Daniel Rock

Daniel Rock (1799-1871), English Roman Catholic priest and ecclesiologist, was born at Liverpool on the 31st of August 1 799, and educated at St Edmund's College, Ware, Herts, and at the English College, Rome. He was ordained priest in 1824 and successively appointed chaplain to the 16th earl of Shrewsbury at Alton Towers, Staffordshire, and priest in charge of the Roman Catholic congregation at Buckland, near Faringdon in Berkshire. After the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, in which he had taken an active part, Rock was elected a canon of St George's Cathedral, Southwark. He was greatly interested in medieval art, and, having gone to live at South Kensington in 1864, in order to be near the museum, was of great assistance to the authorities there. He died on the 28th of November 1871.

Rock's principal works are: Hierurgia, or the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass expounded (London, 1833; revised edition by W. H. J. Weale, 1893), an exhaustive account of the Eucharistic rites in the Latin, Greek and Oriental Churches, and illustrated from early paintings, sculptures and inscriptions; 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 the Coming of the Normans (3 vols., 1849-54; new edition by G. W. Hart and W. H. Frere, London, 1903).

See the Memoir prefixed to Hart & Frere's edition of The Church of Our Fathers by the Rev. B. W. Kelly; a full list of his writings is given in J. Gillow's Bibl. Diet. of the Engl. Catholics, vol. v. p. 436.