There has been a lot of scholarship that has mapped the transition from the end of late Medieval England into Early Modern England.  Reformation scholars have largely focussed their writing on mapping thought and political power but attempts to consider the service of the church in its various stages of Reformation are comparatively minimal.  On the 26^th July at 5pm we will be staging a reconstruction of the 1549 liturgy in St. Bartholomew’s, Smithfield.  This will be the second in a series of historic services, the first was a Sarum Mass.

Most attempts to consider the 1549 Prayer Book, the first prayer book, adamantly view it as the first in a series of increasingly Reformed liturgical, or pseudo-liturgical, works: the Prayer Books of 1549, 1552, 1559, with the English Reformation reaching its most Protestant in 1645 with the “Directory For The Publike Worſhip Of God”.  However, in attempting to envision how the 1549 should be executed, how the script should be read, it has become clear that to think of it in such Puritanical terms is not helpful.  In fact, it is the turning point from High Medieval English liturgy to the more Reformed liturgies, and as such contains elements of both.  Cranmer presents most of the sections that come to characterise much of the Prayer Book but disguises it largely in the form of the traditional Mass.

The liturgical revolution that took place began sometime before 1549.  Henry VIII and Edward, following the break with Rome, had already made several Reforming changes – Uses except Sarum were supressed, Monasteries closed and thus their Uses also suppressed, the Pope Removed from the old Canon, the provision for English readings, Creed and Lord’s Prayer, Reforming sermons, the English Litany, and the English Communion Rite.  These were all intended to supplement or to be inserted within the Sarum Mass.  As such many of the big changes that we think of as characterising this early semi-Reformed liturgy had already happened.

I provide the following table showing the similarities and differences between the main players in this liturgical transition:

I also add a comparison of the 1549 Prayer Book versus the 1552 Prayer Book for reference:

The 1549 takes on a completely different structure to the 1552, and is ostensibly more similar to the Sarum Mass.  It follows the same basic order, with all the important elements in their traditional places.  In essence, it is a simplified version of the of the Sarum Mass plus the 1548 insert.  Indeed, many of the parts from Sarum missing from 1549 would be very straightforward to add back in – the rubrics do not mention the use of Lavabo prayers, the Secret, or the Last Gospel, for example.  The episcopal injunctions make it more than clear that clergy were continuing to make use of the old rubrics, with particular reference to setting the altar and the consecrated sacrament.¹

It seems that in many places even pax bredes remained in use for a little while after 1549.²

In larger churches with multiple clergy, it had become custom for multiple masses to go on simultaneously, these could include chantry masses or votive mass cycles, for example.These simultaneous masses, however, were not in the spirit of the Reformation (reformers deplored lay people hopping from one elevation to another; in Late Medieval folk-theology more Mass was directly equated with more grace).  But they did not ban simultaneous services.  Clerics, perhaps deliberately, interpreted this new prayer book in the context of the old liturgy which they knew, and adapted it to their standard customs.  In collegiate churches, extra clergy celebrated votive ante-Communions at side altars, a 1549-flavoured Missa Sicca, if you will, as well as votive Communions.³

What this means in practical terms is that we will interpret the 1549 Prayer Book as much like Sarum as reasonably possibly.  The Prayer Book’s rubrics are minimal, and as such appear to assume that clergy will do what they always have done, except when things are explicitly banned, most notably elevations.  We will follow all the instructions in the Prayer Book’s rubrics to the letter, but where it fails to explain how to perform the service (which is most of the time), the ritual will adopted from Sarum.  We are in the fortunate position of having just put together a Sarum Mass reconstruction (more info here), and putting these two projects side-by-side will hopefully make sense of them in many ways.

There is also the topic of music to address, which will be covered in a separate blog post.  To give a brief overview, the 1549 possesses its own individual repertoire coming largely from the Wanley and Lumley Partbooks, and this too in many ways exhibits the same traits as above.  This newly composed music is now in English, but much of the repertoire follows traditional forms; indeed, it even includes contrafactums of older works.  Moreover, the monody of John Merbecke is thought to be one surviving example of how plainsong was adapted for and reinvigorated for the new liturgy.