Daniel Rock
Liverpool, 1799 - 1871, London
LC Heading: Rock, Daniel, 1799-1871
Rock, Daniel (1799–1871), Roman Catholic priest and ecclesiologist, was born at Liverpool on 31 August 1799, the son of Martin and Mary Rock. He entered St Edmund's College, Old Hall Green, near Ware, as a foundation scholar in 1813 and remained there until 1818. In December of that year he was one of the first six students sent from England to Rome on the reopening of the English College, following the troubles of the Napoleonic period. Among his fellow students was Nicholas (later Cardinal) Wiseman. He was ordained priest on 13 March 1824 and graduated DD in Rome in 1825. After returning to England in that year he served for a short time as assistant priest at St Mary Moorfields in London, and at the Bavarian chapel in Warwick Street, London. In 1827 he took up the post of domestic chaplain to John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, at Alton Towers in Staffordshire. He first spent a further two years in Rome to extend his knowledge of church architecture and fittings. With only light duties he was able to follow up his great interest in the history of the liturgy and Gothic architecture. It was Rock who introduced Augustus Welby Pugin to the earl of Shrewsbury; he also showed Pugin the design of the fourteenth-century Aachen chasuble, which encouraged Pugin to promote ‘Gothic’ vestments rather than the ‘Roman’ style then in general use.
While at Alton Towers, Rock published his first major work, Hierugia, or, The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass Expounded (1833), a scholarly attempt to describe the history of the ceremonies used at mass, together with an explanation of the chief doctrines of the church surrounding the mass, notably transubstantiation. This work made extensive use of his own researches, and the book proved invaluable as a reference work, running to three editions by the end of the nineteenth century.
Following a disagreement with the earl, Rock left Alton Towers in 1840 to become the missioner at Buckland near Faringdon, Berkshire. Around this time he became a prominent member of the Adelphi Club of priests who were anxious to promote the restoration of the hierarchy in England. By 1843 this association had 120 members. After the hierarchy was restored in 1850 Rock became a priest of the new diocese of Southwark. He became one of the first canons of the chapter of the diocese in 1852, but in 1854 he resigned from Buckland and from active missionary work. Between 1849 and 1854 he produced and published his second major work, The church of our fathers as seen in St. Osmund's rite for the Cathedral of Salisbury with dissertations on the belief and ritual in England before and after the coming of the Normans. This was a pioneering study of the ritual used in the Anglo-Saxon church. It appeared in three volumes (bound in four) and ran to two editions, the latter containing a short biography of the author by Father Bernard Kelly.
Rock lived for a short while at Newick in Sussex and then moved to Brook Green, Hammersmith, in 1857. Here he started work on behalf of the South Kensington (later the Victoria and Albert) Museum, in which his long devotion to antiquarian studies proved a valuable asset. In 1862 he was a member of a committee appointed to prepare for a special exhibition, ‘Works of art on loan’ (chiefly medieval); in 1864 he moved to Kensington to be nearer the museum, and in 1869 again promoted a large loan exhibition. He also assisted Pugin with some of the finer points of Gothic architecture and Wiseman with historical details for some of his London lectures. He died at his home at 17 Essex Villas, Kensington, on 28 November 1871 and was buried at Kensal Green Roman Catholic cemetery.
Besides the two main works listed, he also compiled a catalogue of the textile fabrics at the South Kensington Museum. He contributed a paper entitled ‘The influence of the church on art in the dark ages’ to Manning's Essays in Religion (1865); he also wrote three papers for the Archaeological Journal (vols. 25, 26, 27) and contributed many communications to Notes and Queries. He also wrote a short treatise on Our Lady in verse, entitled The Mystic Crown of Mary, the Holy Maiden Mother of God (1857).
In addition to his important role at the South Kensington Museum, Rock is also significant as the first English Catholic writer to have explored the history of the liturgy. His correspondence with Pugin shows that he also possessed an intimate knowledge of the most minute details of Gothic architecture. Such detailed knowledge proved invaluable not only to Pugin but to all architects who followed him, notably Hansom and W. W. Wardell. A collection of Gothic artefacts belonging to Rock is preserved in the museum at St John's Seminary, Wonersh, Guildford.
(“Rock, Daniel (1799–1871),” Michael Clifton in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, Accessed August 20, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)
Person TypeIndividual
Last Updated8/7/24
Ware, England, 1856 - 1916, London
London, 1801 - 1890, Birmingham, England
