Common Prayer, The Book of

Common Prayer, The Book of. The official service-book of the C of E containing the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, the forms for the administration of the Sacraments and other rites, the Psalter, and (since 1552) the Ordinal. The book was compiled because of the desire of T. Cranmer and others to reform, simplify, and condense the Latin services of the medieval Church and to produce in English a simple, convenient, and comprehensive volume as an authoritative guide for priest and people.

The First BCP was issued in 1549 and its use ordered by the first Act of Uniformity. In doctrine and ritual it was a compromise between the old and new schools and pleased neither. Revision in the light of Protestant criticism led to the issue of the Second BCP in 1552. After the reign of Mary, this was reissued, with a few alterations, as the Elizabethan BCP of 1559. Under the Commonwealth, the BCP was officially superseded by the Directory of Public Worship (1645), but after the Restoration, the 1662 Act of Uniformity authorized a BCP revised by Convocation. The most important change was the introduction of the AV for the Epistles and Gospels. This 1662 Book remained almost unchanged until modern times. However, in the face of ritual controversies in the late-19th cent., a new Book (whose use was to be wholly permissive) was drawn up and passed by the Convocations and Church Assembly but rejected by the House of Commons in 1927 and again, after some amendments, in 1928. In 1955 the Abps. of Canterbury and York appointed a Liturgical Commission to prepare a revision which, after a period of authorized experimentation with individual services, led to the acceptance in 1980 of the Alternative Service Book (q.v.).

Outside England the BCP underwent numerous revisions. The Scottish (Episcopalian) Communion Office of 1764 influenced the American BCP of 1789. Elsewhere the English 1662 Book was used until the Church of Ireland, freed by disestablishment from the Act of Uniformity, in 1877 produced its own BCP, a conservative revision in a Protestant direction. In the early 20th cent., revisions of the BCP were issued in Canada (1922), the United States of America (1928), and Scotland (1929). In other parts of the Anglican Communion the BCP or parts of it were generally translated into local languages, though in some areas different forms of the Communion Service appeared in the first half of the 20th cent. Until 1948 Lambeth Conferences viewed the BCP as a bond of the Anglican Communion and it was only after 1958 that encouragement was given to provincial revisions.

In the 1960s modern English was introduced into the Anglican liturgy and new experimental rites addressed God as ‘you’ rather than ‘Thou’. As in the C of E, the revision of individual services was followed by the issue of a single Book; in some provinces its use is mandatory; in others it is an alternative to the BCP, though in practice tending to replace it.