Cranmer’s 1549 Book of Common Prayer was not a translation of the pre-reformational English Sarum Use and don’t let anybody tell you that it is.

For those who do not have access to the Missale ad Usum Ecclesiae Sarum, they can compare the 1549 BCP canon by comparing it the Roman Canon of Trent, which essentially that of Sarum. While the Sarum Ordinary of the Mass differs from the Roman Ordinary, the Sarum Canon is the Roman Canon.The twelve prayers of the Sarum/Roman Canon are approximated by Cranmer eleven prayers in the 1549 BCP. Cranmer has nothing to proximate the Nobis quoque of the Roman Rite, largely because its content commemorates twelve martyr-saints by name (something Cranmer was already opposed to by 1549).

Although the ordering of Cranmer’s 1549 Canon is similar to the Sarum Canon, the content of the prayers have been adjusted to fit Reformational theology. The names of the Pope and diocesan bishop are omitted in the Prayer for the Church. The Prayer for the Church includes prayer for King Edward VI and for “all Bishops, Pastors, and Curates,” in that order. In Erastian fashion, the king takes precedence over the clergy.

Cranmer’s goes to great measures to insure that the 1549 Canon does not give any impression that Christ’s sacrifice is repeatable by adapting the Sarum oblation prayer Hanc Igitur. Cranmer censors the Sarum references to the sacrifices of Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek and employs the words, “by his oblation once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world,” so as not to be misunderstood. Hanc Igitur is an Oblation Prayer but also carried something muted in Western Christendom, a moderate epiclesis of blessing upon the gifts. Cranmer introduces a much more explicit epiclesis of the Holy Spirit in his Oblation Prayer, complete with manual signs of the cross over the elements. The need for an epiclesis in the Canon of the Mass was something uniquely discerned by Cranmer at this time.

The two Canons can be seen as fundamentally disagreeing with the object of oblation. In the Sarum Canon, the surrounding prayers offer our Lord Jesus Christ as victim to God the Father. In Cranmer’s 1549 Canon, the surrounding prayers offer ourselves as the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving in conformity to St Paul’s instruction in Romans 12:1. Cranmer makes this distinction in his True Defense when he writes, “The first kind of sacrifice, Christ offered to God for us; the second kind we ourselves offer to God by Christ.” According to Cranmer, no human being can participate in the offering of the first kind of sacrifice. Those that attempt to do so, deprive Christ of honor and become “very Antichrists, and most arrogant blasphemers against God and against his Son Jesus Christ whom he hath sent.”

All this displays that Cranmer certainly did not carry forward the received Canon of the Western Church. He created something new. The real problem doesn’t stop there. If you compare the Sarum Mass to the the Second Prayer Book (1552) the matter becomes clear. There is very little resemblence between post 1552 Communion and the Sarum Use Mass. Even the 1559 BCP and the 1662 are hardly “Sarum” when you line them up. Only the 1549 maintains a faint semblance with the Sarum Use and yet no Anglicans steadily employ that Canon. Even if the 1549 were a “translation” of the Sarum Mass, nobody uses it anyway. Thus the received Anglican liturgies for “Holy Communion” were never intended to be “Masses.” That scares me.

I have written a paper on this subject and I can make it available to anyone interested in the subject.