From Week to Week?

Abstract This chapter explores the effect of the frequency of Prayer Book communion services from 1549 to the present day by tracing how often the eucharist was celebrated in Church of England churches and examining the reasons for variations in its celebration and the role played by popular piety. It demonstrates that such piety had a significant impact upon how far sacramental worship was part of parish church life across the centuries in times of political and ecclesiological change. The chapter shows how Cranmer’s original expectation of a weekly communion service was constrained by the rubrics within the Prayer Book and the ways in which they were received by clergy and people alike, particularly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and how these constraints were broken down in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to make the eucharist the central focus of Anglican worship.