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BCP Reference · Annotated Sources

Sources of the Seasonal Collects

Each collect of the Christian year traced to its origin

The Anglican collects descend from four chief streams. The largest is the Sarum Use — the medieval English form of the Roman rite — whose collects Cranmer translated into English for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. A second stream is Cranmer’s own composition for the Edwardine books of 1549 and 1552. A third is the Latin Prayer Book of 1560 (the Liber Precum Publicarum), some of whose collects were drawn into English at the Restoration in 1662. And a fourth, smaller body was composed afresh for the 1662 revision itself, including the Collect for the Third Sunday in Advent and the Collect for Easter Even.

The 1928 American Book of Common Prayer carries forward this entire collection. With it, the worshipper saying or hearing the Collect of any Sunday or Holy Day is reading words shaped by Salisbury monks, by Cranmer, by John Cosin, and by the long anonymous succession of priests who handed the prayers down.

The page is organised by the calendar of the Christian year: Advent and Christmas first, then Epiphany, Pre-Lent, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Ascension and Whitsun, Trinity and the Sundays after Trinity, then the Holy Days of the Apostles and Saints, and finally the opening rubrics of the Order for Holy Communion. Each card gives the day, the source as found in the marginal apparatus, the opening words of the collect, and a brief note where the source apparatus carries additional information.

I.Advent’s Close and the Christmas Octave

The cycle on this page begins with the Fourth Sunday in Advent and the Octave of Christmas; the Collects for Advent I–III, all from Cranmer’s 1549 book or the 1662 revision, are documented earlier in the appendix.

II.Epiphany and Its Sundays

The Epiphany itself is from Sarum; of its six Sundays, four follow the Sarum Collect, two are 1549 Cranmer, and the Sixth is reserved as a substitute for the next-before-Advent Sunday when one is needed.

III.The Pre-Lent Sundays

The three Sundays before Lent — their counting names taken from the Latin numerals for the seventieth, sixtieth, and fiftieth days before Easter — are all from the Sarum Use, with one exception in Quinquagesima, which is Cranmer’s 1549.

IV.Lent

The forty-day fast is opened by Cranmer’s great Ash Wednesday Collect — one of the most penetrating of the 1549 prayers — followed by Cranmer’s Lent I and four Sarum collects. The Collect for Ash Wednesday is appointed to be repeated as a Memorial after the Collect of the Day every day in Lent.

V.Holy Week

The principal collects of the Great Week — Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter Even — come down with very few changes from Sarum, with the addition in 1662 of a new Collect for Easter Even drawn from the Scottish Book of 1636.

VI.Easter and Eastertide

Easter Day opens with a great Anthem-rubric introduced in 1662 and a Collect that comes down from Sarum as Englished in 1549. The five Sundays after Easter follow with two 1549 Collects and three from Sarum, including the famous Rogation Collect on the Fifth Sunday.

VII.Ascension, Whitsunday, and Trinity

The three great festivals after Easter draw their Collects from Sarum, with one 1549 composition for the Sunday after Ascension, and a small but famous 1662 emendation to the Whitsunday Collect (“as at this time”).

VIII.The Sundays after Trinity

The long teaching season of Trinitytide carries the largest single body of collects in the Anglican year. Of the twenty-five Sundays after Trinity, the great majority are taken directly from the Sarum Use; a handful were reworked or composed afresh in 1662, and one (the Eleventh) was drawn into English in 1662 from the Latin Prayer Book of 1560.

IX.The Holy Days of Apostles and Saints

The Apostles’ and Saints’ Day Collects fall into three groups: the older Sarum collects translated by Cranmer in 1549; the body of new Cranmer compositions for 1549 and 1552 (especially for the Apostles whose feasts had no settled Sarum form in English use); and the group drawn into English in 1662 from the Latin Prayer Book of 1560. Several of the Saints whose Days fall in the Christmas octave are listed earlier in section I.

X.The Order for Holy Communion

At p. 309 the appendix passes from the seasonal Collects to the opening rubrics of the Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion. The annotations show how the rubrical structure was built up between 1549 and 1662.

The chief impression left by this section of the source is the depth and stability of the inheritance. Of more than seventy collects appointed for the Sundays and Holy Days of the Christian year, the great majority can be heard, in some recognisable form, in a Salisbury sacramentary of the eleventh or twelfth century, in a Roman one earlier still, and behind these in the Latin sacramentaries of late Antiquity. To pray the Collect of any given Sunday is therefore to take part in something that has been said for centuries before us, in many countries, in many tongues, and is now said in our English at this hour.

Source Drawn from the marginal apparatus of The Lay Folks’ History of the Liturgy, Appendix, “The Collects, Epistles, and Gospels,” pp. 290–309. The opening words of each collect are given in italics from the same source. Section commentary, occasional context (e.g. on the Latin Prayer Book of 1560 and the Easter Even Collect from the Scottish Book of 1636), and comparison with the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer are supplied from general reference works on the English Prayer Book.