Book of Common Prayer

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The Book of Common Prayer is the official service book of the Church of England: a single volume, in English, prescribing the words for daily prayer, the Communion, baptism, marriage, the visitation of the sick, and burial — the liturgy that an entire national church was to use in common. Its first edition appeared in 1549, the work above all of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Edward VI. The decisive revision of 1662 remains, in law, the established liturgy of the Church of England to this day.

What the book replaced is the measure of what it was. Before it, English worship ran on a shelf of Latin volumes — the missal that held the Mass, the breviary that held the daily Office, the manual and the pontifical for the occasional rites of baptism, marriage, and burial — together with the intricate regional uses such as the Use of Sarum, the form worked out at Salisbury that governed most of the late-medieval southern English church, with York and Hereford alongside it. These books were many, costly, and handled by the clergy, in a tongue most worshippers did not read. The people heard the rite rather than spoke it. Cranmer compressed that machinery into one book, in the vernacular, with the people’s parts written for the people to say, and the whole of it ordered so that a single priest with a single volume could carry an entire parish through the year. The collapse of the regional uses into one national rite was itself a claim: that the church of a realm should pray, everywhere within it, the same words on the same day.

The 1549 book

The first Book of Common Prayer was authorized by the Act of Uniformity of 1549 and came into use that Whitsunday, in the second year of the boy-king Edward VI, with Cranmer the presiding architect of the whole. He did not invent from nothing. He translated, abridged, and recast what lay open before him — the Sarum books most of all, but also the breviary reform of the Spanish cardinal Quiñones, the German church orders of the Lutheran reform, and the ancient collects of the Latin tradition, which he rendered into an English of balanced clauses and falling cadence that has rarely been equaled. The two-fold daily Office of the medieval church, with its eight services strung across the hours, he folded into two: Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, built from psalms read through in a monthly cycle, scripture read through in a yearly one, canticles, and the Lord’s Prayer. The intent was a worship the laity could follow, join, and carry home.

The whole title turns on two words. Common meant uniform — one rite for the realm, in place of the regional uses — and it meant shared, a service the gathered people prayed together rather than watched a priest perform on their behalf. Around the daily Office the book set the rites that mark the passage of a life: a single English order for the Communion; for baptism, the sacrament of admission, with its renunciations and its signing of the cross; for the churching of women after childbirth; for marriage, with the giving and receiving of the ring; for the visitation and communion of the sick; and for the burial of the dead. To these were appended the Psalter, the litany, a calendar, and a catechism of plain question and answer. One volume now held what a parish needed from the cradle to the grave, and held it in words every worshipper could be expected to learn by heart.

For all that, the 1549 book was a document of compromise, and its Communion service in particular kept much that the older religion would recognize: vestments, the sign of the cross, prayer for the dead, language that could be read as preserving the real presence. Conservative bishops could use it without open violence to their conscience; the more thorough reformers, Continental and English alike, judged it a halting half-measure. It satisfied neither party for long.

The doctrinal turn of 1552

The second Book of Common Prayer, authorized by a fresh Act of Uniformity and issued in 1552, drove the Reformation into the heart of the rite. Where the 1549 book had hedged, the 1552 book chose. The change fell hardest on the Communion, and it was a change of doctrine carried out in the grammar of liturgy. The medieval teaching that the Mass re-offered Christ as a sacrifice upon the altar — the claim that the priest, at the moment of consecration, made present again the one offering of Calvary — was deliberately dismantled. The word Mass was dropped; the altar became a table; the stone slabs were ordered replaced with wooden boards set in the body of the church. The prayer of consecration was broken apart so that no encircling action would suggest a sacrifice offered to God upon a holy stone. The rite was recast to read as a memorial and a thanksgiving — a sharing in the body and blood of Christ received by faith, rather than a sacrifice performed at an altar.

Nothing shows the turn more exactly than the words the priest said as he placed the bread in each communicant’s hands. In 1549 they were: The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life. In 1552 those words were replaced entirely: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving. The first sentence hands over a body; the second commands a remembering. The whole reformed reading of the Supper — closer here to the memorialism that ran from Zwingli through the wider Reformed tradition than to the bodily presence Luther defended, and tuned by Cranmer’s own mature theology and by the Calvinist currents then arriving in England — is compressed into the substitution of one sentence for another. To the same end the so-called Black Rubric was added at the last moment, printed on a separate leaf in black ink because the page had already gone to press: a declaration that kneeling to receive the bread implied no adoration of any bodily presence in it, since Christ’s natural body was in heaven and not there. These were not editorial choices but doctrinal ones, and they were felt as such — by those who welcomed them, and by those for whom an altar turned into a table was a desecration.

The 1552 book had scarcely been a year in use when Edward VI died and his half-sister Mary I, restoring the old religion, swept it away and returned the Latin rite. Cranmer himself was tried and burned at Oxford in 1556. His book would return under Elizabeth and stay in use for centuries; he did not live to see it restored.

Restoration, abolition, and the settlement of 1662

The book’s history is a history of conflict over exactly the questions it encoded. It was imposed by successive Acts of Uniformity, which made its use compulsory and other forms illegal; withdrawn under the Catholic Mary; restored in 1559 under Mary’s successor, in a revision that softened the sharpest edges of 1552 in order to gather as many of the queen’s subjects as possible inside one church. The 1559 settlement performed its inclusiveness in a single famous stroke: it joined the two contradictory formulas of administration end to end, so that the priest now said over the bread both the 1549 sentence and the 1552 one — The body of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee… Take and eat this in remembrance… — letting the communicant hear either a gift received or a death recalled, as conscience inclined. The Black Rubric was quietly dropped. Comprehension, not precision, was the governing aim.

Behind each of these turns stood an Act of Uniformity — the legal instrument that bound the book to the state. Worship in the established church was not left to taste or custom; it was statute. The Acts of 1549, 1552, 1559, and 1662 each prescribed the lawful liturgy, named the penalties for using any other or none, and so made the prayer book the one form of public worship the law would recognize within the realm. A deviation in the service was, in principle, an offense against the crown as well as a matter of conscience. This fusion of liturgy and law is what gave the book its peculiar weight and its peculiar violence: to revise it was to legislate belief for a nation, and to refuse it was to break the law of the land.

That settlement held, contested, for eighty years, until the religious wars of the mid-seventeenth century overturned it. When the Puritan party gained the upper hand, Parliament abolished the Book of Common Prayer outright in 1645 and replaced it with the Directory for Public Worship, a manual of guidance rather than a fixed text, which left the minister to pray in his own words and swept away the set forms the reformers had still thought too liturgical. For the better part of two decades a national church prayed without a national book.

The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought the book back. After the unsuccessful Savoy Conference of 1661, at which Puritan and conformist divines failed to agree on the concessions the dissenters sought, a revised text was fixed by the Act of Uniformity of 1662 and made, once more, the sole legal liturgy of the Church of England. The 1662 book is essentially the 1559 book with adjustments — the Black Rubric reinstated, but now denying only Christ’s corporal presence rather than any presence at all; the lessons updated; the language lightly modernized. Its adoption carried a price counted in men. The Act required of every minister an unfeigned assent to everything the book contained, episcopal ordination, and the renunciation of the Covenant; those who could not give it were to be gone by St Bartholomew’s Day, the twenty-fourth of August, 1662. Some two thousand who would not conform were driven out of their livings in what came to be called the Great Ejection — the event that made English Nonconformity a permanent body standing outside the established church.

Anglicans came to hold the book as more than a manual — as the church’s settled doctrine in the form of prayer, on the old principle that the law of praying establishes the law of believing: what worship says, the church holds. To pray the Book of Common Prayer was to be catechized by one’s own mouth, Sunday upon Sunday, in the doctrine the reformers had built into its sentences. Its critics, from the Puritans onward, read the same pages as a liturgy still too close to Rome — kneeling at Communion, the ring in marriage, the sign of the cross in baptism, the surplice on the minister — and the divide over those ceremonies ran on long after 1662. The Scottish reformers under John Knox, who built the Kirk on a plainer, Genevan pattern, would have none of it; the attempt to force a prayer book on Scotland in 1637 helped touch off the wars that ended in the book’s English abolition.

The prose and its afterlife

Cranmer’s prose is the other reason the book outlived its century. The English Reformation produced two great vernacular monuments — the Book of Common Prayer and, a little later, the King James Bible — and between them they fixed the rhythms of formal English for three hundred years. Phrases first set in the prayer book passed out of the liturgy and into the common stock of the language: the marriage service’s dearly beloved and its vow to hold a spouse till death us do part; the burial service’s committal of the body, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; the general thanksgiving’s the means of grace, and the hope of glory. They are heard now by people who have never opened the book and would not know its name — said at weddings in films, read over coffins of every creed, folded into ordinary speech as proverbs whose source has dropped away.

That achievement owes as much to a writer’s ear as to a reformer’s theology: the book set the words a people would say at their weddings and over their dead, and held them there for centuries.

Texts and scholarship

The standard reading text gathering the principal versions is Brian Cummings’s edition, The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford, 2011), which prints the three layers freshly edited from early copies with full notes and a glossary, and remains the most accessible scholarly entry to the book’s development — see the publisher’s listing. The indispensable life of the book’s maker is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cranmer: A Life (Yale, 1996), which sets the liturgical work inside the politics and theology of the Edwardine reform. For the architecture of the rite and the comparative weight the Latin Mass placed on the same actions Cranmer recast, the encyclopedia.com entry on the Book of Common Prayer gives a compact survey of the successive editions and their doctrinal drift, while the Wikipedia article on the Great Ejection collects the documentation on the clergy driven out under the 1662 Act. The older but still consulted institutional history is Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere’s A New History of the Book of Common Prayer (1901), and Alan Jacobs’s The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, 2013) traces the book’s long life and global spread through the Anglican Communion after the reformers were gone.

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