# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Legg, John Wickham

​LEGG, JOHN WICKHAM (1843–1921), physician and liturgiologist, was born at Alverstoke, Hampshire, 28 December 1843, the third son of George Legg, of Alverstoke, by his wife, Ellen Austin. Samuel Wilberforce [q.v.] was vicar of Alverstoke from 1840 until his appointment as bishop of Oxford in 1845, and the church revival which he began in this parish probably influenced the boy. Educated locally, Wickham Legg, on leaving school, entered University College, London, in order to study medicine, and became a pupil of Sir William Jenner [q.v.]. He won the gold medal of his year, and having qualified M.R.C.S. in 1866 became, on Jenner's recommendation, resident medical attendant to Prince Leopold, afterwards Duke of Albany. He resigned this post in 1867 and went to study at Berlin under Professor Virchow; in 1868 he returned to England in order to become curator of the pathological museum at University College. In the same year he took his M.D. degree at London, and became M.R.C.P.; he was elected F.R.C.P. in 1876. In 1870 he was appointed casualty physician at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and in 1878 was elected assistant physician; he also held various appointments in the medical school of the hospital. In addition, he had a growing consulting practice and made considerable contributions to the literature of medicine, of which his treatise on Haemophilia (1872) is probably the best known. ‘All Wickham Legg's medical writings show the same qualities. The language is well chosen; the main thesis carefully worked out; the literature of the subject has been thoroughly mastered, and in every paper he has something definite to say’ [Memoir, p. 3]. The range of his researches was not less remarkable than his presentation of them.
Nevertheless, in 1887, after two attacks of rheumatic fever, Wickham Legg resolved to abandon medicine; he resigned his appointments, gave away his medical books, and retired from practice. Medicine was not his only interest; as early as 1875 he had been elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, while as a churchman he was greatly influenced by Dr. Henry Parry Liddon. The study of liturgies was a strong interest in his life, and he now had the leisure to bring to it the accurate scientific training which, joined to his brilliance and eagerness for research, had made his reputation as a physician. In this new field of learning he rapidly obtained a European reputation, his first great contribution to liturgical science being his edition (1888) of the Quignon Breviary of 1535. He was one of the prime movers in the foundation, in 1890, of the Henry Bradshaw Society for printing rare liturgical texts. For that society he edited the Westminster Missal (3 vols., 1891–1897), the Second Recension of the Quignon Breviary (2 vols., 1908, 1912), and seven other volumes, and he was chairman of the council from 1897 till his death. His researches in the libraries of Western Europe bore fruit in essays printed in the publications of various learned societies; some are gathered up into his Ecclesio​logical Essays (1905) and Essays Liturgical and Historical (1917). He also edited the Sarum Missal, from three early manuscripts, for the Clarendon Press in 1916. His English Church Life from the Restoration to the Tractarian Movement (1914) is a remarkable collection of evidence to show that in the period from 1660 to 1833 traditional church doctrines and practices prevailed more commonly than is often supposed. In 1913 the university of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D.Litt. in recognition of his liturgical scholarship.
In ecclesiastical as in medical matters Wickham Legg's mind was strongly sceptical of new movements. This made him extremely conservative, and although he was open to conviction, it needed almost a scientific demonstration to convince him. He relied on the general validity of the appeal to history in the church, and as time went on his mistrust of the speculations of liberal theology and his dislike of Anglo-Catholic developments increased. He would tell with keen humour how in 1886 he had been described as ‘one of a conspiracy to restore the ceremonial of fifty years ago’, and probably he vastly preferred that traditional ceremonial, reverently performed, to innovations introduced, without historical inquiry, from current practice in France or Belgium. He held that the present generation lacked both the knowledge and the taste successfully to revise the Prayer Book; consequently he opposed Prayer Book revision in some learned and pungent pamphlets (The Proposed Revision of the Prayer Book, 1909; Shall We Revise the Prayer Book?, 1911). He described the aim of some of the leaders of the movement as being ‘under pretence of revision, to undermine the doctrinal position of the Church of England in favour of the liberals, men who profess a new religion, of such a character that it may be doubted if it have any claim at all to be considered historical Christianity’. He was elected a member of the house of laymen of the province of Canterbury in 1910, his position being that of a strong high churchman of the Tractarian type.
Wickham Legg married in 1872 Eliza Jane, daughter of Richard Houghton, of Sandheys, Great Crosby, near Liverpool. There was one son of the marriage, who was elected a fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1908. On his wife's death in that year Legg removed from his house in Green Street, Park Lane, to Oxford, where he resided till his death on 28 October 1921. He is buried at Saltwood, Kent.
In person Legg was of middle height, portly, with a handsome face and fine head. In 1917 his sight became impaired, and at the end of his life he was almost blind. He possessed a rare charm of manner, was a first-rate raconteur, and a delightful host to a large circle of friends. They included many foreign savants, among them the future Pope Pius XI who, as prefect of the Ambrosian Library, was Legg's guest at Oxford at the commemoration of Roger Bacon in 1914.
[Memoir (by Sir A. E. Garrod), with portrait, in St. Bartholomew's Hospital Reports, vol. lv, 1922; private information; personal knowledge.]
S. L. O.