William Edward Scudamore (1813-1881) was a prominent
Church of England priest, historian, liturgist, chaplain, and devotional author. His popular devotional manual Steps to the Altar reached its sixty-seventh edition in 1887, and was used extensively in North America and on the Indian subcontinent in addition to in Great Britain.
Scudamore was a nephew of the eminent physician of
gout Sir
Charles Scudamore. Educated initially in Belgium, he matriculated at
St. John's College, Cambridge in 1831, where he received the degrees of B.A. (1835) and M.A. (1838).[1] He was admitted as a fellow of the college on March 14, 1837. Scudamore was active in the organization of women's religious life in the Church of England, serving as chaplain to a church institution for women first at
Shipmeadow in
Suffolk and then at
Ditchingham in Norfolk where he was rector of St. Mary's Church. This became the
Community of All Hallows, whose Ditchingham convent closed in April 2018.
A moderate Anglo-Catholic, Scudamore entered into public controversy with the
English Church Union over church calendar revision, wafer-bread, and non-communicating attendance at the Holy Communion.