Eighteenth-Century Anglican Worship: The Liturgy

Part 1: The Liturgy

In the eighteenth century, liturgy meant the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The colonies used the BCP of the parent church, and Ireland’s 1666 edition was very little different from the main text. The American BCP, of course, does not appear until nearly the end of the century, and differed only in three regards – the use of the Scottish Prayer of Consecration, the incorporation of the common Low Church abridgments of the service into the main text, and the removal of any reference to the monarchy. Other than the authorized liturgy, special prayers and forms of servicer were occasionally issued by authority, but these were less frequent in the 1700s than they had been in the 1560-1689, and usually took the form of additions to the set order of service, or substitutions for some of its elements.

The standard Sunday morning service consisted of Morning Prayer, the Litany, and Ante-Communion – that is the Communion service down to the end of the Prayer for the Church Militant, concluding with a collect and the blessing. This arrangement was not an inherent feature of the liturgy, but one that had been commanded back in the 1560s to discourage the Puritans from abridging the service to make more time for preaching. By insisting that the three morning services were read together, the bishops made it easier for Churchwardens to catch and report wayward parsons. The Table of Lessons was still that of 1560, which had proper Old Testament Lessons for Sundays and Holydays, but the rest of Scripture was read in course. Thus, the lessons for this coming Sunday (9/22) would have been:

Psalm 107 (Of the Day)

Ezekiel 14 (Proper for Trinity 17)

Acts 20 (Of the Day)

Whilst the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel would be those for Trinity 17. The text for the sermon was usually taken from one of the lessons, but this was not invariably the case, as some parsons liked to preach in course, or from whatever texts took their fancy. Sermons lasted between 30 and 60 minutes. This meant that morning service usually lasted one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours depending on sermon length and the musical customs of the parish.

Most of the service was read from the reading desk usually attached to the pulpit, as shown in the photograph below. The three-decker pulpit placed the clerk, who read the responses, lessons, and Epistle in the lowest tier, the parson read the service from the middle level, and he would ascend to the highest to preach. How much the congregation participated in the service is hard to gauge. I believe the traditional picture of a duet of parson and clerk may be exaggerated, and it seems likely that the congregation would have joined in the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. To these may have been added the responses and canticles, at least in some places, though given limited literacy and a shortage of books, wider participation than this seems unlikely. By the end of the century, it was becoming more common to teach the congregation to make the responses and otherwise join in the service. An example of this from the “Long 18th Century” is William Meade teaching the children to make the responses when he was Rector of Christchurch, Alexandria, VA 1811-1815. This was regarded as revolutionary at the time.

Evening Prayer would have been done straight from the BCP, and the requirement of the rubrics and the Canons of 1604 for catechesis after the second lesson seems to have been increasingly ignored in favor of a second sermon. Baptisms were also customarily done after the second lesson at Evensong, though in large parishes they were often inserted into the gap between morning and evening service.

Although the Ante-Communion was read weekly, the Lord’s Supper was celebrated infrequently. Part of the reason for this was the insistence that “a sufficient number” of communicants receive with the priest. In a small parish, there might only be a few dozen communicants, and this tended to militate against frequent communion, especially as devotional manuals of the period encouraged rigorous preparation and fasting reception. The latter did not significantly decline until late in the century, even though the requirement to fast before communion had been eased after the Reformation. Indeed, Archbishop Herring of York promoted evening communions in the 1750s to “cut down on the superstitious practice of fasting before Communion.” A small rural parish, such as James Woodforde’s Weston Longville would have had three or four celebrations a year, but monthly was common in town and city churches. Indeed, a few large town parishes had either weekly communion or multiple celebrations around Easter, etc., to spread the load when a large number of communicants was anticipated. Also, towards the end of this period, there is a slight uptick in the frequency of communion thanks to the Evangelical Movement. As Reformed communion customs had become entrenched, non-communicants usually left the Church after the sermon or the Prayer for the Church, leaving the parson and the communicants in the chancel. This was against the rubrics of the Prayer Book, but perhaps understandable when the service had already lasted approximately two hours.

Marriage and funeral customs seem to have been dictated as much by social rank as by the liturgy, especially in the latter case. The white wedding dress did not appear until the reign of Victoria, though the use of a veil was ancient and remained common. Many communion rails of this period had a bulge in the center-front which was sometimes referred to as “the marrying place” as this was the spot on which marriages were solemnized after banns thrice asked. Other marriages would be performed by license – a custom generally confined to the middle and upper classes, and the military – or occasionally at the behest of the Overseers of the Poor or the Churchwardens in a case where the couple had put the cart before the horse, and the woman was willing to name the father of her illegitimate child. Speaking of which, Sunday services were occasionally enlivened by parishioners doing public penance for their moral lapses.

Funeral customs seem to have confined a service in church to those who could afford a funeral sermon. Otherwise, the office was performed at the graveside soon after death, usually no more than three days. In parishes that were dependent on “galloping curates,” the interval between death and burial could be lengthened a little by the need to wait for the curate to appear the next Lord’s Day, but this was less common than some Victorian commentators liked to make out. The outward trappings of mourning – “weepers” worn around the hat, armbands, etc. – remained from pre-Reformation custom.

One less-than-satisfactory element of eighteenth-century worship was a tendency to abridge the service, especially among Low Churchmen. The 1662 service requires that the Lord’s Prayer be said five or six times in the course of Morning Service, and some of these were customarily omitted. The Prayer for the Church Militant after the sermon would often get the chop too, and it became something of a High Church distinctive to retain its use.

On the whole, eighteenth-century worship provided a sufficient diet of scripture, prayer, praise, and preaching, but was weak in terms of sacramental devotion. However, this defect was largely due to inherited custom and contemporary theological trends rather than any inherent problem with the liturgy, which made provision for Communion on every Sunday and Holyday, as well as in Holy Week, and on Easter Monday and Tuesday, and Whit-Monday and Whit-Tuesday.

[A late 18th-century church interior. The Holy Table is behind the pulpit in the “communion place” reflecting a common way of adopting the two-room plan to a single cell building. Here the pulpit is used both as a liturgical object, and as the division between the nave for praying and preaching, and the chancel for Communion.]

 

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