When We Were English, Part VII

The Turbulent Life of The Rt. Rev. John Holyman, Installment 4
by Glenn N. Holliman

During the last years of Henry VIII and the reign of the boy king, Edward VI, our John Holyman served as priest at Long Handborough, near Oxford, and later vicar at Wing, near Tring, Hertfordshire.


The name John Holyman appears (above) on this list of rectors who have served the parish in Handborough. This roster hangs on the church wall. There is an error; John Holyman was the second, not first Bishop of Bristol.

The photo of the book to the left of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is the latest in many excellent works on this pivotal priest during the Reformation. Some of the activities of our Bishop of Bristol are recorded in Diarmaid MacCulloch's biography which was published Yale University Press in 1996.

During the English Reformation, out went certain Roman traditions and services and in came a more simplist style of worship and church decorations. English, not Latin, became the language of the pulpit and altar. Cranmer wrote the first Anglican Church prayer books, the model and language which survives even into the 21st century in the American Episcopal Church.

Discretion must have been his middle name.

However, one of his distant descendants practices an indiscretion, standing in the 15th century pulpit where John Holyman preached in the 1540s in Long Handborough. Photo by Barbara Holliman, wife of the bogus preacher.

Next posting, we continue with the paper on ancestor John Holyman (1495 - 1558) presented by Peggy Cattell of Cuddington, Buckinghamshire, England.