A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

Canon 24. “In all cathedral and collegiate churches, the holy communion shall be administered upon principal feast days, sometimes by the bishop, (if he be present,) and sometimes by the dean, and sometimes by a canon or prebendary; the principal minister using a decent cope, and being assisted with the gospeller and epistler agreeably, according to the advertisements published in the seventh year of Queen Elizabeth (hereafter following). The said communion to be administered at such times, and with such limitation, as is specified in the Book of Common Prayer. Provided that no such limitation by any construction shall be allowed of, but that all deans, wardens, masters, or heads of cathedral and collegiate churches, prebendaries, canons, vicars, petty canons, singing men, and all others of the foundation, shall receive the communion four times yearly at the least.”

Canon 42. “Every dean, master, or warden, or chief governor of any cathedral or collegiate church, shall be resident there fourscore and ten days, conjunctim or divisim, in every year at the least, and then shall continue there in preaching the word of God, and keeping good hospitality; except he shall be otherwise let with weighty and urgent causes, to be approved by the bishop, or in any other lawful sort dispensed with.”

Canon 43. “The dean, master, warden, or chief governor, prebendaries and canons, in every cathedral and collegiate church, shall preach there, in their own persons, so often as they are bound by law, statute, ordinance, or custom.”

Canon 44. “Prebendaries at large shall not be absent from their cures above a month in the year; and residentiaries shall divide the year among them; and, when their residence is over, shall repair to their benefices.”

And by Canon 51, “the deans, presidents, and residentiaries of any cathedral or collegiate church, shall suffer no stranger to preach unto the people in their churches, except they be allowed by the archbishop of the province, or by the bishop of the same diocese, or by either of the universities. And if any in his sermon shall publish any doctrine either strange, or disagreeing from the word of God, or from any of the Thirty-nine Articles, or from the Book of Common Prayer, the dean or the residents shall by their letters, subscribed with some of their hands that heard him, so soon as may be, give notice of the same to the bishop of the diocese, that he may determine the matter, and take such order therein as he shall think convenient.”

The passage of the advertisements published in the seventh year of Queen Elizabeth, referred to in Canon 24, is as follows: “Item, in the ministration of the holy communion in cathedral and collegiate churches, the principal minister shall use a cope with gospeller and epistoler agreeably; and at all other prayers to be said at the communion table, to use no copes but surplices. Item, that the dean and prebendaries wear a surplice, with a silk hood, in the choir; and when they preach in the cathedral or collegiate church, to wear a hood.” And at the end of the service book in the second year of Edward VI., it is ordered that “in all cathedral churches, the archdeacons, deans, and prebendaries, being graduates, may use in the choir, beside their surplices, such hoods as pertaineth to their several degrees, which they have taken in any university within this realm.”

Churches collegiate and conventual were always visitable by the bishop of the diocese, if no special exemption was made by the founder thereof. And the visitation of cathedral churches belongs unto the metropolitan of the province, and to the king when the archbishopric is vacant.—Burn.

All cathedrals throughout the world had a body of clergy and ministers belonging to them; which were divided into various orders and degrees; they were gradually incorporated in Western Christendom, but not in the East. (See Chapter.) In England no diocese has more than one cathedral. There are many instances of a plurality of cathedrals even in the same city, as at Rome, Milan, &c., and formerly in France. These churches were called concathedrals. One instance exists in Ireland, viz. in Dublin, where Christ Church and St. Patrick’s enjoy all the rights of cathedrals; and while the congé d’ élire existed, conjointly elected the archbishop; and their united consent must still be given to all acts which require the sanction of a chapter. This plurality of cathedrals in one see is not to be confounded with a plurality of cathedrals under the same bishop, when, as generally in Ireland, he has under his charge two or more dioceses. One Irish diocese (Meath) has no cathedral; and two others (Kilmore and Ardagh) have no cathedral chapters. These anomalies are not, as some have supposed, remnants of a primitive order of things; for it can be proved that they did not originally exist in the respective dioceses now mentioned; but were the consequences of poverty, barbarism, and other unhappy causes which mutilated the external framework of the Irish church.—Jebb.

With reference to the architecture of a cathedral: the normal plan of an English cathedral is in the form of a Latin cross; a cross, that is, whose transverse arms are less than the lower longitudinal limb; and, in a general architectural description, its parts are sufficiently distinguished as nave, choir, and transept, with their aisles, western towers, and central tower; but in more minute description, especially where ritual arrangements are concerned, these terms are not always sufficiently precise, and we shall hardly arrive at the more exact nomenclature, without tracing the changes in a cathedral church from the Norman period to our own.

In a Norman cathedral, the east end, or architectural choir, usually terminated in an apse, (see Apse,) surrounded by the continuation of the choir aisles. The aisles formed a path for processions at the back of the altar, and were called the processionary. The bishop’s throne was placed behind the altar, and the altar itself in the chord of the apse; and westward of this was a considerable space, unoccupied in ordinary cases, which was called the presbytery. The choir, or place in which the daily service was performed, was under the central tower, with perhaps one or two bays of the nave in addition; so that the ritual and the architectural choir did not coincide, but the ritual choir occupied the tower and a considerable portion of the architectural nave. This arrangement seems unnatural, and even inconvenient; but it was perhaps required by the connexion of the cathedral with the monastic or other offices of the establishment; for these were arranged around a quadrangle, of which the architectural nave, or western limb of the church, formed one side, and length was gained to the quadrangle, without disproportionate enlargement of the church, by making the western limb sufficiently large to receive part, at least, of the ritual choir. (See Monastery.)