Use of Sarum

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The Use of Sarum was the local form of the Latin liturgy worked out at Salisbury Cathedral in the centuries after the Norman Conquest, and from there spread until it governed the worship of most of late-medieval England. A “use” in this sense is not a separate rite but a regional manner of doing the one Roman Rite: the same Mass and Office, ordered to a particular cathedral’s calendar, ceremonial, and books — which feast falls on which day, how many ministers serve the altar, when the procession moves and where it stops. Sarum is simply the most fully recorded and most widely copied of the English uses, with York, Hereford, and others alongside it.

What a “use” is

The distinction is exact and worth holding onto, because it is the hinge of the whole subject. The body of the Mass and of the daily round of the Office was everywhere the same — the same Canon spoken over the bread and the cup, the same psalter sung through in its weekly cycle, the same proper texts for the seasons of the year. What a use varied was not that core but its setting: the diocesan calendar, with its choice of which saints were kept and at what rank; the ceremonial — the number of ministers, the routing of processions, the gestures of celebrant and deacon, the points at which the choir bowed or turned; and the books that wrote all of this down. To pray according to the Use of Sarum was to keep the Roman Rite in the Salisbury manner, the way an orchestra keeps a score in one conductor’s reading. Medieval England knew several such readings at once. Besides Sarum there were the Uses of York and Hereford, and lesser local orders attached to Lincoln, St Paul’s in London, Wells, and Bangor; the religious orders kept their own. What set Sarum apart was not antiquity or authority so much as documentation and copy: it left the fullest paper trail and was reproduced in the greatest quantity, until by the eve of the Reformation it had become, in practice, the standard liturgy of the southern English church.

Origins and the question of St Osmund

Its origins are conventionally traced to the reorganization of Salisbury’s worship under its first Norman bishops and, by tradition, to St Osmund — a Norman who came to England in the Conqueror’s settlement, served as chancellor, and held the see from 1078 until his death in 1099. The medieval church kept his name attached to the use as its founder, and the nineteenth century took the ascription largely at face value. Scholars now treat it cautiously, and for a concrete reason: no liturgical rule or innovation is credited to Osmund in any source earlier than the fourteenth century, which is to say the attribution appears only after the use was already two hundred years grown. The figure who can actually be documented at the center of the work is Richard Poore — dean of Salisbury from 1198 and bishop from 1217 to 1228 — under whom the governing customary was first issued, before 1220, and under whom the cathedral itself was moved off the cramped, waterless hilltop of Old Sarum to the meadow site of New Salisbury where the present church rose.

The elaborate Sarum Use that survives in manuscript is therefore best read not as one founder’s design but as the product of slow accretion across the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — a body of practice that thickened decade by decade as the canons of a wealthy secular cathedral worked out, refined, and wrote down exactly how their worship was to be done. The attachment of Osmund’s name was a later church’s way of giving an organic growth a single saintly origin. That is a common shape in the history of institutions, and it does not diminish what the canons of Salisbury made; it only relocates the making from one bishop’s lifetime to four or five generations of careful hands.

The books

What is certain is its reach, and the instrument of that reach was a shelf of books. The Sarum corpus is unusually complete, and its parts had defined jobs. The Missal carried the Mass; the Breviary carried the Office, the eight hours of psalmody and reading that structured the day from Matins to Compline. The Gradual and Antiphonal held the sung music for Mass and Office; the Processional held the chants and rubrics for the frequent processions; the Manual held the occasional offices a parish needed — baptism, marriage, the visitation of the sick, burial. Governing all of these stood two regulating texts that were the real engine of the use. The Consuetudinary, or Customary, set out the ceremonial: it assigned each minister his actions and movements, the choreography of the choir, the staging of the great feasts. The Ordinal — also called the Directorium or, in its later printed form, the Pie (the Pica) — showed how the parts fitted together across the year and resolved the calendar’s collisions, the daily puzzle of which feast outranked which when two fell together. Roughly, the Ordinal governed the rite and the Consuetudinary the ceremonial; together they told a clergyman not only what to say but precisely how, where, and when to move while saying it.

By the close of the Middle Ages these books had been adopted far beyond the diocese. In 1542 the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury imposed the Sarum Use across the whole southern province, ratifying in law what had already become custom. It had spread into Scotland — kept at Moray by the 1240s — and into parts of Ireland and Wales, and it became the natural template against which the other English uses defined themselves. The printing press accelerated everything. The first printed edition of the Sarum Mass was produced for William Caxton in 1487 by the Parisian printer Guillaume Maynyal, a landmark volume — among the earliest English liturgical books printed in two colors, red and black, and the first to carry Caxton’s woodcut device; its sole surviving copy is the Lyme Caxton Missal. The technical demands of two-color liturgical printing were such that the English trade leaned on the Continent, and the great presses of Paris and Rouen, as of Venice and Basel and Louvain, turned out Sarum missals and breviaries in quantity for the English market through the opening decades of the sixteenth century. By then the use was a printed, mass-produced standard, carried in every well-found southern church.

Sarum and the Reformation

That standing made Sarum the immediate background to the English Reformation. When Thomas Cranmer assembled the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, he worked with the Sarum service-books open before him, translating, compressing, and pruning what he found; the Sarum Missal and Breviary were, of all his materials, first and foremost. He took the shape of the Communion service, the structure of Mattins and Evensong distilled out of the eight monastic hours, the collects, and much of the calendar from the Salisbury books, set them in English, and reordered the doctrine — so that a good deal of the cadence of Anglican worship descends, by that route, from Salisbury, even as its theology was deliberately changed. Cranmer’s own preface to the 1549 book named the diversity of the Salisbury, Hereford, Bangor, York, and Lincoln uses as the confusion that his single book would replace — a passage that has shaped how later readers picture the medieval English liturgical landscape, sometimes more tidily than the manuscripts warrant.

The Latin Use itself was suppressed under Edward VI as the Prayer Book was made compulsory by Act of Uniformity, briefly restored when Mary returned the realm to Rome in 1553, and then set aside again at the Elizabethan settlement of 1559. It did not vanish at once. The 1570 bull Quo Primum of Pius V, which fixed the Roman Missal for the Latin West, explicitly preserved any rite that could show two hundred years of continuous use — a clause under which Sarum, in principle, might have endured. In practice the rupture in England was too complete, but the use survived in the libraries that kept the printed and manuscript books, in the memory of recusant Catholic households who kept the old worship in private chapels into the seventeenth century, and finally in the work of nineteenth-century scholars who reconstructed it.

Recovery and scholarship

The recovery began as a devotional impulse and matured into a discipline. In the 1840s the leaders of the Oxford Movement — Newman, Keble, Pusey — discussed producing an edition of the Sarum Breviary in Latin and English; the architect A. W. N. Pugin, building churches for both the Anglican revival and the restored Roman mission, fitted them with the sedilia and screens a Sarum ceremonial required. The serious editorial work followed. Francis H. Dickinson issued his great edition of the Missale ad usum Sarum at Burntisland between 1861 and 1883, taking the 1526 Paris missal of François Regnault as his base and collating it against earlier printings. Francis Procter and Christopher Wordsworth edited the Breviarium Sarisburiense in three volumes from 1879 to 1886, with help from the Cambridge librarian Henry Bradshaw, whose name was given in 1890 to the Henry Bradshaw Society, founded for the editing of rare liturgical texts and still the chief publisher of such editions. Walter Howard Frere then produced the foundational modern study, The Use of Sarum, in two volumes (1898 and 1901), printing the Consuetudinary and Customary and the Ordinal and Tonal with the apparatus that made them usable. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the work has continued in projects such as the Sarum Customary Online and William Renwick’s complete edition of the rite, alongside the standard reference history of the field, Richard Pfaff’s The Liturgy in Medieval England: A History (Cambridge, 2009), which treats Sarum at its most elaborate before turning to York, Hereford, Lincoln, St Paul’s, and Wells, and which cautions against reading Cranmer’s preface as a neutral map of what actually stood before it. A review essay placing Pfaff’s synthesis in the longer arc of the discipline appears in The Innes Review.

The ceremonial and its later reception

The thing that made Sarum worth recovering, and that gives it its place at the edge of Western esotericism, is the texture of its ceremonial. Set against the comparative restraint of the Roman practice that Trent would later standardize in the Tridentine Mass, Sarum was elaborate to a degree that still surprises. Its processions were many, and the one before High Mass on Sundays was a set piece — clergy and choir moving through the church in fixed order, pausing at appointed stations, the asperges sprinkling the people with holy water as they went. The greater feasts could call for ranks of ministers a modern eye finds astonishing: three, five, or seven deacons and as many subdeacons, multiple thurifers, several cross-bearers, each with a place and a path. The use kept a developed sequence of vestment colors for the seasons and feasts, though a parish too poor for several sets simply used what it had. And it preserved in fine detail the older liturgical practice of blessing and consecration — the sacramentals, as distinct from the sacraments proper: the consecration of water, salt, and oil, the blessing of objects, the exorcisms that purified the matter of worship before use, the precise choreography of vested ministers around the altar.

It was this ceremonial vocabulary — the grammar of how sacred action is staged, how words and gestures and consecrated matter are ordered into an efficacious sequence — that drew the attention of the ritualists and occult revivalists of the nineteenth century when they wanted an English ceremonial pedigree. The blessings and consecrations of the medieval church, recorded in such close detail in the Sarum books, sat at the historical root from which the learned ceremonial magic of the later medieval and early-modern periods partly grew, and the revivalists looked back to that root for atmosphere and authority. The borrowing was overwhelmingly one of aesthetics: a sense of how a rite is built and carried, of the weight that deliberate, slow, fully scored action can bear. It would overstate the case badly to call Sarum a magical source in any operative sense. The Sarum books are a record of the church’s public worship — its Mass for the dead and its festal processions, its washing of the celebrant’s hands and its stations of the cross — and nothing in them was meant or used as an instrument outside that frame.

What it offered, and still offers the historian, is the most complete picture of how one medieval church actually prayed — the unhurried, gesture-by-gesture record of a worship that filled the English year for four centuries before it was translated, abridged, and let go.

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