley of Manchester and Robert Storry of Colchester.

The route to orders without a degree did, however, become progressively more difficult during this period.

Goethe emphasized the importance of spectacle in Faust as part of an audience's total sensual (‘sinnlich’) experience of the work on stage. At the same time, for the initiated, the work's deeper meaning lay beyond what simply meets the eye. As the Director states in ‘Vorspiel auf dem Theater’ [Prelude at the Theatre], the masses come to the theatre to see spectacle and action, but the Poet reminds him that this must be combined with poetry. Goethe's Faust embraces the most diverse kinds of poetry and some of the most lyrical. It is just as much a work for the ear as it is for the eye. In addition to the many sections of the text that call for musical accompaniment or musical interludes, or those that have inspired countless composers to Lieder and opera, the poetry itself embraces all registers of language and creates an unparalleled range of musical effects.

As a work for the stage Faust presents great challenges to the director. Peter Stein's production, premiered at EXPO Hannover in 2000, was, it was claimed, the first ever unabridged production of both parts of the play by a professional theatre company.

Origins

The history of Galicia is in many respects quite unlike that of the Liébana, and it is to the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula that we now turn in order to see how and why this was so. At the heart of this matter lies the supposed distinctiveness of Galician history and culture, a longstanding motif in Spanish historical and folkloric literature. The notion that there exists a distinctive Galician path to modernity has been advocated since at least the nineteenth century, when nationalists began to debate the putative Celtic culture of the ancient and early medieval inhabitants of the region. Whatever the motivations of their proponents, all arguments concerning the ethnic or cultural attributes of Galicians and their history share one feature: they attempt to set Galicia at one remove from the rest of Spain. But divorcing Galician history from wider peninsular developments is hazardous, for it risks marginalising important contextual factors.

One such factor concerns the legacy of Rome, for while Ibero-Celtic and Suevic influences remain hard to detect, Roman-native cultural syncretism of the sort seen in many parts of the Roman world is abundantly evidenced in Galicia, leaving a recognisably Roman-influenced inheritance in its wake. This point was not lost on Sánchez-Albornoz, who thought it unwise to imagine Galicia ‘cloaked with the mystique of Celtic antiquity’, and chose instead to stress the weight of the Roman legacy. Noting that Romanitas was surprisingly resistant in this corner of the peninsula, Sánchez-Albornoz penned a series of articles that focussed on a Roman legacy that has, since he wrote, become increasingly well attested in the archaeological record. Romanisation in Galicia, as elsewhere in most of Western Europe, was a matter of degree; its reality is without question. This chapter will take this reality as its starting point, and examine Galicia in the three centuries after the Roman state collapsed in the West. Subsequent chapters will take the story further, looking at village society from 800 to 1031, and the elite families whose power shaped society and politics in this region.

A relic of antiquity?

‘In Galicia, at the edge of the entire world’

The fifth-century chronicler Hydatius, bishop of Chaves, is principally known for his learned lament on the destruction of the Roman Church and empire in the north-western corner of the Iberian Peninsula, an account more or less contemporary with the events it describes.

Autodidacts

Although the vast majority of men who took orders had undertaken formal, guided periods of study – whether at university, advanced grammar school, with tutors, or assisted by employers, family and friends – men who were almost entirely self-taught occasionally presented themselves for orders. Most, but not all, had an elementary classical education behind them, and on this foundation they were able to attain the necessary standard of Latin and Greek using primers, grammars and lexicons, and prosecuted their divinity studies using books they could buy or borrow. That they made so much progress with so little help is, perhaps, not so surprising when the pedagogical methods of the period are considered. Those boys who had received a grammar school education, where perhaps a master and an usher were the only teaching staff to cover six forms of boys, had – if they had made any progress at all – learnt to study alone with only episodic instruction from a master.

John Newton was such a man, having had only two years of grammar school education before joining the voyages of his merchant marine father. Of his studies he commented, ‘in all my literary attempts, I have been obliged to strike out my own path, by the light I could acquire from books, as I have not had a teacher or assistant since I was ten years of age’. Before ordination in 1764, he had improved his school Latin and had not only taught himself elementary Greek, but had also begun Hebrew and Syriac. George Crabbe received a classical and mathematical schooling before becoming a surgeon's apprentice at the age of fourteen. Business not prospering, he sought his fortune as a poet; having found patronage from Edmund Burke, and evincing a desire to enter the Church, he studied for orders, apparently unassisted, although with advice about his reading, taking deacon's orders in 1781. John Hellins, a labourer's son with only an elementary education, taught himself mathematics whilst he was a cooper's apprentice. His abilities brought him to the attention of local clergyman and mathematician Malachy Hitchins, who found him a post as an assistant at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. There, as an adult, he began studying Greek and Latin as a prelude to taking orders, which he did in about 1779.

For a brief but extraordinarily consequential period from October 1814 to October 1819, Franz Schubert was captivated by the works of Goethe. During that short time span he penned fifty-four of his eventual seventy-two settings of Goethe's poetry. Although those settings represent a variety of genres and draw on a variety of poetic sources, they collectively reveal Schubert's voracious appetite for the work of the poet whose collected works had been released by Cotta's Vienna presses in 1810. Among them the Faust settings have pride of place – not only because they were launched with ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (D 118), the work that is widely considered to have articulated a turning-point in Schubert's approach to song composition and, after it was published in 1821, in the Romantic Lied as a genre, but also because of their deployment of extraordinary musical means to achieve, collectively, unprecedented psychological and dramatic insight into the work that Friedrich Schelling had described as ‘die innerste, reinste Essenz unseres Zeitalters’ [the inmost, purest essence of our age]. As shown in Table 6.1, between October 1814 and May 1817 Schubert completed four settings of texts from that drama and began a fifth. Those four completed settings are the subject of this essay.

Schubert was of course hardly alone in his fascination with the Faust saga. It had been wildly popular since the mid-sixteenth century, when the deeds of one or both of the historical Fausts were first compiled in manuscript by Christoph Rosshirt ca. 1575 and then published (with additions) in a chapbook published in Frankfurt am Main by Johann Spiess in 1587. During the first century and a half after the chapbook's appearance Faust's ill repute spread rapidly, quickly losing its original specifically Protestant moral and becoming a pan-denominational craze in Catholic Europe as well. A new twist was added with the versions that appeared during the late Enlightenment, as those recountings, drawing in part on the commonly encountered interminglings of the Faust and Don Juan legends, frequently introduced what might today be termed a ‘love interest’: now Faust's long-fabled seduction of a conjured Helen of Troy was supplemented or replaced by his reputed wooing of innocent young girls who fell in love beyond their station in life, became pregnant, and often resorted to infanticide.

IN 1964, the music critic Philip Hope-Wallace committed to print some unsavoury rumours about Newman's past: ‘I once met an owl who solemnly assured me that Newman was an ex-criminal with a “closed chapter” in his life’. This closed chapter was the publication of Pseudo-Philosophy at the end of the Nineteenth Century (1897), which brought Newman into contact with a shady publisher and appears to have dashed his chances of receiving a British knighthood. Not even lobbying by William Emrys Williams (chief editor at Penguin Books, 1936–1965) to have Newman admitted to the Order of the Companions of Honour on his eightieth birthday came to anything. The stench of association from this controversial episode in Newman's life hung over the rest of his career.

Newman wrote Pseudo-Philosophy during his time on the Free Review (discussed in the previous chapter), under the pseudonym of Hugh Mortimer Cecil. In the course of the book's production, Newman unwittingly became associated with a criminal who owned the imprint under which the book was published, the University Press, Watford. There is no evidence that Newman broke the law or was a criminal. Nevertheless, the publication of Pseudo- Philosophy implicated Newman in a case of imprint theft and, indirectly, the suicide of a publisher.

Pseudo-Philosophy is an extreme example of Newman's rationalist ideology and capacity for hard-hitting criticism. Despite its overwhelmingly positive critical reception, which brought Newman considerable respect in freethought circles, it was Newman's last major freethought work. The book was a fierce critique of three recently published, and hugely popular but conservative, books (discussed below) that, amongst other agendas, questioned evolutionary theory and the idea of progress.

G.A. Singer, the Free Review's second editor, commissioned Newman to write Pseudo-Philosophy (John M. Robertson had bequeathed the journal to Singer in 1895 while he pursued a career in politics). Singer's real name, however, was George Ferdinand Springmühl von Weissenfeld. He was a criminal who, under yet another name, Dr Roland de Villiers, was the proprietor of Watford University Press, which later changed its name to University Press Limited, London. By April 1897, Watford University Press had taken control of the Free Review, renaming it University Magazine and Free Review, and had announced the publication of Newman's Pseudo-Philosophy.

General

The records which C. R. Cockerell created during his time in Greece and Greater Greece, or which are directly relevant to his travels, are now rather scattered. A short summary of the records created by Cockerell through his life can found on the National Archives website, but known collections important for his travels are discussed below. Individual documents are referenced and discussed where relevant in the foregoing chapters and the notes to the edited letters.

There may be further relevant documents in the archives of Cockerell's close associates. Material in the papers of Haller von Hallerstein in the University Library, Stuttgart, is possible, although this has been thoroughly researched by Bankel; further material relating to Haller is in the Bavarian archives. Relevant material may exist in the archives of John Foster, whose two sets of drawings of the Bassae frieze are in the British Museum and the Gennadius Library; also of Otto von Stackelberg (see N. Stackelberg 1882, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg. Schilderung seines Lebens und seiner Reisen in Italien und Griechenland, und Tagebuchern und Briefendargestellt, Heidelberg); Jacob Linckh (see P. Goessler 1930, Jacob Linckh, ein wüttembergischer Italienfahrer, Philhellene, Kundstsammler und Maler, Stuttgart); Peter Brøndstet in the Royal Library, Copenhagen; Louis Fauvel (see C. Clairmont 2007, Fauvel. The First Archaeologist in Athens and his Philhellenic Correspondents, Zürich); and Georg Gropius, a few of whose sketches are in the British Museum (F. Hasluck 1911/12, ‘Topographical Drawings in the British Museum Illustrating Classical Sites and Remains’, Annual Brit School Athens, 18, 270–81).

Relevant material may also exist in the archives of the British men who were in Greece, Greater Greece and Italy during the first two decades of the nineteenth century; for example, that of Edward Dodwell, who drew the Temple of Apollo at Bassae in 1806, and corresponded with Fauvel over the measurements of the columns (J. McK. Camp II 2013, In Search of Greece. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings at the British Museum by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi from the Collection of the Packard Humanities Institute, 116–19). Cockerell made hundreds of drawings while he was away, sometimes drawing several versions of the same scene, and he was (distressingly frequently) not always careful to note their provenance on the drawings themselves, making identification difficult or impossible.