THE CATHEDRAL FROM THE EAST.
Reproduced from a drawing by Mr. Hedley Fitton, by permission of the "Daily Chronicle."[ToList]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See a paper read before the Society of Antiquaries, in 1833, by Mr. A.J. Kempe.
[2] Burnham-Overy, in Norfolk, and Barton-Overy, in Leicestershire, show that the suffix is not peculiar to St. Mary's, Southwark.
[3] It may be well to explain that a "Collegiate Church" takes its name from the Collegium, or collected body of priests, attached to it, who were called "Secular Canons" in distinction from the "Regular Canons" of a monastery. The latter were monks who had been admitted to Holy Orders, but still continued in obedience to the rule (regulus) of the foundation to which they belonged. The Seculars were more or less like our parochial clergy in that they were subject to no such regulation, lived and moved without restraint among the people, and in early days were not infrequently married. Until the time of Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), the celibacy of the extra-monastic clergy was not at all generally insisted on. Even after the twelfth century, when greater strictness had been enforced by the first and second Lateran Councils, the marriage of the secular clergy was frequently connived at by their superiors, who even tolerated a system of concubinage which they were unable to prevent—propter duritiem cordis—by which a law of nature was provided for, in defiance of the law ecclesiastical. The question was finally settled by the Council of Trent in 1563, since when the celibate rule has generally been strictly observed in the Roman Church. The absence of such a rule in the Church of England is, of course, due to the Reformation.
With very few exceptions the English "Colleges" were suppressed by an Act of 1545. The name seems to have clung to St. Saviour's through all its subsequent changes, rather by old association than as having any practical value, till the collegiate character, as well as the title, was formally restored to it in 1897 by Dr. Talbot, then Bishop of Rochester.
[4] The dedication of the hospital was altered to "St. Thomas-the-Apostle," in 1540, when the official title of the church was changed to St. Saviour. To make way for the line of railway between London Bridge and Charing Cross, a wing of the hospital had to be pulled down, and the whole was transferred to the Albert Embankment, where the new buildings were opened by Her late Majesty Queen Victoria in 1871.