WORSHIP.
It was required that in every parish church there should be a stone font; a comely pulpit, with a decent cloth or cushion; a carpet of silk, or some decent stuff, on the communion-table during service; and a fair cloth for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper; also a cup and flagon of silver, chests for alms and for registers; and it was also ordered that in churches there should be placed the Book of Canons, a Book of Offices for the 30th of January, the 29th of May, and the 5th of November, a copy of Jewel’s Apology well and fairly bound, and a record—in which strange preachers should write their names in the presence of churchwardens. Notwithstanding the careful and repeated inquiries made respecting such matters in Articles of Visitation, it is highly probable that they were often neglected.[262]
II. From the buildings and their furniture we turn to the worship, including its vestments and mode of celebration. Whatever may be the exact meaning of the rubric prefixed to the Order of Morning Prayer, chasubles and other priestly attire used in the second year of King Edward, were not worn after the Restoration, nor did any of the Anglican prelates attempt to enforce their use. Copes, according to the Twenty-fourth Canon, were prescribed to be worn by the principal ministers at the Holy Communion in cathedrals; but in other churches ministers were to read the Divine service, and administer the sacraments, in a decent and comely surplice with sleeves, and wearing University hoods according to their degrees. With such an arrangement the visitation articles of the prelates are in accordance. Croft, Bishop of Hereford, that very low Churchman, took care to express his decided approbation “of a pure white robe on the minister’s shoulders,” emblematical of the purity of heart which became the service.[263]
Wind instruments were, for a time used in some cathedral choirs, but they soon gave place to organs; and the boys failed not to bring “a fair book of the anthem and service, and sometimes the score,” to distinguished strangers.[264]
Baptism was performed according to the Prayer Book, and a public administration of it in the case of those who had passed the age of childhood sometimes attracted considerable notice. The following anecdote on this subject occurs in a letter:—“Mr. John Harrington (whose father was some time since one of the serjeants-at-arms to His Majesty) had his boy baptized in the church; he being about fifteen years old, and not baptized before, and the son of a Nonconformist. To see which the church was fuller than it useth to be at other times; he having God-fathers and God-mothers according to the ceremony of the Church.”[265]
The Lord’s Supper was administered from the table placed by the wall, at the east end of the church, in accordance with Laudian precedents, in spite of the rubrical direction that it “shall stand in the body of the church, or in the chancel; where morning and evening prayers are appointed to be said.” In some churches, the Communion Service, on non-communion days, was read from the desk, it being alleged, “that it was indecent to go to the altar and back, with the surplice still on, to the homily or sermon”—a reason which implies that the surplice was worn in the pulpit, even by those who read the Communion Service in the desk. Clergymen left the desk, after the second lesson, to baptize in the font at the west end of the church.[266]
WORSHIP.
On special occasions, cathedrals witnessed extraordinary processions—as when Judges, with the Sheriffs and their officers, attended at Assize sermons; or when a Mayor and Aldermen, clothed in municipal robes, with their gold chains, marched or rode thither, through streets of quaint architecture, to celebrate festivals civic or sacred. A Royal visit eclipsed all mere annual pageants; and it is related that when Charles II., in the year 1671, visited the City of Norwich, as the guest of Lord Henry Howard, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, His Majesty went to the grand old Norman temple in the Close—the pride of the City—and was “sung into the church with an anthem; and when he had ended his devotion at the east end of the church, where he kneeled on the hard stone, he went to the Bishop’s palace [then occupied by Reynolds], and was there nobly entertained.”[267]
St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, became the scene of peculiar solemnities. The Feast of St. George was there celebrated in 1662; and the knights elect were constrained to receive their investiture below, in the choir, yet directly under their proper stalls, because of “the great concourse of people which at that time had flocked to Windsor (greedy to behold the glory of that solemnity, which for many years had been intermitted), and rudely forced not only into and filled the lower row of stalls, but taken up almost the whole choir.” Two years afterwards, at the Feast of St. George, there was an anthem, composed for the solemnity, accompanied by the organ and other instrumental music; this was the first time that instrumental music was introduced into the Royal chapel.[268]
Pompous funerals had taken place during the Commonwealth, particularly in Westminster Abbey. Funerals more pompous still occurred in the same national edifice, with a splendour surpassing what might be exhibited elsewhere. Monk, Duke of Albemarle, in 1670, was conveyed “by the King’s orders, with all respect imaginable,” in a long procession; and within the sacred walls the remains were met by the Dean and Prebendaries, who wore copes; and, in connection with the service, offerings were made at the altar.[269]