The Church Calendar

Seasons and holy days

Each month includes a general description of the part of the liturgical year that usually falls within that month. Since at least half of each year is affected by the movable feast of Easter and its associated holy days, certain seasons migrate. Their description is given for the month in which they usually fall; Shrovetide and Lent, for example, are described in February, even though they sometimes do not occur until March.

Lectionary

In adapting and reforming the Sarum rite, the Book of Common Prayer established a series of overlapping patterns of prescribed readings of the Bible for every day of the year. The most straightforward cycle concerned the lessons appointed to be read at Morning Prayer—a first reading from the Old Testament, and a second reading from the Gospel—and Evening Prayer—a first reading again from the Old Testament, and a second reading from the Epistles. The chosen readings from the Old Testament would be read through once over the course of one year, while the Gospel and Epistles were each read three times (roughly, in January-April, May-August, and September-December). Divine services on Sundays and holy days included appointed collects—prayers that initiated divine service—and relevant readings from the Gospel and the Epistles that interrupted the daily cycle of readings.

The result of this schedule was a rich tapestry of biblical readings that, through time and repetition, surely became associated with different times of the year. Every year began with Genesis in January; lovely June was the unlikely time to hear the story of Job, and Proverbs dominated July. In an effort to capture some of those associations without providing the overwhelming detail that can be easily found in any post-1559 edition of the Book of Common Prayer, each month below includes a brief description of the readings for that month.

That schedule of readings was not fully established until 1562. Between 1559 and 1561, some of the printed versions of the Book of Common Prayer continued to list the slight variations (especially in the Old Testament selections) from the 1549 prayer book, and it is that older schedule that John Booty included in his otherwise useful modern edition of the 1559 prayer book.⁵ The 1549 schedule was printed in the first edition of the Latin prayer book, Liber Precum Publicarum (1560). However, one extant 1559 version of the prayer books printed a slightly revised calendar of readings (STC 16292a, prelim. #2), and it was this schedule that became standard in the Book of Common Prayer from 1562 onwards, including (from 1572) the Latin Liber. The readings described in the month-by-month calendars below, as well as all quotations from the Book of Common Prayer, reflect this later schedule; they are taken from the 1559 prayer book in which they (apparently) first appeared, STC 16292a, prelim. #2.⁶

Fairs

A standard list of “principal fairs” was included in most perpetual calendars and annual almanacs. This list was not entirely consistent across early modern sources, which included Holinshed’s Chronicles, Grafton’s Briefe Treatise, and Hopton’s Concordancy. A rough estimate of the number of principal fairs in each month, and the most popular saint’s days for fairs, is provided below to give readers a general sense of the seasonal cycle.

Law Terms

By the sixteenth century, the legal year had been divided into four unequal law terms: Hillary, Easter, Trinity, and Michaelmas. The general parameters of the dates for law terms were summarized in both annual and perpetual almanacs and in prayer books. The dates for Hilary and Michaelmas terms (in January and October) were relatively fixed in the calendar; the dates for Easter and Trinity were tied to the movable feasts of Easter. Within these parameters, the legal calendar was complex. The ecclesiastical courts and some other civil courts were tied to the saints of the pre-Reformation calendar, as they continued to use these names for returns, or dates when suits could be brought or decisions handed down. So, for example, in Michaelmas, the returns in the Court of Arches, the Audience Court of Canterbury, the Court of Consistory, the Court of High Commissioners, and the Court of Delegates were linked to the feasts of St. Faith, St. Edward, St. Luke, Sts. Simon and Jude, All Souls, St. Martin, St. Edmund, St. Katherine, and St. Andrew. Some of these saints, of course, are apostles or evangelists who continued to be commemorated in the Book of Common Prayer. But others are somewhat obscure, their memory kept alive partially by the ecclesiastical courts which, as David Cressy has pointed out, ironically enough were also involved in “enforcing the discipline of the reformed religion.”⁷