In Our Time - The Book of Common Prayer

Episode Date: October 17, 2013

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Book of Common Prayer. In 1549, at the height of the English Reformation, a new prayer book was published containing versions of the liturgy in English. Generally believed to have been supervised by Thomas Cranmer, the Book of Common Prayer was at the centre of the decade of religious turmoil that followed, and disputes over its use were one of the major causes of the English Civil War in the 1640s. The book was revised several times before the celebrated final version was published in 1662. It is still in use in many churches today, and remains not just a liturgical text of great importance but a literary work of profound beauty and influence.With:Diarmaid MacCulloch Professor of the History of the Church at the University of OxfordAlexandra Walsham Professor of Modern History at the University of CambridgeMartin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and CultureProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, two years after the death of Henry VIII, a new prayer book was published which affected not only what people did in church, but the way they spoke and wrote. The book of Common Prayer first appeared in 1549, and was largely the work of Henry's Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Common Prayer was the first attempt to provide a liturgy in English for the newly reformed church. It was hugely controversial and many people, including Kranmer himself, lost their lives in the religious turmoil of the following decade. The final version of the Book of Common Prayer, published in 1662, remains to this day the official liturgy of the Church of England.

It's full of phrases now in everyday use, such as the words from the marriage service in sickness and in health till death us two part. Like the works of Shakespeare and Tyndall, it has shown. shaped the English language. But it's also a text in which can be found evidence of years of religious disputes, civil war and political tension. With me to discuss the Book of Common Prayer are Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, Demand McCulloch, Professor of the History at the University of Oxford, and Alexander Walshaw, Professor of Modern History at the University

of Cambridge. Damon McCulloch, can you tell us why it was necessary to have a new book in the first place? Well, it was necessary because there had been a reformation. The old church, the Western Church, the Latin Church, the Catholic Church centred on Rome, had split up over the previous few decades, and England was part of that split. The liturgy of the old church was in Latin. It was actually quite fragmented, it depended which bit of Europe urean as to what sort of Latin you'd hear in church. But it was all in Latin.

And the essence of the Protestant Reformation was to give worship back to the people in languages they understood. And in England that primarily meant English, might meant French in the Channel Islands or Welsh in Wales, but English was the first book to provide, the first language to provide worship, and

that was Kranmer's aim, to provide worship in people, which people could understand, in a language of people could understand. But who thought it was necessary, Dammit? I mean, you can imagine a few people like Kranmer who was inclined that way, but was there a feeling in the country that we had to have this new literature?

No, I don't think there was, frankly. The country in the reign of Edward VI was bewildered. This is following Henry the 8th. Yes, this is a very short reign, the boy king, the son of Henry the 8th. And Henry the 8th had confused the country. He had broken with Rome.

He'd not quite joined the Great Reformation of mainland Europe. But under his son, there was a set of politicians, clique of politicians plus Archbishop Cranmer who were determined to join the revolution, join the Protestant Reformation abroad. And it's them. It's they who are bringing this Reformation forward. Of course there was some support from below,

but that's not primarily what it's about. On Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, can you tell us something about him? Cranmer, Cambridge-Dorn, quiet, retiring, thrust into politics by the accidents of the reign of Henry VIII. He'd been made Archbishop of Canterbury primarily just to do a job, and that was to get rid of one wife from Henry, Catherine of Aragon,

replace her with another wife and Bolin. But Cranmer also happened to be an enthusiast for the new Reformation. So quietly, during Henry's reign, he pushed it forward, and in Edward the 6th reign, this once-quiet Cambridge Don is now a hard-nosed politician who's been through a lot of knocks. and so this book is only part of his work in pushing forward a revolution. Two other things one might mention. He was a good friend of Cromwell, Thomas Cromwell.

And he also, rather unusually, he made a barmaid in Cambridge pregnant and then married her. So that shows an appetite and honour, doesn't it? Yes, well, let's deal with those two friendships. Yes, Thomas Cromwell, while he lived, the great minister of Henry VIII in the 1530s, was absolutely a team. with Cranmer and quietly they pushed forward the Reformation before Cromwell stepped too far for all sorts of reasons and was executed. Cranma survived. As for the barmaid, I think you put it a little tendentiously, Melvin.

Well, I've read it in your notes, I am dependent, so one of the three of you is guilty. She was the daughter of an innkeeper in Cambridge, in other words, a hotel proprietor's daughter. And we are being fastidious. In your note, it said barmaid. Fair enough, you keep it your way But I think the great point out of that Was that this man liked getting married He was determined to get married He in fact ruined his career

It seemed when he married that young lady And he then made a very interesting second marriage After her death To the niece of a German theologian While he was abroad So there's a man here Who is very enthusiastic for marriage Not mistresses you notice

That barmaids in UN know if I might say so No, this was marriage, and that's something very different. Considering you as hired to split up a marriage, it's... Isn't it ironical? Okay, onward. Martin Palmer, can you give us some idea of the forms of worship were in use by the 1540s just before the publication of the Book of Common Prayer, and how did the Anglicans change those usages?

Well, as Dermott said, it was all in Latin, and it was very complex, to put it mildly. You had various uses. There was the Salisbury diocese use, known as the Serum use or old serum. But different dioceses such as Hereford, Lincoln, York, Bangor, had their own versions of what was essentially the brewery. This is the book for your eight different services throughout the day. Then you had another book, which was the missile for the mass. Then you had another book which was the manual, and this was for things.

as baptism and marriage. And these were set around by a huge number of regulations and rules and rubrics and so forth. And a great deal of the reforming spirit was to strip away these accretions, this layers and layers of practice that are grown around the services, which were felt to be wrong, to be in fact foreign imports, as it were. So, for example, many of the readings in the church, would not just be odd texts from the Bible. It's very unusual to read the whole Bible at all.

They would be stories of saints, they would be apocryphal material and legends. The communion service, too, was only given in one kind. The laity only had bread. They didn't have the wine as well. That was reserved to priests. And then in 14, sorry, in 1542, Henry VIII is persuaded by Krammer

to allow the readings, the New Testament readings, to be read in English, because there was now a Bible in every church, the great Bible, that had been brought in at the end of the previous decade. So you're beginning to get this idea that perhaps the people should actually be able to understand what's going on. Prior to that, you would have had books of homilies

that you would read during the Mass, because you had really very little idea what was going on. This is why you had to ream the bell three times when the bread was raised of a consecration and ditto for the wine, because otherwise you'd really no idea where you were. Was it partly Latin and partly the screen? It was partly the screen, yes. I mean, the screen was pretty effective in cutting you off. And there was very little sense of preaching, too.

You begin to get that towards the end of the 15th century, people like Dean Collett at St. Paul's, for example, who puts aside teaching about the sort of Donis Scott and so forth and begins to actually say to his students, let's look at the Bible, let's study it, this huge sense that with Erasmus's Greek New Testament, with a record, recovery of ancient knowledge, you were able to begin to not so much have a revolution about liturgy, but perhaps have a restoration to be able to go back to what had been there in the early church. And for example, it was often quoted that when Augustine of Canterbury came at the end

of the 6th century, Gregory had said to him, look, make use of the language and any prayers and liturgy that's going on there. So this sense that we had been sort of robbed of our heritage, of the ability to understand in the vernacular what was being said, but also it was just a mess of conflicting materials. And this drive to turn this, to bring the English language to bear, which we've talked about quite often with Tyndall, but then various Bibles game, which were basically Tyndall revisited.

And that was strong, and Cranmer took that up. he was part of that drive, which was not only English was European at that time, wasn't it, the vernacular? I think there were, no mention it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, in 1543, Kramer writes the litany in English,

which was for use in procession. So he's basically beginning to do the groundwork for what comes to fruition in 1549 with the first prayer book. And that is to give, first of all, to simplify everything, to cut down the eight hours, eight services throughout the day

to just two, morning prayer and evening prayer. And also this great emphasis on praise and prayer and study. He really wants worship to be something that leads people deeper into their faith, deeper into a relationship with the Bible, deeper into relationship with God. And he feels that, very strongly,

that the Latin Mass and the way that it was performed, which was often in a sort of clipped Latin, and it was said that a priest could get through the mass in 10 minutes if he did it really fast, a sense that actually this was something important. And of course, remember at this stage, the monasteries have all gone by the 1540s, and that had been a great prayer house, if you like, but it had also, to some degree, said to people, don't worry about praying, we'll do that for you,

you pay for us to do it and get on with your everyday life. Krammer wants to take it into everyday life, hence common prayer. So there's been a dispute about, a friend of mine wrote in when I announced the programme last week saying be sure you say common prayer or not common prayer. So what's a distinction for? The idea of common prayer is that, A, first of all, it's used by everybody. And I think where you've got a reformation,

where you've got a revolution in effect, and you've got a country that is beginning to split around religious lines, what you need, if you're a monarch trying to impose order, is one book that everybody uses and if you don't use it then you're not allowed to be a priest and remember of course there was only the parish church

there weren't chapels or dissenter buildings and so forth so common prayer in common for everybody but also so that it was this was the book of prayer not of prayers but of the act of prayer Alexander Walsham

can you just run through Martin began it what the first version of of the prayer book, the 1549 prayer book, actually contained? Well, in a sense, its basis is the Latin office, the series of offices that Martin's already described the reduction of them into matins and evensong. But as well as that, there's the services for communion,

Holy Communion, which in the 1549 prayer book is still mentioned as commonly called the Mass, the Lord's Supper as commonly called the Mass. There's also right for public baptism and for private baptism, and that is going to become a controversial issue for the future. There's a whole series of prefaces and introits to introduce the service throughout the ecclesiastical year.

And I think it's very important to emphasize what's omitted from these lists at that time, that there's a pruning away of the cult of saints, the days devoted to the saints, the festive days. But I think it's also important to emphasise that this is a prayer book that has doctrinal implications. What the words are surrounding the Eucharist and the baptism and the burial of the dead

have implications in terms of Protestant doctrine. Although, as I said, it's still commonly called the mass in the 1549 prayer book that is emphasised. But nevertheless, it stresses it's in perpetual memory, not a sacrificial element to that. Can we just develop that a bit? Because that seems to be one of the,

if not the central point of argument for a long time when this, when frankly the Book of Common Prayer becomes part of the political, political battleground very substantially through the reign of Elizabeth through the Lord of James to name Charles I first

into Charles the second it's a huge force which we have to keep remembering the church's date were often double side each side of the same coin but the communion was at the heart of it as it is indeed at the heart of Christianity this body and blood

which a Catholic saw actually before your eyes every day every time a miracle was performed this wafer turned into the body this wine turned into the blood. And can you tell us how the Book of Common Prayer dealt with that? Well, among other things,

critical difference between the Latin right is that the priest receives the communion with the laity and it's emphasised in the rubrics that the priest must receive it with another... This is in the Common Prayer.

Yes, in the Common Prayer. But I think the other thing to emphasise about the Book of Compaire, it's not just a book of prayer, It's a book of ritual and ceremony. In 1549, one of the most interesting parts of the book of common prayer is a statement about ceremonies that are abolished and ceremonies that are retained. And there's an attempt to steer a course between the need to abolish things that bring and have brought superstition and vanity on the one hand and to retain those that are necessary for decency and good order. So Kranmer castigates those who are addicted to old customs,

but he also criticises those who are so newfangled as they want innovation and novelty. And on which side does he come? How does he solve the problem of the Eucharist of the body and blood? Of the wafer and the wine, or the body and blood? How does he solve that moment in the book of Common Prairie? As I say, there's this mention of the perpetual memory, the memorial character. of it rather than it being a sacrificial enactment of that miracle of the mass.

But nevertheless, there are elements of it that lend themselves to a much more conservative reading. There are certain forms of manual blessing that are allowed in that, and also the traditional vestments that the priest would have worn. Some of those are still permitted, and that's going to perpetuate the possibility of multiple ways of understanding this. And actually, you've led us back into something that Chinkie is fascinating, that it's part of the politics, isn't it?

It's part of the way those in charge are trying to rule the country and saying this is a way, it's part of this tremendous fight between the monarchy, the state and the church, and inside the church, between the Roman Catholics,

those in the middle, and the Presbyterians. So this is a battleground here, the Book of Contra. How is it received, Dermott? Well, received very differently in different bits of England.

Eastern England, there's quite a lot of people who are sympathetic, excited about the Reformation, and they used it. And they even used it when they were demonstrating against the government. In the West country, there was a full-scale rebellion against it, and that shows you how split the country is. But even the book itself, you see, as Alex has said, is a compromise. You can read in two ways, and that's quite deliberate. It's because you've got to get it through the House of Lords. And a lot of the bishops who have voting rights in the House of Lords hated the book. And the only way you can get it through is by making it avowedly a compromise,

and no one really was satisfied with it. I mean, that's the point about 1549. Everyone thought it was temporary. Everyone thought something else should happen. Either go back to the old world or go forward into a new one. In fact, it was changing 1552. Why was that and how was that? It was changed because Cranmer himself was profoundly dissatisfied with it,

and particularly that the killer blow came from one of his concerns, conservative colleagues, Bishop Stephen Gardner, Bishop of Winchester, who said, yeah, you can use this for the old theology. And let me demonstrate how you can do that. And so it had to be changed. And it's interesting when you look at the two books, 1549, 1552, all the things Gardner pointed out are changed. And so now the book is expressing a very pure, gloves-off, reformed Protestant theology, the sort of theology that theologians would have agreed within Z or Geneva in Central Europe. And Martin Palmer, that was okay while Edward was on the throne, the boy king, as Lema had said, but when he died, in 1552, Mary came, she was a Roman Catholic, and things changed radically then. Yes, it probably was one of the shortest publications stints of any book.

It lasted about eight months, I think, before Mary comes, and of course, revert straight away to Catholicism. Not straight away, she initially says, oh yes, I will, you know, I won't inquire too much as to what you get up to. But that soon went out of the window. And she brings back the Latin Mass. She brings back a limited form of monasticism. So you have an abbot of Westminster Abbey again.

She gets rid of all of the purging, as it were, of ritual. And that comes back, albeit it's slightly handicapped because so much has been destroyed. So, for example, the rude screens, the screens across the church dividing, as it were, the clerical area from the lay area, carrying the cross of Christ with John and Mary, that's gone in many places, the statues of saints have gone. But she tries, in a sense, to turn the clock back. And very much, as Dermott says, that's met with considerable support, particularly from the bishops who have yet really to become tremendously reformed.

But it's a hodgepodge again, because you've got the hardliners flee to Europe. They go to join Calvin or they go north to Knox and they find sanctuary there and that only reinforces their sense that they're absolutely right and everybody else is absolutely wrong so that when they return when Mary dies in 1558

and Elizabeth takes over it's as though you'd suddenly got a whole bunch of Trotskyists who'd been in exile in Mexico coming back to the Soviet Union after Lenin's died and going right now we can do what we wanted to do. It's a very, very tense, radical situation.

But, Madam Alexander, Elizabeth rises to it, and she stamps her authority, it seems to me, please tell me, if I'm wrong. I know you will, that's okay. She won the way she stamps her authority on her reign, and what she's going to do is by bringing back much of the book of Common Prayer and saying, this is it, this is what we're going to live by. Is that right? Well, yes, the reintroduction of the book,

common prayer in 1559, and that's essentially the 1552 version with some slightly more conservative elements to it. But that coincides with a renewed act of uniformity, which again prescribes that people must attend church and hear common prayer. Once a week. On a weekly basis, on paid of a fine of 12 pence. 12 pence fine. So that's. a deterrent against failure to attend. And of course, the point there is that by weekly exposure to common prayer, that set of doctrines of words are going to seep into the consciousness over time. That she's deliberately using it to hold the, as the gentleman was saying earlier on,

to hold those of the Catholic background and Catholic longings, to hold them in and to hold in the reforming party. and to hold in the extreme problem. She's trying to hold this together, isn't it? Through what she's doing in the book of Paul and what she's saying about it. But even from the very beginning of Elizabeth's reign, there's discontent simmering on both sides. Conservative Catholic sympathizers of the church

are initially unclear about how to respond, despite the fact that the Council of Trent rules in 1562 to three on the subject says that it is, you are entering it a schism and heresy if you go to common prayer. But it isn't until the 1570s that there is a pronounced wave of refusal, what they call recusancy, refusal to attend church. Prior to that, people had been more squeamish around attending what they called Calvin's supper, rather disparage. but it's not until the 1570s that recusancy becomes pronounced

but there are nevertheless large numbers of Catholics right through Elizabeth's reign who continue to attend common prayer because it gets them out of the problems of the fines and of other penalties

against them. Can I just come to you because of course it's not complicated. The parallel is politics. Elizabeth is excommunicated. It's quite clear that the Catholic forces in Europe which are formidable want her out of the way and of course they send

over the Spanish Amada which hadn't been for the bad weather they might have might have wanted and so on so we're talking again about her trying to guide her way through that. Yes she's a definite Protestant. There's no question she's a Protestant but she is

someone who sees the middle way is very important she is the mother of her nation. And that means that she needs to keep as many Catholics on side, but she also needs to contain those who are increasingly discontented

with this book, where they regard it's too elaborate, too full of popish survival. And her answer to this problem is just to steer right down the middle without making any concessions on either side, not allowing any change in her church and the settlement which she herself created through

Parliament in 1559. And the book is a sort of symbol of that. Martin, you wanted to come in and then Alexander. It was really just that it's that excommunication by the Pope of Elizabeth in 1570 that really triggers that problem with Catholicism. And as Dermott said, prior to that, there was this balance being held. And I think when one looks at, for example, there's a change in the 39 articles where she brings in an article that basically says anybody who comes to church

and pretends that they're taking communion but aren't really, they are to be thrown out. So it's a hardening that happens there. Alexander. Well, just coming back to Dermott's point about, you know, there's Catholic resistance to comprehend, but there's also Puritan resistance. There's the resistance of those who regard the Church of England

as but halfly reformed and who want a more radical reform, a reform that looks much more like the service book that they experienced in Geneva and which they uphold as their, The emblem of the two and flow of religious factions, especially Presbyterian and radical religious factions, from Europe, especially Geneva, Calvin and Svengli across Turkey. And just at the same time as Catholics are beginning to, as it were, move towards this more separatist position,

Puritans are also agitating in Parliament. In 1572, they submit a document, a petition, and they call for the reform of this prayer book, they regard as having been culled and picked out of a popish dunghill. I want to ask you something, but you've got your thing. So why don't you say what you want to say? Well, yes, one element in what Alex has said that Puritans don't like is the fact that this book can be used in cathedrals in a very special way. Now, Elizabeth kept cathedrals in the Church of England

in a way that no other Protestant church in Europe did. And what I mean is she kept the whole shebang. She kept choirs and organs and prebendaries and all that stuff. and the use of the book of common prayer in such circumstances is very different from your average parish church. It's done with great elaboration. It's done with professional music. And that's really what Puritans hate.

I think that's what made the book seem poisonous, that it could be used in this very, what they would regard as unnatural Catholic way. And that's why when King James, the sixth of Scotland, became King James I, the First of England, and called this great meeting about religion, Common prayer was on the agenda and the Puritans, because he'd been brought up as a presbytery in Scotland,

had great hopes for it, but it was scarcely mentioned. It was the Bible that came out of it. Scarcely mentioned the Book of Compras, I understand it. Well, the great shock, the great horror was that James rather like the Church of England. I've grown up, as you say, with all these Dower, Genevaan types in Scotland, and he had resented it. He had regarded it as a check on his kingship. And coming to England, he's got this church with bishops and a sense of hierarchy,

and ceremony, which he liked. And so to the horror of Puritans, this supposed reformed Protestant king, actually went on the other side. He liked the prayer book. He liked the set-up. Energy went into the Bible, but the Book of Colm Prayer was very much rally,

surfaced again in a potent way, Alexandra, in the 1630s. Can you tell us how and why? Well, there had already, since the 1590s, been the beginnings of a kind of shift of gravity within the Church of England and the rise of ideas that were more conducive to a sacramental style of piety and more ceremonial style of piety. And those come to a culmination, if you like, in the 1630s under Archbishop

William Lord, whose proclivities and whose doctrinal position seemed to that hottest of Protestants, the Puritans, to be a kind of form of backsliding towards Rome. But it's more specifically in 1637 the attempt to impose the prayer book on Scotland, which had had its own liturgy, and which, as Dermott says, has had been a different kingdom with a different kind of liturgical tradition. It's that attempt to impose it on Scotland that leads to, well, literally rioting. A woman throws a stool at the minister in St. Giles, who is, she says, bringing the mass back into Scotland. And that precipitates the bishop's wars that are the immediate prelude to the outbreak of civil war in England in 1642. So we're into the civil wars, which is the

more men per capita were killed in that than in the first world. Well, we're talking about a very, very bloody conflict. What part did the Book of Common Prayer play in that, Martit Bama? Well, it becomes a sort of focal point for the Puritans, who would prefer to be called the godly, as something to be thrown out, along, as Dermott said, with a whole episcopal hierarchy and cathedrals and structures and so forth. And you get this incredible radicalism that emerges,

particularly with the mortal army under Cromwell, and a sense that here is a chance at last to purge England and Wales, of the last remains of papist superstition. It is a terrible time. I mean, one person in 10 in England dies as a result of the Civil War, either through violence or through starvation or disruption and so forth. And it's very touching in the preface to the 1662 prayer book.

It simply says that time of unhappy confusion. And I think that's the key. What comes across, and what Cromwell tries to get a habit, on is the fact that once you take the lid off and you say, well, you can believe what you want, all sorts of sects come up. So you have the ranters, you have the diggers, you have the fifth monarchy men, you have the Quakers who, slightly different from the sort of rather peaceful ones of today would mount massive demonstrations and attack preachers. So you have a breakdown of order and the book of common prayer is banned. And what comes in next, Damon? Well, on the book of common order, which is a version of what Scotland had experienced, which is basically a set of instructions and it leaves lots of leeway for the minister to extemporise prayer. It is not the same sort of ceremonial atmosphere at all. It's quite deliberately, aggressively reformed Protestant.

It even included a prayer for the conversion of the monarch's wife because Queen Henrietta Maria was French Catholic. And I can't imagine any other liturgy in history has done that. And frankly, it isn't popular. and there's a lot of evidence actually that all through the time of Oliver Cromwell parishes were quietly using the bits of the Book of Common Prayer they liked from the past. Well, Alexander, also, came to Restoration 1660, Charles I's seconds back to England. What does he do about the Book of Common Prayer? Well, initially there's a kind of atmosphere of conciliation.

In the Declaration of Breeder, he has promised liberty to tender consciences. And it's that atmosphere that then creates a moment for discussion, discussion between 12 bishops and some representatives of the Presbyterians who'd been the victors in the civil war. And that discussion takes place in the Savoy Conference of 1661. And there's an attempt to, as it were, discuss whether concessions might be made to non-conformist dissenting groups. But in the end, that moment passes.

And although one of the key figures in this revision of 1662 is John Cousin had been a Lordian, a ceremonialist, who in some ways would prefer to revert to the 1549 than the later prayer book, in effect, the 1662 prayer book is a conscious look back to the past, an attempt to revive something that, and it's worth saying, that in the early 1640s, many, many people have petitioned to save and preserve the prayer book against Puritan abolition. And that's the one that's officially used today still. Briefly, Martin Palmer, in your note, you spoke very cleverly,

I thought of the way looking at the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 archaeologically. Yes, it's almost as though you're looking at strata laid down at certain times. So if you go to morning prayer, for example, Matins, you can see the original crammer text of wanting praise. Then you see that in the 1552, the Puritans add in that you must do confession, because that gets rid of the notion that you could go to a priest for confession and private confession. And all the way through, you can see the anti-Catholic, then you can see the kind of concession to the Puritans, and then actually not going that far.

The Anabaptists were the bogey men of much of Reformation Europe, because they were so extreme, so you had whole teachings against them. It really is. You can trace virtually every major dispute, whether it's about transubstantiation in the communion, whether it's about the notion of predestination, which was a huge debate, were people chosen before the world was even created,

and in which case what on earth was the point of Christ? So all these are there, and by 1662, in a sense what they do is they put a cap on it, and they say, fine, it's going to be a bit more pre-sleep, it's going to be a bit more ritual, but we're not going to disturb it because there are too many layers of, frankly, unresolved conflicts that lie underneath it. David, please say, do you want to say? Can I add a question, if you can ask? It is a great moment of split, isn't it, this 62?

It would be consequent in politics. We have to keep coming back to politics. It's a massive moment in the political life of this country. I think you have to say that the Book of Common Prayer split this nation forever. It created Protestant descent. The Baptists, the Congregationalists, all these great elements in English culture were created by the split of 1662. And that makes England very special. It's a Protestant culture which is pluralist from 1662 onwards.

And that has enormous consequences. The way in which dissenting groups later the Methodists as well were behind the trade union movement, for instance. It's a culture of what you might call loyal opposition. This is a common Protestantism divided between the established church and dissenting churches. So 1662 is a sort of symbol of that. One thing I was going to say is that there are nice new elements in the prayer book in 1662, and one is prayers at sea. And that's a symbol that suddenly this second-rate little island off Europe is becoming a world empire with a navy,

and you need that sort of prayers. Baptism for those who are of riper years. I love that phrase, because it means adults. But the adults concerned are natives, those in the new colonies, people who are being brought into the church as converts. What attempts were made Alexander Orcham to revise the 1662 book? Well, after 1662, as term it says, there is a kind of pluralism becomes entrenched in English society. but there are continuing efforts to effect some kind of comprehension.

And in the lead up to the Glorious Revolution, there is an attempt to bring about a liturgy of comprehension. But that, again, that is thwarted, and what emerges from the Glorious Revolution is the act of toleration, an act exempting their majesty subjects from attendance at common prayer. and therefore, as it were, removing them and removing all of those discontents. So there's a moment in which these people are now able to worship for themselves in their own churches or their own meeting houses according to their own forms of service.

So in that sense, the Book of Compa Prayer becomes much more a possession or an emblem of Anglicanism. And it becomes something that people have dipped into ever since, I'm dipped into, taken it, it's become part of the seam of our literature and a lot of our conversation. Dermott and the others in Jordan, the strength of the language second only to the Bible in the

Oxford book of quotations in the number of quotations from it, it's part of our, can you talk about the language and how it's still back to Kranma, how he fashioned it in the way he did? It's quite conservative, and in the 16th century that means not having too many Greek or Latin words in. So its vocabulary

is quite Anglo-Saxon. And that stopped English becoming overladen with too much Latinate language. This was the great age of humanism when all sorts of words were being tested out in English. And Kramer occasionally got it wrong, and you can see him being corrected in 1662. I mean, for instance, in his ordination service in 1550, he talked about the Imarchecible Crown of Glory. Don't think anyone listening really probably understands what Imarchaseable means. And in 1662, they just calmed it down to the never-fellable. crown of glory. But he

rarely got it wrong. And that's really established how we speak. And remember that this is a drama that everyone spoke. It's not like Shakespeare, or you get professional actors to do it. This is where the entire population were supposed to be there enacting a drama.

There was a sort of continuation of Tyndall. He was determined that it went to the common people, to use that word as properly in the common land, common the house of common. He wanted it to go to the common people. But at the same time, he wanted it to pay respect to the subject. Yes, and Tyndall and Kramer are marching side by side in this. If anything, Tyndall is a bit more than Accular. But the point about Kramer is that he wanted

these words to be used again and again and again. You can't have flashy language. You can't have punch lines because they all sound so dull at the thousandth repetition. So it's language you can use until you wear it as smooth as a pebble on a beach. It's sickness and in health. devices and desires all there. Another thing that happened, Martin, is that it became, the book of one player

became a massive seller, if you want. There were 1,200 editions, it was translated into 199 languages and so on. So as Dammit said, we were getting an empire and we sent it,

it went round the empire and was translated again and again in the empire. So that had an enormous effect. A huge effect, because it again, what it imposed was a sense of order. you have an empire, you have a monarch,

and now you have the book, the common book that you use for the prayers. And if you look at, for example, the East India... Yes, you have the Bible as well. But if you look at, for example, the East India Company, they were quite happy to have chaplains who would come and read the book of common prayer and conduct services. And they were quite happy to have that translated into local languages. What they were not happy to have was the Bible.

because that meant you had missionaries who would go out there and try and convert the natives, which despite the preface to the 1662, which talks about converting the natives of our plantations, was not what the East India Company wanted because it would disturb. But in order to impose some kind of order on this fairly unruly bunch of young men out in India, was a jolly good thing to have a chaplain who would remind them of the prayers that should, and confession was quite useful, I suspect, in that circumstance. And I'll come to your example. Why do you think it's still the official liturgy?

What has made it last so long? What's its staying power? Partly the arguments in the church as to what might replace it. It's a bit like the House of Lords. Everyone disagrees with the present, but where do you go next? And so it survived through all the various political struggles of the 18th century, the 19th century. It's only really in the 1950s and 60s of the church knuckled down to trying to change it. And there are new forms.

some of them successful, others not. And what I think is remarkable is the way that Evensong from Cranmer's Prayer Book has stayed as one of the sort of great things of national culture. And that's unchallenged. No other version has got anywhere near 1662 Evensong. Is that included in Coral Evensong as well? That's Coral Evensong.

That is Coral Even Song. That is the greatest service. I mean, 42 choir every day singing. It's the greatest free concert. history lesson in Britain. It's a wonderful. And often the choir out numbers of the congregation. Yes. But thanks to Radio 3, lots

more people can listen to it. So what would you say its major influence was Alexandra? Well, I think one of the extraordinary things about it from the very beginning was its capaciousness, its capacity, to allow

a range of different people from different points on the ecclesiastical spectrum. to use it and to exploit it as a framework for worship. Well, thank you very much, Alexandra Walsham, Dermann McCulloch and Martin Palmer. Next week we'll be talking about the Corn Laws in 1846, which changed Britain's economy forever. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free.

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