A researcher into church pewter recently contacted us about permission to view and photograph a mid-eighteenth century flagon held on behalf of Haworth church at York Minster’s Treasury. It is a pair to one which the church retains, and local historian Steven Wood was able quickly to provide me with the photograph from 1920s reproduced above which shows the two together.
We went over
to York yesterday to view the flagon (and the silver communion beaker in the
photograph – but that demands a separate post of its own).
Each flagon has
an inscription on the front which includes the date 1750 and this date is
repeated on the base of each with the names W. Grimshaw, Minister, W. Sharp, B.
Hey, Ch. Wardens.
William
Grimshaw became Perpetual Curate of Haworth in 1742, soon after a converting experience similar
to that which had inspired John Wesley (who was six years his senior) four
years earlier. In the same way that
Wesley then travelled the whole country preaching the Methodist revival,
Grimshaw came to travel an extensive local area doing something similar, and
the two men were close collaborators.
In Haworth
itself, Grimshaw revived what was an ill attended church, so that, for example,
Wesley’s Journal records a visit on Sunday 22nd May 1757 when I
suppose there were nearly a thousand communicants, and scarcely a trifler among
them.
This is
where the flagons come in. Clearly a
good supply of wine was needed to keep topping up the chalices and the pair of new
large flagons would have been used for this purpose. The inscriptions on the front of each fits
with this. In both cases it is a
verse from a Communion hymn.
The verse on
the flagon in York is from a hymn by Isaac Watts, who had died two years earlier, first published in 1707 (Far from my
thoughts vain world be gone):
Blest Jesus,
what delicious Fare!
How sweet
thine entertainments are!
Never did
Angels taste above,
Redeeming
grace or dying love.
The verse on
the one which the church retains is from a hymn by John or Charles Wesley
published just five years before the flagon was inscribed:
In Jesus we
live, in Jesus we rest,
And thankful
receive His dying bequest,
The Cup of
Salvation His mercy bestows,
And all from
His passion our Happiness flows.
Hymns on the
Lord’s Supper (1745) is prefaced by John Wesley’s abridgment of a work of
Daniel Brevint The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice (1673). The Wesley hymns are then intended to teach this
theology and embed it in the worshipper’s use and memory.
One section
of the work is headed Concerning the Sacrament as it is a pledge of future
glory and the section of the hymnbook which contains this hymn reflects this
by being headed The Sacrament, a pledge of heaven. Wesley includes Brevint’s prayer feed me
with the living bread which [these mysteries] present and sanctify me in both
body and spirit for that eternal happiness which they promise, so the word ‘happiness’
in the verse is not incidental.
(I’m
enjoying the link back to Brevint because he succeeded Michael Honeywood who
was made as Dean of Lincoln at the Restoration in 1660; like Honeywood he was
deprived of office under the Commonwaelth and like him he was in due course buried
in Lincoln Cathedral.)
