Biography -- John Mason Neale

Few have heard of John Mason Neale and yet everyone benefits from his genius. Neale was an Anglican priest, scholar, and hymnwriter who wrote and translated hundreds of Christian texts including previously unknown medieval hymns, both Western and Eastern. Among his most famous hymns is the 1853 favourite ‘Good King Wenceslas’.

Neale was born in London on 24 January 1818. His father Cornelius Neale was a clergyman and his mother Susanna was the daughter of John Mason Good, a writer on medical, religious, and classical subjects. His parents named him after the Puritan cleric and hymn writer John Mason (1645–94), of whom his mother Susanna was a proud descendant. His younger sister Elizabeth Neale (1822–1901) founded the Community of the Holy Cross.

Neale was educated at Sherborne School in Dorset then Trinity College, Cambridge, where (despite being the best classical scholar for years) his lack of ability in mathematics prevented him taking an honours degree.

At the age of 22, Neale was made chaplain of Downing College, Cambridge. While there, he became greatly influenced by the Oxford Movement and particularly interested in church architecture.

Neale helped found the Cambridge Camden Society (afterwards known as the ‘Ecclesiological Society’) which sought to introduce more ritual and religious decoration into Anglican churches, and was closely associated with the so-called ‘Gothic Revival’.

Neale was ordained in 1842 and was briefly Vicar of Crawley in West Sussex but felt compelled to resign owing to a chronic lung disease. The following winter he lived in the Madeira Islands, where he was able to research for his first book History of the Eastern Church. He returned and, in 1846, became warden of Sackville College, an almshouse at East Grinstead; he held this appointment until his death.

In 1854 Neale helped found the Society of Saint Margaret, an order of women dedicated to nursing the sick. Many contemporary people were deeply suspicious of religious orders returning to the Church of England and, in 1857, he was attacked and mauled at a funeral of one of the Sisters. Crowds threatened to stone him or to burn his house. Thereafter he received no honour or preferment in England and his only subsequent award was a doctorate from a College in Connecticut.

Neale was the principal founder of the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, a religious organisation founded as the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches Union in 1864. This organisation resulted in Hymns of the Eastern Church which Neale edited and published in 1865.Neale translated a great many Eastern liturgies into English, but is chiefly known as a hymn-writer and, especially, translator, having
enriched English hymnody with many ancient and mediaeval hymns translated from Latin and Greek. For example, the melody of Good King Wenceslas originates from a medieval Latin springtime poem. More than anyone else, he made English-speaking congregations aware of the centuries-old tradition of Latin, Greek, Russian, and Syrian hymns. The 1875 edition of the Hymns Ancient and Modern contains 58 of his translated hymns; The English Hymnal (1906) contains 63 of his translated hymns and 6 original hymns by Neale. They include ‘All Glory, Laud and Honour’, ‘All people that on earth do dwell’, ‘Of the Father's Heart Begotten’, ‘O come, O come, Emmanuel’, and ‘Sing, My Tongue, the Glorious Battle’.

Aged only 54, Neale died on 6 August 1866, the Feast of the Transfiguration, so the Anglican church commemorates him the following day, 7 August.