Beyond Keble College walls
Keble was intended to be the training ground for new Tractarian priests. To enable their work, it was given the patronage of some 69 parishes across England by wealthy supporters. It was not unusual for colleges to hold these advowsons, or ‘livings’. Indeed, before Fellows were allowed to marry, appointment to a parish was often the only way in which one could take a wife. Keble was untypical, however, in the fact that these livings were meant to encourage particular ways of worship inspired by Tractarian thought. Endowed by Thomas Combe (1796-1872), University Printer and staunch supporter of the Oxford Movement and built in 1869, St Barnabas Church in Jericho is a good example of this process. To this day, it is still an Anglo-Catholic parish with the elaborate ritual typical of the ways in which Tractarian ideas developed.
See inside St Barnabas Jericho, credit: St Barnabas Church Jericho PCC.
