After more than a year of research, the breviary information server is delighted to announce that the site's author, David Goode, has a book published by Canterbury Press. Food in Due Season: Daily Table Graces for the Christian Year is a book of blessings for use before and after meals for every season of the Church's liturgical year.
Synopsis: Structured daily prayer has been integral to Christian worship from the very beginning. Prior to the Book of Common Prayer, the Breviary contained the Divine Office and included beautiful liturgies for midday and evening meals for several seasons of the Christian year. These were lost at the Reformation, but in a simple, stylish and elegant modern translation this liturgical treasure is made available once again, with new graces composed in a sympathetic style where there was no provision originally in the Breviary.
Using the Common Worship psalter and general style, Food in Due Season is the perfect companion to the Church of England's breviary, Common Worship: Daily Prayer, and will be welcomed by individuals, families, churches and religious communities. A second section offers shorter graces for general use, carefully researched from ancient sources, from the monks of the fourth-century Egyptian desert to the court of Queen Elizabeth I.
This is, of course, a shameless plug for Food in Due Season, for which the author of both site and book makes no apology, and you may order a copy from Amazon at a 30 per cent discount.
News flash: the final, definitive edition is now available.
Welcome to the breviary information server. This site contains some general information about breviaries but is particularly oriented towards the Church of England's new breviary Common Worship: Daily Prayer. I have the rather grandiose hope that it will become the place to find out more about using this great book.
In addition to plenty of handy hints and tips on working with the new breviary, the site also has a jewel in its crown. Thanks to a generous arrangement with the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England, we can offer a daily prayer 'feed', giving the offices of Lauds (Morning Prayer), Vespers (Evening Prayer) and Compline (Night Prayer) in full for every day of the church's year. We shall offer two feeds: the Office for today, and the Office for tomorrow.
If you'd like to buy books, save money and contribute to the development of this site, all in one fell swoop, choose the extras link for a look at what Amazon has on its virtual shelves. Below, you will find a small selection books recommended for the season.
In the beginning was the breviary. OK, that's not quite true, but structured daily prayer has been a part of the Christian tradition since the beginning. Christ prayed in the temple, the apostles went up to the temple at various 'hours' of the day familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of the hours of prayer.
Here is not the place to chart the development of the cathedral and monastic offices of the fourth century onwards. Rather, this website is a celebration of the restoration of the breviary to the authorised services of the Church of England. But a small amount of background is required…
The last breviaries of the Church of England were printed in the 1540s, editions of the famous Sarum Breviary. The Sarum breviary developed from the eleventh century to the sixteenth as the definitive Church of England office book. It is similar in many ways to contemporary Roman breviaries, though with a number of small but significant differences that set it apart as the English Use.
In 1549, Thomas Cranmer published the first prayer book of Edward the Sixth and the old order was swept away. Gone were the seasonal variations, common offices of the saints, antiphons to psalms and canticles to aid prayerful use of the psalter. In its place, a set of two services of Morning and Evening Prayer, stripped to the bone and sadly bereft of most of the beauty of the old breviaries – once you'd stripped away their abuses, of course.
And, for getting on for 500 years, that was it. Many people down the intervening years had reconstructed parts of the old breviaries for personal (and even church) use but none of these were authorised services of the Church of England. And it's this authorisation that's important. Section B of the Canon Law of the Church of England permits only the use of authorised services. This Canon was, naturally, widely disregarded throughout the Church as the forms of service in the Book of Common Prayer, the only authorised service book for more than 400 years, increasingly failed to meet the needs of parishes of all persuasions.
In 2005, the Church of England, a slow-moving beast at the best of times, finally produced an edition of Common Worship: Daily Prayer to the delight and joy of many who rued the rigours of Cranmer's beautiful but austere and, frankly deficient, Book of Common Prayer.
I shall probably be hanged, drawn and quartered for saying this, but the Book of Common Prayer was an over-reaction that became a legend, something of aesthetic beauty but little practical value, rather like those old nicknacks and gewgaws that adorn the tops of old ladies' dressing tables.
The Book of Common Prayer successfully – in a way – suppressed the excesses of the Roman breviary, but at the expense of the greater part of the breviary that was good. But, it's not my intention to denigrate a martyr archbishop of blessed memory, so moving swiftly on…
Though the word 'breviary' doesn't appear anywhere in the new Daily Prayer, that is what it is and that is what I shall refer to it as. There are some differences, naturally, between the new breviary and former editions, and I shall deal with these in due course.
The current edition of the breviary is preliminary. It is in fairly widespread and unrestricted use until its final form is published in 2004 or 2005. Users give feedback and have some input into its final form. There are some rather annoying things about it in its current form, and some deficiencies. All – but, realistically, some – of these will, I hope, be put right in the final edition. Even if they're not, though, the restoration of the breviary is a historic moment in the Church's history and I heartily commend its use.
All material © David Goode except where stated otherwise. David Goode is member of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, and a parishioner at the church of St Mary the Less. All documents on this site are valid XHTML 1.1 styled with valid CSS2.