My friend Bill East, who has died aged 72, was a teacher who became first an Anglican vicar and then a Catholic priest. He excelled as a Latinist and made a substantial contribution to a new translation of the Catholic Missal, the book of prayers and instructions for mass.
Bill was born in Maidenhead to Albert “Gordon” East, and Catherine (nee Kinder), both of whom worked on fairgrounds in London and the south-east.
He attended Reading school and then studied English at Keble College, Oxford, graduating in 1969. That year he also married Betty Parkhurst, whom he had met at a Shakespeare summer school in Stratford-on-Avon. Bill then went to Yale University, where he gained an MPhil and a DPhil in medieval studies.
Bill’s first career was as a teacher in the English department at University College Cork (1972-76), where he delivered highly popular lectures on Chaucer and introduced the study of Old Norse.
Then he decided to train for the Anglican ministry and returned to Oxford, to St Stephen’s House. He was ordained in 1979 and spent 11 years serving at St Luke’s parish church in Pallion, Sunderland. In 1994 Bill and Betty were both received into the Catholic Church. Having been ordained at Our Lady’s in Acomb, York, Bill served in the parish until 2000, when he moved to St Joseph’s in Pickering, staying there for 19 years.
I met Bill in 1971, in the office of our common mentor, Malcolm Parkes, at Keble College, Oxford, and we became firm friends, united by a love of medieval culture and much else.
Bill wrote two student guides to Chaucer: Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale (1980) and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (1981), and three books of homilies on the Gospels. He also wrote many humorous poems for his friends, in the styles of authors from Chaucer to Milton.
He was an ardent member of the Walsingham Association, which encourages pilgrimages to the Marian shrine in Norfolk. And from 2003 to 2011 he helped the International Commission on English in the Liturgy with its new translation of the Missal, receiving praise from the ICEL’s executive director, Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth, for his ease of style and accuracy.
Bill retired in 2018, leaving Pickering to live in York, where he named his home Iona House.
He is survived by Betty, his sons, James and Charles, his granddaughter, Sophie, and his brother John.
