Reference was made in a letter in The Daily Telegraph to the action taken by Archbishop William Laud (1573-1645) to control dogs in churches. Alistair Lexden corrected an error and expanded a little on Laud’s work in a further letter published in the paper on July 26.
SIR -- Archbishop Laud would have been furious at the suggestion that he belonged in the Tudor era (Letters, July 24). That was a period in which the Church tended to adopt a broad, tolerant approach.
Laud was the architect of the dogmatic high Anglicanism of Charles 1’s reign. Many churches in the 1620s had mere communion tables in their naves, where on weekdays churchwardens did their accounts and dogs relieved themselves. Laud decreed that every church should have an altar at its east end with rails around it “neare one yard in height, so thick with pillars that dogs may not get in”, creating “an uniformity in this respect in every church.”
As Hugh Trevor-Roper put it in his marvellous life of Laud, “railed off in the east end, the table was free from those profanities to which it was otherwise sometimes subjected.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
