Cathedral, Common Prayer, Community: when a cathedral gets its story, our story, wrong

Arrange to meet with the Papal Nuncio and hand over the keys.

That would seem to be the obvious course of action for Ely Cathedral after its tweet concerning the 1539 dissolution of the monastery at Ely.  After all, if it was the case that "[c]enturies of prayer & tradition were disrupted and destroyed", what exactly has been going on in Ely Cathedral in the centuries since 1539?

Of course, such a view might come as something of a surprise to Robert Steward, last prior of the monastery at Ely and first dean of the cathedral: in his own person he embodied continuity as monastery became cathedral.  It is also worth noting that Steward, who conformed under the reign of Mary, remained dean through her reign. Despite Mary submitting her realm to Rome, there was no restoration of monastic institutions or lands. 

The dissolution of the monasteries, obviously, had much to do with a grubby dispute over power, wealth, and greed.  The grubby dispute, however, was not a one-way process.  Religious communities desired to hold on to power, prestige, and wealth.  From this perspective, the dissolution cannot be understood straightforwardly as the disruption and destruction of a noble tradition of communities of prayer.

What is more, the dissolution was about more than just wealth and land.  It also ensured that the focus of the ecclesia Anglicana shifted to the parish, and helps to explain the significance of the parish in the Anglican imagination.  As Duffy notes in The Stripping of the Altars, monasteries were "institutions with a central place in popular religious practice" in the pre-Reformation Church.  By contrast, MacCulloch emphasises that for reformers such as Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell "both papist religious orders and [Anabaptist] radicals cut themselves off from the Church's mainstream life", so that the dissolution was an affirmation of the "ordinary society" of the parish.

For cathedrals too this was so.  Re-ordered and reformed from the monasteries, served by secular - and often married - clergy, and taking a place at the heart of civic life, they too were a sign of "ordinary society" - rather than vowed, celibate life - caught up in the life of God.

And in the midst of all of this was profound continuity.  The tradition was not destroyed by reformed and re-ordered.  The Latin offices of the monastery at Ely became the daily Common Prayer of the cathedral.  As Cranmer was to describe the offices in the 1549 BCP, 'An Ordree for Mattyns/Evensong dayly through the yere'.  The continuity in this tradition is evident in Cranmer's 'Concerning the Service of the Church' not only when he praises "this godly and decent order" of daily prayer, but also when he clearly describes the BCP as standing in succession to previous usages:

And whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm; some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole Realm shall have but one Use.

In other words, to suggest that the tradition of prayer used in the monastery at Ely was "destroyed" is to suggest a grievous ignorance of how Common Prayer renewed and revitalised this tradition.

Another sign of continuity with significant monasteries was in cathedrals retaining the use of music in the liturgy.  Elizabeth's 1559 Injunctions instructed that musical establishments were maintained, "for the comforting of such [including the Queen herself] that delight in music":

Item, because in divers collegiate and also some parish churches heretofore there have been livings appointed for the maintenance of men and children to use singing in the church, by means whereof the laudable science of music has been had in estimation, and preserved in knowledge; the queen's majesty neither meaning in any wise the decay of anything that might conveniently tend to the use and continuance of the said science, neither to have the same in any part so abused in the church, that thereby the common prayer should be the worse understanded of the hearers, wills and commands, that first no alterations be made of such assignments of living, as heretofore has been appointed to the use of singing or music in the church, but that the same so remain.

This would lead to the rubric at the conclusion of Mattins and Evensong in 1662:

In Quires and Places where they sing here followeth the Anthem.

Cathedrals such as Ely also were communities, retaining one of the important characteristics of the monastic institutions which they succeeded.  A hint of this is found in a rubric at the conclusion of the Holy Communion, introduced in 1552 and retained in 1559 and 1662:

And in Cathedrall and Collegiate churches, where be many Priestes and Deacons, they shall al receyue the Communion wyth the minister every Sunday at the least, excepte they haue a reasonable cause to the contrary.

The civic importance of cathedrals also ensured that they often shaped and defined the communities in which they were placed.  F.C. Mather has pointed to 18th century cathedrals and collegiate churches "in old corporate towns" embodying "traditionalism in religion" and "a well-established communal life".

In light of this, we might perhaps see that the frustration with Ely Cathedral's tweet is not mere antiquarianism.  It is, rather, concern that defining aspects of the Anglican vocation have been overlooked or lost.  What is, in fact, antiquarianism is the approach taken in the tweet, lamenting a long lost tradition rather than confidently celebrating the continuation and renewal of that tradition in the life of cathedral, Common Prayer, and community.

The antiquarianism is particularly evident in the decision to mark the 480th since the dissolution with Latin Vespers (a form of prayer not used in the cathedral since 1558) rather than Book of Common Prayer Evensong, the means by which the tradition of prayer was revitalised at the Reformation and which continues to sustain the cathedral and the community it serves.  Rather than lamenting a tradition disrupted and destroyed, Ely Cathedral should be celebrating a tradition re-ordered and reformed, which continues to be lived out in the life, worship, and witness of the cathedral community.