Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: Ceremonial

Part 4. Ceremonial

We do not think of 1700s Anglicanism as being particularly interested in ceremonial, but there was a good deal left over from Lancelot Andrewes and his school, with their concern for the beauty of holiness. There was a basic decorum to public worship, which included the basic Anglican rule of “sit to listen, stand to praise, kneel to pray” as well as the Prayer Book ceremonies of the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, and kneel for communion remained, but that in itself does not exhaust the topic even in a period when there was no advanced ritual.

Anglican Worship in the 1700s was, at its best, a sober and dignified affair. To our eyes and ears, it was very word-orientated even though the ceremonial revival of the early 1600s had left its mark. The vast majority of Holy Tables were railed off at the east end of the church—the arrangement favored by Laud and his acolytes—though there were exceptions where sight lines or other considerations dictated a deviation from the norm.^[1] Two candlesticks and an alms basin were common ornaments on the Table, though the candles would not usually have been lit except to give light.^[2] Frontals were all but universal, and a weak color sequence in the form of black for Lent, and red or green for the rest of the year remained. The surplice was worn for reading the liturgy, and the gown was all but universal in the pulpit. I sometimes suspect that the Victorian idea that the clergy wore only the gown came from the fact that eighteenth-century formal portraits show clergy in their gowns, as the professional men they were, rather than in the surplice.^[3]

The differentiation between High Church and Low Church lay largely in the degree to which they accepted the ceremonial customs that had become widespread in the early 1600s under the influence of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) and his party. The general tendency through the century was for ceremonial observances to decline, but it should not be thought that Anglican worship was slovenly. Most parsons read the service carefully, took care to observe such customs as were accepted locally, and seem to have been much less inclined than their Victorian successors to impose a rigid uniformity.

What was High Church Ceremonial Like?

So, what were these High Church ceremonies? The most obvious one was the High Church insistence on bowing at the name of Jesus as was required by the 1604 Canons. This was gradually reduced to the familiar bow at the Creed, but it was a common enough ceremony to excite no remark. Bowing to the Holy Table entering and leaving church was also common in the 1700s, and had been commanded in the 1640 Canons, which had never been fully approved. Turning east for the Creed also seems to have remained current in some churches. High Churchmen also favored reading the Ante-Communion from the Holy Table so as to enforce the point that Communion should be celebrated and received by “some at least” every Lord’s Day. Other ceremonials were much less common. Christchurch, Oxford, Durham Cathedral, and a few other places maintained the custom of bowing for the Gloria Patri whenever it appeared in the liturgy. Then there were the informal customs such as standing for the Lord’s Prayer when it appeared in the lessons—a custom Wordsworth remarks on as being observed in Westmoreland, and the buying of bunches of ‘palm’ (pussywillow) for Palm Sunday, though these would not have been brought into Church.^[4]

[Coxwold, N. R. Yorks. The Church here is only slightly Victorianized with a 19^th-century altar and reredos. Most of the late-18^th century furnishings survive, though the Royal arms seem to be cast iron, and early Victorian; a nice survival.]

In parish churches, worship had two foci—the pulpit, which frequently incorporated the reading desk, the clerk’s seat, and even the vicarage pew, and the Holy Table, and they usually served as the focus for separate liturgical spaces. The nave, used for Morning and Evening Prayer, had the pulpit as its liturgical focus, whilst the chancel, used for the Lord’s Supper, focussed on the Holy Table. The pulpit was usually placed a short distance down the nave to aid audibility, and there was a tendency for the pews to orientate towards it so that some members of the congregation would sit with their back to the chancel, especially when the pews were double-sided. Chancel screens survived widely even after the depredations of the Civil War and were used to divide the building into two rooms.

[An early-nineteenth-century American view of Holy Communion, but 18^th-century norms still obtained]

Where the population did not place undue pressure on the seating capacity of the Church, the seating in the chancel would be reserved for communicants but it might also be used as free seats on ordinary Sundays.^[5] Altar tables, as they were commonly called, tended to be short, allowing room for the celebrant to stand at the north end without being pushed off into a corner of the chancel. Despite the relative infrequency of Communion, a good deal of care was given to its appointments even if they were nothing more than the required carpet and fair linen. Communion rails were often three-sided to allow a good number of communicants to gather around the Table for the celebration and sometimes had a bulge in the center front for the parson to stand in when officiating at marriages. This was occasionally exaggerated, as at Coxwold, Yorks., to prove a rail capable of accommodating large numbers of communicants. It seems to have been relatively common for the first rail of communicants to kneel at the altar from the General Confession until they had received, whilst others knelt at benches in the chancel waiting their turn.^[6] As a rule, each rail of communicants would have been dismissed together. The elements would have been leavened bread and undiluted wine, and due to this, and the number of communicants, patens tended to be larger than we see today, and multiple communion cups and flagons were common in larger parishes.^[7]

[The chancel at Coxwold, Yorks, N.R.]

Eighteenth-century Anglican worship was simple but not necessarily irreverent as the Victorians so often implied. The lack of ceremonial, the relative invisibility of the altar—in some sense a hangover from the Middle Ages, the incorporation of the social hierarchy into the church’s seating arrangements, and the disorderly arrangement of the nave with pews running “t’other and which” all offended Victorian sensibilities. However, this reflected the daily realities of an agricultural Britain still dominated by the squirarchy, but it was of its time and place which is not something that can be said for the more extravagant outgrowths of liturgical Romanticism which often look like alien imports when grafted onto the Anglican Liturgy.

Notes

1. – See “The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship” by G.W.O. Addleshaw, and William Etchells, Faber and Faber 1950. ↑
2. – Their presence is often attested to by newspaper reports of their being stolen! ↑
3. – This was a common custom in Lutheran Europe too. The overwhelming majority of portraits of Danish and Norwegian clergy of this period, where the surplice or rochet was also used, show them in black robe and ruff. ↑
4. – Percy Dearmer, “The Parson’s Handbook” (12^th edition, London, 1932) gives a rundown of these old customs. ↑
5. – Pews rents were a relatively painless way of raising funds and became common after the reformation with families paying for the privilege of erecting a pew in the church. The ‘private enterprise’ aspect to pews often made for a heterogeneous set of furnishings, though eighteenth century re-pewing often more uniform. ↑
6. – This custom was also mentioned in the 1685 Ritual of the Danish Church. ↑
7. – A set of communion plate in this period usually consisted of a paten, two chalices, and one or two flagons. Manuals of this period recommend the provision of quite large quantities of wine, suggesting that the present polite lady-like slip from the chalice is a Victorian custom. ↑