John Wickham Legg

John Wickham Legg (1843-1921) was the third son of the printer and bookseller George Legg, and was born at Alverstoke near Portsmouth in Hampshire, England, on 28 December 1843. His schooling was at Winchester College and from there he went to New College, Oxford and subsequently opted to read Medicine at University College, London, where he studied under Sir William Jenner. Having qualified as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons, he was recommended by Jenner for the post of medical attendant to Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria's fourth son, later styled Duke of Albany, a haemophiliac. Though the appointment lasted only a year, the young Legg became a favourite of the Prince's wife and daughter, Princess Helen and Princess Alice.

The year 1867 brought Legg to studies in Berlin and upon his return he obtained his M.D. and membership of the Royal College of Physicians and was appointed curator of the Pathological Museum at University College. He began to publish and in 1870 became Casualty Physician at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London. Perhaps to relieve the stress of this work, about this time he took up liturgical studies as a hobby.

In 1872 Legg married Eliza Jane Houghton and a son, Leopold, was born to this happy union in 1877.

The medical publications continued, but the liturgical studies also progressed. Symptomatic of the dual interests was the fact that in 1875 he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the following year of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1878 he became Assistant Physician at Bart's and the following year began to lecture on Pathology. The liturgical hobby surfaced publicly in 1879 when he became a founder member of the re-established St Paul's Ecclesiological Society and with a 1881 essay on liturgical colours. The medical career was still unflagging, for in 1883 he gave the Bradshaw Lecture to the Royal College of Physicians on cardiac aneurysms. Subsequently two attacks of rheumatic fever led to a dramatic development: in 1887 Legg resigned his offices and gave away his medical books, retiring for the winter to Cannes.

In 1888 Legg faced the public with the firstfruits of a series of editions he was to produce in the next three decades: an edition with Cambridge University Press of the reformed breviary devised and published by Cardinal Quinonez ("Quignonez" or "Quignon") in 1535.

Having developed a taste for this line of work, Legg dedicated his energies, social graces and connections to consolidating it. He was the prime mover behind the foundation in 1890 of the Henry Bradshaw Society, which on the model of the Surtees Society aimed at published manuscripts and rare printed works to subscribing members. Fittingly enough for a Society inaugurated in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, Legg contributed as its first publication a monumental edition of the manuscript Westminster Missal.

Legg's publications continued until the last major work, the edition of the Sarum Missal which he published with Oxford University Press in 1916. He died at the home of his son, Leopold, now a Fellow of New College, Oxford, on 28 October 1921 and was buried in Saltwood, Kent.

Sources

A. Ward & C. Johnson, "John Wickham Legg (1843-1921)", in "Ephemerides Liturgicae" 97 (1983) 70-84 (with Legg's bibliography).