‘The Lay Folks' Mass Book’ and Thomas Frederick Simmons: Medievalism and the Tractarians

Thomas Frederick Simmons (1815-84) combined his ecclesiastical duties and liturgical interests with editing the fourteenth-century Middle English Lay folks’ mass book (1879) for the Early English Text Society, with the aim of showing the continuity of the English Church from the medieval period through the Reformation. In the light of modern scholarship, this article recontextualises both medieval text and Simmons’s own editorial practice, and shows how Simmons, as a second generation Tractarian churchman, sought in this text – and others associated with it – evidence for the Church of England’s Catholic underpinning in an imagined medieval English Church.