1549 Book of Common Prayer
Official use of Thomas Cranmer’s Prayer Book was not compulsory until Pentecost June 9, 1549, but eager evangelicals got a jump on using it as early as March of that year. It spread cautiously across the Church of England leading up to its official Whitsunday launch at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, with Archbishop Cranmer as celebrant. This was then followed by a series of supporting sermons the following week at St. Paul’s Cross, an outdoor pulpit at the cathedral that became the most important preaching venue in Tudor England. The 1549 Prayer Book followed from the 1544 English Litany commanded by Henry VIII (prayers asking for divine assistance in preparation for the invasion of France), and the “The Order of the Communion” in 1548, a rite in English for communion from the reserved sacrament that abolished the requirement for confession to a priest before communion, and restored the chalice to the laity.
In 1548 the task of writing a Book of Common Prayer was given to a committee of six bishops and six other learned men (mostly Tudor humanists) under Cranmer’s leadership. A Parliamentary Act of Uniformity, January 21, 1549, made the new book official, replacing the various Latin rites with one book in the English vernacular to be used by everyone. The new book had a very rocky start. The original committee was divided in its support, and the bishops in the House of Lords just barely voted for its adoption. Thomas Cranmer was the only name attached to the 1549 Book of Common Prayer in the Parliamentary action, and it is clear that he was its main author.
“With an inexcusable sadness, between Saturday night and a Monday morning at Pentecost 1549, the English liturgical tradition of nearly a thousand years was altogether overturned” (Gregory Dix). The fact that the new book was not Protestant enough would be corrected in a few years, but the theology was not the primary concern of the common people who didn’t know Latin, and had only heard the mass in Latin. The intended purpose of worship in “common” English was to promote participation and engagement of all the people of God. Cranmer first experienced Lutheran worship on a visit to Nuremberg in 1532 (where he secretly married the niece of the German reformer Andreas Osiander), and in the 1530s he was converted to the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch, he came to firm conclusions about the nature of Holy Communion between 1546 and 1547. Justification by faith was the driving force for Cranmer’s liturgical reforms of the 1549 and 1552 Books of Common Prayer (the “rebar” of Thomas Cranmer’s thinking, according to Zac Hicks).
The 1549 Prayer Book was a moderate book designed to wean Catholics from Medieval Worship and guide them into Protestantism, while at the same time hoping to buy more time with ardent Protestants who wanted more reform. General Seminary professor Robert Wright cites five legacies of Cranmer’s first Prayer Book: 1) Prayer in English vernacular, 2) dignified worship without sentimentality, 3) prayer from one book for all occasions of life, 4) “prayer that could be doctrinally comprehensive without causing overmuch offense,” and 5) prayer that is participatory for clergy and laity alike, with the laity receiving both the bread and the wine of communion. Perhaps most notable was the consolidation of the many monastic prayer offices of the Medieval church into Morning and Evening Prayer (Matins and Evensong) with a new focus on the power of reading and hearing the Bible - “that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them”). A table of lessons to be read exposed the Church of England to the whole of the Bible on a regular basis - the New Testament (except for only two chapters of Revelation) was to be read every four months, the Old Testament starting with Genesis would be read once a year, and all 150 Psalms read and heard every month.
Even though the 1549 Book of Common Prayer couldn’t have been more different from Medieval Catholic worship in England, it was clearly meant to be a first step towards a much stronger and much more settled Reformation book. It prepared the ground for Cranmer’s “immortal bequest,” the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. In the 1552 version (that became the 1559 and then the 1662 versions, with a few minor changes), the sweeping-clean of all the vestiges of transubstantiation was completed, and all the unbiblical and extra biblical teachings of medieval Catholicism were removed. It would no longer use the word “mass” for the Lord’s Supper, and wooden communion tables “with legs” replaced stone high altars. The 1552 Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Articles of Religion, and the Tudor Homilies (as well as Cranmer’s long awaited 1550 “Defense of the true and Catholic doctrine of the sacrament of the body and blood of our saviour Christ”), demonstrates Cranmer’s wholehearted commitment to all the key doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, and to an understanding of “real presence” in the hearts and affections of those who receive the grace of the sacrament by faith, not in the bread and wine prayed over by a magic-working priest.
Consulted:
The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Diarmaid MacCulloch
Thomas Cranmer, Diarmaid MacCulloch
“Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered,” Ashley Null (Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History, Ed. Crankshaw & Gross)
“Thomas Cranmer", Ashley Null (Christian Theologies of the Sacraments, Ed. Holcomb and Johnson)
“The First Prayer Book of 1549,” J. Robert Wright
A History of Anglican Liturgy, G. J. Cuming