Book of Common Prayer - History

History

The forms of parish worship in the late medieval church in England, which followed the Latin Roman Rite, varied according to local practice. These were termed local "use". By far the most common found in Southern England was the Use of Sarum. The rite was not consolidated into a single book. Instead, the forms of service that were to be included in the Book of Common Prayer were drawn from the Missal (for the Mass), Breviary for the daily office, Manual (for the occasional services; Baptism, Marriage, Burial etc.), and Pontifical (for the services appropriate to a bishop—Confirmation, Ordination) (Harrison & Sansom 1982, p. 29). The work of producing English-language books for use in the liturgy was largely that of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury at first under the reign of Henry VIII, only more radically under his son Edward VI. Cranmer was, in his early days, somewhat conservative, an admirer, if a critical one, of John Fisher. It may have been his visit to Germany in 1532 (where he secretly married) which began the change in his outlook. Then in 1538, as Henry began diplomatic negotiations with Lutheran princes, Cranmer came face to face with a Lutheran embassy (MacCulloch 1996, p. 215). The Exhortation and Litany, the earliest English-language service book of the Church of England, was the first overt manifestation of his changing views. It was thus no mere translation from the Latin: its Protestant character is made clear by the drastic reduction of the place of saints, compressing what had been the major part into three petitions (Procter & Frere 1965, p. 31). Published in 1544, it borrowed greatly from Martin Luther's Litany and Myles Coverdale's New Testament and was the only service that might be considered to be "Protestant" to be finished within the lifetime of King Henry VIII.