Use of Sarum

[2] The cathedral's liturgy was widely respected during the late Middle Ages, and churches throughout the British Isles and parts of northwestern Europe adapted its customs for celebrations of the Eucharist and canonical hours.

[4] The Use of Sarum refers not only to the text and rubrics of the Mass, but also the calendar of saints, feasts and fast days, the readings and other liturgical practices.

For example, on Maundy Thursday individuals who had been excommunicated for serious sins and then confessed were publicly received back into communion in the Reconciliation of the Penitents ceremony.

[5][6] The revisions during Osmund's episcopate resulted in the compilation of a new missal, breviary, and other liturgical manuals, which came to be used throughout southern England, Wales, and parts of Ireland.

The high Mass of Sundays and great feasts involved up to four sacred ministers: priest, deacon, subdeacon, and acolyte.

There may have been tendencies to use a particular colour for a particular feast (red, for instance, was used on Sundays, as in the Ambrosian rite), but if a church were simply too poor to have several sets of vestments, they used what they had.

In addition, in common with many monastic rites, after the Elevation the celebrant stood with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross; the Particle was put into the chalice after the Agnus Dei.

[20][21] Under Edward VI of England, the use provided the foundational material for the Book of Common Prayer and remains influential in English liturgies.

New priests arriving from Douai were trained in the new Tridentine Use (of the Missale Romanum), so the Use of Sarum, and its fasting requirements, waned by the end of the century.

The Use certainly deserves attention and respect as an outstanding intellectual achievement, but it is far from unique, and the fascination that it has exerted still threatens to limit rather than increase our understanding of the medieval English Church.

[1]Many of the ornaments and ceremonial practices associated with the Sarum rite—though not the full liturgy itself—were revived in the Anglican Communion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement in the Church of England.

Chief among the proponents of Sarum customs was the Anglican priest Percy Dearmer, who put these into practice (according to his own interpretation) at his parish of St Mary the Virgin, Primrose Hill, in London.

[28] This style of worship has been retained in some present-day Anglican churches and monastic institutions, where it is known as "English Use" (Dearmer's term) or "Prayer Book Catholicism".