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 — missal, breviary, manual, the intricate regional rites such as the Use of Sarum — handled by the clergy, in a tongue most worshippers did not read. Cranmer compressed that machinery into one book, in the vernacular, with the people’s parts written for the people to say. The Communion service was reworked along reformed lines: the medieval doctrine that the Mass re-offered Christ as a sacrifice was deliberately dismantled, and the 1552 revision pressed the change further, recasting the rite so that it read as a memorial and a thanksgiving rather than a sacrifice on an altar. These were not editorial choices but doctrinal ones, and they were felt as such.

The book’s history is a history of conflict over exactly that. It was imposed by successive Acts of Uniformity, which made its use compulsory and other forms illegal; it was withdrawn under the Catholic Mary, restored and softened under Elizabeth in 1559, abolished during the Puritan ascendancy of the mid-seventeenth century, and reinstated at the Restoration in the 1662 text, whose adoption drove some two thousand ministers who would not conform out of their livings. Anglicans came to hold the book as more than a manual — as the church’s settled doctrine in the form of prayer, the rule that worship itself teaches belief. Its critics, from the Puritans onward, read the same pages as a liturgy still too close to Rome.

Cranmer’s prose is the other reason the book outlived its century. Phrases first fixed there — “dearly beloved,” “till death us do part,” “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” “the means of grace, and the hope of glory” — passed out of the liturgy and into the common stock of the English language, shaping its cadences as the King James Bible did. Whether that achievement is owed to a reformer’s theology or a writer’s ear is a question the book does not answer; it simply set the words a people would say at their weddings and over their dead, and held them there for centuries.

→ Related: Liturgy · Use Of Sarum · Reformed Christianity · The Reformation · John Knox