Historical Anglican church services
thomas
Shipmate Posts: 17
What are good resources to get a good grasp of what Anglican church services were like between the Elizabethan settlement and the Oxford Movement?
I understand that before the Oxford Movement, church life was markedly different for Anglicans, with celebration of the Eucharist being rare and hymns not being sung. I'd like to form a mental image of what church-going was like for most English people in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries. When reading 18th- or 19th-century novels, or biographies about people from that time, I'd like to be able to imagine what kind of services they actually attended on Sundays.
Are there any film or audio resources to this end? How did church services differ in cathedrals, in market towns and in villages? How common would choral singing have been? And congregational singing? What psalm settings would have been used, and are some of those still in use today? What did it even mean to be high-church or low-church before the Oxford Movement? Were there strongholds of pre-Reformation doctrines or practices between the Caroline Divines and the Oxford Movement, isolated as they might have been?
I understand that before the Oxford Movement, church life was markedly different for Anglicans, with celebration of the Eucharist being rare and hymns not being sung. I'd like to form a mental image of what church-going was like for most English people in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries. When reading 18th- or 19th-century novels, or biographies about people from that time, I'd like to be able to imagine what kind of services they actually attended on Sundays.
Are there any film or audio resources to this end? How did church services differ in cathedrals, in market towns and in villages? How common would choral singing have been? And congregational singing? What psalm settings would have been used, and are some of those still in use today? What did it even mean to be high-church or low-church before the Oxford Movement? Were there strongholds of pre-Reformation doctrines or practices between the Caroline Divines and the Oxford Movement, isolated as they might have been?
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To get you started, metrical psalms were sung from the Reformation onwards. Theres a good article here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrical_psalter
Later on the singing was supported by bands of instruments in the West gallery of churches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_gallery_music
As for High/Low Church https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_church
I have an 1828 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, which includes the complete set of metrical psalms by Tate and Brady. These would have been in regular use at that time.
As Hardy wrote, in Afternoon Service at Mellstock:
On afternoons of drowsy calm,
We stood in the panelled pew,
Singing one-voiced a Tate and Brady psalm.
To the tune of Cambridge New.
3. The Reformation - Owen Chadwick
4. The Church and the Age of Reason - Gerald Cragg
5. The Church in an Age of Revolution - Alec Vidler
4 is probably the key one for 'what happened in the middle'
they're getting a bit dated now, but the best overviews still I think for the interested observer
Otherwise, we're getting into Kilvert's diary etc
You're right of course that it was Hardy. But it could just as easily have been Betjeman. I suppose the latter was more or less a plagiarist!
I'm not sure that's fair...
But *plagiarist*? I'm not even really sure how to refute that, it seems very left field.
(I also guess it wasn't intended seriously, but with a username like mine, I feel the need to think about it...)
Might need a whole new thread - Betjeman As Major Serious Poet and One Of The Most Significant Of The British Poetic Twentieth Century. Or something.
What can be said fairly consistently for most, if not all, of that period is that modern standards, services were mind-blowingly dull, and lasted a long time. Typical of the later part of that period, are the following:-
Is that any help?
In the 18th century services of the Established Church would take the following form on the Sabbath (Sunday)
at 10 a.m. a bell would ring and a few minutes later the people would enter the church where the precentor or reader would lead (line by line) the singing of a psalm. Shortly after the minister would enter the pulpit and bow to the 'quality' who were present, who would in turn bow to the minister. There would be a prayer followed by a lecture on a passage of scripture commented upon verse by verse, a prayer followed and then came the sermon with another prayer at the end. To conclude came the singing of a psalm and the benediction. (Hats were put on during the discourse and the sermon)
The celebration of the Lord's supper was known as the 'Occasion ' or the 'Great work' and was celebrated not more than once a year and sometimes only every two or three years .
This was because of the expense as people often came from far distances and had to be housed and fed by the parish. However some parishioners could attend such an 'Occasion' very two or three weeks in summer by visiting other parishes for what as well as being a sacred time was also a great social occasion.
A population of 500 might swell to over 2000 who would try to arrive for the 'preachings' or preparation services on Thursday and Friday before the communion and the Monday after.
Those who were Episcopalian at that time followed much the same pattern. They would however often say together the Lord's prayer which was deemed to be too papistical and a vain repetition by the Presbyterians
Big changes came in the middle of the 19th century with the equivalent of the Oxford Movement though nothing to do with vestments etc.
Cross-posted. Yes of course I agree. Betjeman was a good deal more significant than is sometimes acknowledged. And he was a fan of suburbia and the Metropolitan Railway so he must be ok!
The Established Church of Scotland became completely Presbyterian at the time of the arrival of William of Orange as joint king with his wife Mary. In return for the guarantee of Presbyterianism for the Established Church the Scots, at that time a separate state ,agreed to accept William and Mary as sovereigns.
The Established Church of Scotland remained as such until about 1920 when 'establishment' ceased and the Church of Scotland adopted the name of National Church.
On a more Anglican note, prior to the expansion of the organ into the church (as something a genteel member of the church could play), you would find a village band playing, probably led by a bass viol (for non musicians like me, not unlike a cello). There's an interview in the Essex Record Office, ref SA497, you want the Daisy Wright one with the transcript, recording memories of the bass viol in particular.
It would be remiss of me to not mention that the bellringers were probably an unruly beer-fuelled bunch in need of later Victorian "civilising". The Knotweed and I do our best to keep that tradition up.
What may be less well-known is that Merbecke also wrote music for the 1549 BCP Mattins and Evensong canticles, but I have no idea how widely this was used.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1uOkZzbL4A
My recollection from readings in church history is that the singing of the Communion Service only revived as part of the Oxford Movement. It was then that Merbecke's setting was rediscovered and adopted by smaller churches who wanted the service sung and by some larger churches who wanted congregational singing rather than choir settings.
You may well be right - it's hard to know how many churches ever sang, rather than said, the parts of the *Masse* for which Merbecke had provided the setting.
I was organist in an Anglican church in Yorkshire where Merbecke was one of the two settings used weekly. The other was, I seem to remember something called The Modern Folk Mass by (?) Shaw. That was a parish that was waaaaay up the candle, where the lovely vicar, after church would put a black cloak over his cassock and go straight to the village pub. Everyone knew him. It kind of explained for me the meaning of the established church encompassing everyone.
Tantalising snippets from a similar but seasonal CD (which we possess): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTAWlUubNOs
Have you read this? I can send you the paper if you PM me with your email address: "Strange Deliberations: John Betjeman and Protestant Nonconformity".
By the same author is "Anglicanism and the Poetry of John Betjeman" which I've read but don't possess.
Yes, and (as far as Christmas music is concerned) what might have been sung by the village quire and band on their carol-singing around the parish on Christmas Eve (cf once again Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree, which begins with just such a peregrination...).
Very much so.
ISTM, though, that they might still have a place in today's worship patterns, even if only occasionally, especially if suitable music and musicians/singers can be had. In this area, they have virtually disappeared from most churches, although one or two still offer an early Communion on Sundays. The Cathedral has an 8am Communion every Sunday, 930am Choral Mattins on some Sundays (Mattins is the first to go, if the main Eucharist has to be brought forward!), and Evensong on most Sundays (also during the week, but often said rather than choral).
I think the 1549 BCP Communion service can still be celebrated in C of E churches - perhaps as part of an instructional series showing how liturgy has developed/changed - but that the local Bishop's permission is needed first.
This tradition continues in the villages around Sheffield where the pubs are packed with people singing their own local carols. I was there last year and must have sung while shepherds watched to six different tunes!
Charles Wheatly (1686-1742), in his A Rational Illustration of the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England added this note about the use of the hundredth and sixty-seventh psalms as canticles:
So some churches in the earlier part of the 18th century were singing the sixty-seventh and hundredth psalms as canticles at Morning and Evening Prayer in the metrical version.
It also demonstrates that 'they will know you are Christians by your disapproval of each other' as a feature of the Church of England was not a creation of either the Oxford Movement or Percy Dearmer.
If they sang Psalms 67 and 100 as psalms (presumably in the version by Coverdale, which AIUI is that used in the BCP), what chant(s) did they use? Plainsong?
I've heard, but can't remember where, that there's evidence of chanting in cathedrals in the eighteenth century and more for some town churches in the early nineteenth. There are chants in an edition of Cheetham's Psalmody that appears to have been published sometime around 1830 which are moving towards the familiar form, though I don't think anyone quite knows how they were sung. It does look fairly clear to me though that 'psalmody' itself meant for most purposes tunes in common, long, short and peculiar metres.
Anglican chant as widely used until about 40 years ago seems to have reached that form in the mid to late nineteenth century.
However, it is possible there are others who know more about this.
Presumably there is a manuscript trail to back that statement up.
I then went from that page to the Prayer Book Society Communion Service. That is very similar to what an 8 am Communion was like when I was confirmed in the 1960s. I think the only significant differences is that from memory I think by then, the Summary of the Law was often used in stead of the full 10 Commandments, and that we may have had two candles.
I think, though, that a pre-Oxford Movement Communion Service would have included the Exhortation, "Dearly beloved in the Lord, ye that mind to come to the holy Communion ... ".
I've downloaded Jebb's Three Lectures on the Cathedral Service of the Church of England (Leeds, 1841) which that page also links to and am looking forward to reading it.
I've heard stories of visiting priests who have been instructed by churchwardens to follow the BCP (because *that's what we do*), and who have then encountered obloquy - not to mention opprobrious epithets - for having done exactly as the rubrics instruct...
The Vicar was usually punctilious in following the BCP rubrics, but I can't recall him ever using the Exhortation(s).
https://halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/the-voltarol-years/midnight-mass-murder/
I've had a bit of a problem keeping a straight face to that hymn (worse, my favourite!) ever since...
It isnt quite that simple. At much the same time that Terry was at work, the Anglican Edmund Fellowes was editing Byrd etc and getting it published in new editions, and Vaughan Williams was editing the English Hymnal which has tunes by Tallis and Gibbons and which led him to compose his Tallis Fantasia in 1910.
Tudor music was very much in the air.
By the way, what is known about the history of the use of the Latin BCP in collegiate settings? Keble College, in May this year, hosted a reconstruction of what Choral Evensong according to the 1560 Latin BCP might have sounded like "in a highly conservative, old-fashioned and even recusant Oxford College chapel".