Book of Common Prayer (1549)
The Book of Common Prayer (1549) was the first Book of Common Prayer and the first complete liturgy in English, authorized for use in the Church of England in the reign of Edward VI. Compiled under the direction of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, it replaced the various medieval Latin uses with a single English book of services. It was imposed by the Act of Uniformity of 1549 (2 & 3 Edw. VI c. 1) and was required to be used from Whitsunday, 9 June 1549.
Preparation and authorization
The book was prepared by a committee of bishops and learned men appointed under the king, which met at Chertsey and later at Windsor; Cranmer had the chief hand in the work, and is credited with its overall editorship and structure. Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity on 21 January 1549, and the Act ordered the new book to come into general compulsory use not later than Whitsunday, 9 June 1549. The book was therefore the liturgical instrument of the English Reformation under Edward VI: for the first time, the public worship of every parish in the realm was to be conducted in English, according to one uniform order.
The preface and its principles
The book opens with a preface, "Concerning the Service of the Church", which sets out the principles of the reform in paraphrase as follows. Worship should be in the vernacular, so that the people could understand and profit from what was said. Scripture should be read in course: the ancient Fathers, the preface argued, had ordered that the whole Bible, or the greatest part of it, should be read over once in the year, and the Psalms read through in course, a pattern that late medieval practice had broken. There should be uniformity: where there had been great diversity, some following one use and some another, now the whole realm should have but one use. And the order should be simple: the rules for finding what was to be read should be few in number and plain and easy to understand.
Contents and sources
The prayer book provided the Daily Office of Morning and Evening Prayer, readings for Sundays and holy days, and services for Holy Communion, public baptism, Confirmation, matrimony, the visitation of the sick, burial, the purification of women after childbirth, and Ash Wednesday, together with a calendar and lectionary; an Ordinal for ordinations was added in 1550. It was based substantially on the medieval Sarum Use, the Latin liturgy developed at Salisbury and widely used in England, simplified and translated, and it also drew on other sources, including a reformed breviary and continental reforming writings. Where the medieval Church had required several books for its services, the new book, with a Bible and Psalter, was nearly all a priest required.
Its Communion office remained closer to the old structure than the book that followed it. It retained, among other older features, a prayer commending to God's mercy those who had departed with the sign of faith and now rested in the sleep of peace, and at the administration it spoke of the body and blood of Christ preserving the communicant's body and soul unto everlasting life. Such features allowed some contemporaries to read the office in a more traditional sense than its compilers intended.
Reception and the Western Rising
The introduction of the new English liturgy was widely unpopular in some parts of the country. Discontent at the change, together with economic grievances, contributed to the Western Rising of 1549, also known as the Prayer Book Rebellion, a popular revolt in Devon and Cornwall in the summer of that year. The enforcement of English-language services in Cornish-speaking areas was among the grievances. The rising was suppressed by government forces, and its leaders were executed.
Supersession
The book was in use for only three years. It satisfied neither conservatives, to whom it seemed too reformed, nor reformers, to whom it seemed too conservative, and it was replaced by the more reformed Book of Common Prayer of 1552, authorized by a second Act of Uniformity. The line of prayer books that followed — 1559, 1604, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer — all descend from the book of 1549, whose language and structure remain visible in the prayer books of today.
See also
References
- Francis Procter and Walter Howard Frere, A New History of the Book of Common Prayer, Macmillan, 1901.
- Brian Cummings (ed.), The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, Oxford University Press, 2011.