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…
Part 2: Music Anglicanism in the 1700s had two distinct musical traditions, which, for the sake of convenience I will call “cathedral” and “parish.” In using those terms, it must be remembered that the cathedral style of worship was also maintained by other places having a choral foundation including the Chapel Royal, the Royal Peculiars…
Part 3. Music in the Parish Church By contrast to the cathedrals, where a full choral establishment of organist, lay-clerks, and choristers was the norm, the musical resources of parishes churches were much more various. Some small and remote parishes simply had a clerk who would line out the metrical psalms that punctuated 1700s Anglican…
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…
Part 5. Architecture Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of England’s churches were mediaeval structures swiftly adapted to reformed worship in 1559-1562, with the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book and the accompanying Elizabethan Injunctions. These had then been subjected to a process of slow evolution over the next two centuries as reformed worship matured and…