Book of Common Prayer

• 1. Introduction

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  On Christmas Day 1657, soldiers surrounded a chapel in London while worshippers knelt to receive communion from the Book of Common Prayer. John Evelyn recorded the moment in his diary. The soldiers held their muskets against the congregation, he wrote, 'as if they would have shot us at the altar.' The rite that day was already more than a century old. It came from a book banned, rewritten, and fought over since its first printing in 1549. Why would armed men be sent to stop people saying prayers together? Who shaped the words in that book, and why did they matter enough to provoke violence? And how did a text banned at home come to be used in churches across the world?

• 2. Cranmer's Careful Wording

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  Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, began his career as a conservative humanist and an admirer of Erasmus. He later became the architect of the prayer book's language. After 1531, his contacts with reformers from continental Europe changed his outlook. His first English-language service, the Exhortation and Litany, published in 1544, borrowed heavily from Martin Luther's Litany and Myles Coverdale's New Testament. It reduced the traditional role of saints to just three petitions, the earliest sign of his shifting Protestant sympathies.

  Cranmer's theology rested on justification by faith and predestination, doctrines that shaped every sacrament in the book. He held that only God's elect received the actual grace of baptism or communion; everyone else received only the outward form. Faith itself, in his view, was the gift that joined the visible sign to its inward grace. This position placed him with the Reformed churches and against both Roman Catholic and Lutheran teaching.

  Parliament passed the Act of Uniformity on the 21st of January 1549. It required the new prayer book to be in use everywhere by Whitsunday, the 9th of June. That 1549 book still kept the term Mass in its title. The service was called 'The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass.' Stone altars remained, clergy still wore traditional vestments, and priests placed the wafer directly into worshippers' mouths. Yet historians describe the 1549 book as a radical departure. It eliminated almost everything that had been central to lay worship of the Eucharist before the Reformation.

  In the 1549 rite, the words spoken during communion stayed deliberately ambiguous. They could be read as identifying the bread with Christ's body, or as a prayer for spiritual reception through faith. By 1552, any mention of Christ's body was stripped from those words, and ordinary bread replaced the communion wafer. The book explained this was done 'to take away the superstition which any person hath, or might have.' The Privy Council also ordered a new addition, the Black Rubric, denying any 'real and essential presence... of Christ's natural flesh and blood' in the sacrament.

  That rubric would vanish from the 1559 book and return, reworded, in 1662, still hedging on the same question of Christ's presence.

• 3. A Book Banned and Restored

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  At Flixton in Suffolk, parishioners brought their own copies of the Book of Common Prayer to church, determined to shame their vicar into using it. They eventually forced him out. Roughly 290 editions of the book were printed between 1549 and 1642. By the time of the English Civil War, something like half a million copies were estimated to be in circulation.

  That devotion did not protect the book from politics. Edward VI died in 1553, and his half-sister Mary I restored Roman Catholic worship within months, reinstating altars, roods, and statues of saints. Thomas Cranmer paid for his role in the Reformation by being burned at the stake on the 21st of March 1556.

  Mary died in 1558, and the prayer book resurfaced under Elizabeth I, only to face a harsher reversal decades later. Parliament outlawed it outright in 1645 during the English Civil War. It was replaced with the Directory of Public Worship, a set of instructions rather than a liturgy. The Directory made no provision at all for burial services, so clergy kept using the banned prayer book in secret for funerals.

  Charles I was executed in 1649, and the Commonwealth under Lord Protector Cromwell governed without the prayer book until shortly after the monarchy's restoration. The 1662 edition finally emerged two years after that restoration, following the Savoy Conference between twelve bishops and Presbyterian representatives such as Richard Baxter. Not every clergyman could accept the new book. In what became known as the Great Ejection, 936 ministers were deprived of their positions rather than conform.

  Some of the fiercest opposition to the book, though, had already broken out decades earlier. It came from English Protestants who never planned on setting foot back in England at all.

• 4. Exiles and Rebellion

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  Hundreds of English Protestants fled into exile during Mary's reign, establishing a church in Frankfurt am Main. There, a bitter dispute broke out between two camps. Edmund Grindal and Richard Cox wanted to keep the 1552 prayer book exactly as written. John Knox, the congregation's own minister, saw it as still tainted by compromise. In 1555, civil authorities expelled Knox and his supporters to Geneva. There they adopted a new liturgy called The Form of Prayers, based on John Calvin's French-language La Forme des Prières.

  Knox carried that book to Scotland. By 1564 it had become the basis of the Scottish Book of Common Order, sidelining the English prayer book entirely.

  Decades later, Charles I and Archbishop Laud tried to impose an English-style prayer book on Scotland anyway. The 1637 prayer book, closer to the old 1549 text than to the 1559 version, was never accepted by the Scots. During one reading of it at Holy Communion in Edinburgh's St Giles' Cathedral, the Bishop of Brechin had to protect himself. He pointed loaded pistols at the congregation.

  That standoff at St Giles' helped ignite the Bishops' Wars, even as translators elsewhere were about to carry these same words far beyond Britain's borders.

• 5. A Book in Every Tongue

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  An Act of Parliament in 1563 ordered the Bible and the prayer book translated into Welsh. The resulting text, Y Llyfr Gweddi Gyffredin, appeared in 1567, the work of Richard Davies and William Salesbury. Latin worshippers got a version too, Walter Haddon's Liber Precum Publicarum, published in 1560 for the collegiate chapels of Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, and Winchester.

  Irish speakers waited until 1712, when John Richardson published a translation of the 1662 book called Leabhar na nornaightheadh ccomhchoitchionn. It was printed in parallel columns of English and Irish. On the Isle of Man, John Phillips produced the first Manx translation in 1610. A later version by his successor Mark Hiddesley stayed in use until 1824, when English took over the island's worship entirely.

  In the Māori language, the 1662 book was first translated in 1830 and became known as Te Rawiri, meaning 'the David.' That name reflected the prominence of the Psalter in its services. It is still used today, particularly among older Māori living in rural areas.

  Japanese speakers call the book Kitōsho. Missionary work toward a Japanese version began in 1859. After several revisions, the first complete Kitōsho appeared in 1895, with the Eucharistic section printed in both English and American traditions.

  The Anglican Church of Korea published its first Korean translation, called Gongdonggidomun, in 1965. A further revision followed in 2004, known as Seonggonghoe Gidoseo, or 'the Anglican Prayers.' In Chinese, the book is called Gōng dǎo shū. An edition issued in Shanghai in 1938 and revised in 1959 is still used in Hong Kong today. It is nicknamed the Black-Cover Book of Common Prayer for its cover.

  None of these translations, however, could reach into English itself quite the way the original book's own phrasing eventually would.

• 6. Words Beyond the Church

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  The King James Version of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare left a similar mark. Like them, many words and phrases from the Book of Common Prayer have passed into everyday English speech. Traditional English-language Lutheran, Methodist, and Presbyterian prayer books all borrowed directly from its wording. Its marriage and burial rites shaped those used by other denominations entirely.

  In 1894, the Church of England gave San Francisco a gift: a 57 ft sandstone cross designed by Ernest Coxhead. It stands among the higher points of Golden Gate Park. The Prayer Book Cross commemorates the first use of the Book of Common Prayer in California. It was read by the chaplain of Sir Francis Drake on the 24th of June 1579.

  That single service happened on a California shoreline in 1579. Today it is marked in stone, thousands of miles from Cranmer's Canterbury, in a country and a language he never saw.