Hours of Prayer

Sunday someone asked me how many times a day medieval people prayed and I said 7 or 8. I realized that I’m a little fuzzy on what the canonical hours are, their names and what they have been transformed into today. So, this is going to be a short-hand version I hope will be helpful to you and will serve as notes for me. Wikipedia actually seems to have a pretty good summary of the Liturgy of Hours.

Pre-Vatican II and through out the medieval period, the divine hours were:

1. Matins: night office usually prayed around midnight. Also called nocturns or a vigil.
2. Lauds: dawn.
3. Prime: first hour of prayer at about 6 am.
4. Terce: third hour of the day, about 9 am.
5. Sext: sixth hour prayer, about noon.
6. Nones: ninth hour prayer, about 3 pm.
7. Vespers: early evening prayer, about 6 pm or so.
8. Compline: upon retiring usually about 9 pm.

This organization was introduced to the western church by John Cassian (d. 435) and popularized by Benedict of Nursia. In Ireland, it appears that John Cassian had a more direct influence on monastic development long before the Benedictine rule came there. Bede describes Bishop Wilfrid and his Abbot Benedict Biscop being instrumental in introducing the Benedictine rule to England in the mid-seventh century. In a contemporary elegy, St Columba of Iona (d. 597) was said to have been a student of Cassian and Basil.

He ran the course that runs past hatred to right action. The teacher wove the word. By his wisdom he made glosses clear. He fixed the Psalms, he made the books of Law known, those books Cassian loved. He won battles with gluttony. The books of Solomon, he followed them. Seasons and calculations he set in motion. He separated the elements according to figures among the books of Law. He read mysteries and distributed Scriptures among the schools, and he put together harmony concerning the course of the moon, the course which it ran with the rayed sun, and the course of the sea. He could number the stars in heaven, the one who could tell all the rest which we have heard from Colum Cille.

Section V Elegy for Colum Cille

Dallan Forgaill (fl. 597), Clancy p. 104 (Gaelic)

This does not mean that Columba actually knew Cassian but that he had studied his writings. Fixing the psalms is establishing the order that the psalms are said in the monastic office. The psalms have always been the primary text of hourly prayer. Cassian was the vital link between east and west. He was a good friend of Patriarch John Chrysostom and transmitted the prayer routine he learned from the desert fathers in Egypt to the West. He established his monastic system at St Victor in Marseilles. His memory was harmed by his attempt to mediate, or find a third way, between Augustine of Hippo and the Pelagians. This led to his being labeled a semi-pelagian after his death. Irish adherence to Cassian’s ways may be the root of many of the false claims that they were Pelagian.

Dallan Forgaill is a Gaelic secular poet, contemporary with Columba. Often a befriender of secular poets, Columba soon became their patron saint. This long elegy has ten sections. This elegy is one of the oldest surviving pieces of Gaelic (Old Irish) poetry. The language is so archaic that later copies of it are glossed so that later medieval Gaelic speakers could understand it.

The Book of Common Prayer recognizes four hours for prayer: morning prayer (a combination of matins and lauds), mid-day prayer, evening prayer (vespers) and compline.

~~~

Thomas Owen Clancy, ed The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry AD 550-1350. Canongate, 1998.

Bead and Book

As Eamon Duffy wrote in his recent book Marking the Hours, the late middle ages were an age of bead and book. It was not a choice of either/or. On the eve of the Reformation both Books of Hours and Paternoster beads were found at all levels of society. In wills prayer beads and books of hours usually passed together, often to a daughter. I think this has more to do with the types of things inherited by sons and daughters than being an inherent gender issue. Women inherited portable wealth (textiles, jewels, books, furniture), while men inherited land and such (buildings, ‘the business’, titles, most livestock etc).

Finding information about early prayer beads is not easy. This gap has been partially filled by Chris Laning’s Bedes Byddyng: Medieval Rosaries & Paternoster Beads published as issue 135 (2007, 81 pgs) of The Compleat Anachronist. It is available for $4.50 (free postage and handling in US) from here. You can read Chris Laning’s blog Paternosters here.

Laning covers a wide variety of topics: the evolution and spread of paternoster beads and the rosary, commerce and gift giving, origins and meaning of terminology of prayer beads, finding and evaluating the evidence of prayer beads, materials culture, and how to make paternosters and wear them. She also gives brief descriptions of variations of prayer beads used up to 1600, an appendix listing the Latin prayers, and another appendix giving step-by-step instructions to make a set of prayer beads.

Today we think of the Roman Catholic rosary as a pretty rigid set of prayers with a standardized rosary. This is the current product of a long evolutionary process. As Laning describes, everything about the rosary is a product of a several evolutionary steps. Prayer beads began as Pater Noster beads based on the Lord’s Prayer. The number of beads has varied considerably but eventually settled on 150 pater nosters reflecting the 150 psalms prayed on 50 beads, three times around. The ‘Marian psalter’ began as one of many variations that obviously eventually won.

One of the things I find fascinating that is the way prayer beads influenced the English language. The word “bead” comes from Old English ‘to bid’/’to pray’. This is fairly well known but what may be new is that English is the only language to name beads after praying. In German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, French or Swedish, the word for bead is derived from their words for pearl or grain. In other words, in the rest of Europe, their word for bead is derived from some similar size pre-existing object. Only in English is the word for all round objects strung on string named after prayer beads. It also seems odd that prayer beads are always referred to in the plural as sets or pairs of beads or rosaries (perhaps because one rosary is a the sum of many prayers?-big guess on my part perhaps some English major will fill me in). Paternoster has also become a by-word for objects strung in a string that lasts to this day from a string of lakes in a valley to a bucket-brigade type of elevator.

Prayer beads only began taking on the name rosary from 1386 as a metaphorical comparison between the practice and a wreath of roses or a rose garden. Early leaders in the development opposed the name as being too sensual. Initially the word rosary was also applied to other devotions as well.

Laning identified the three main objections to the rosary during the Reformation: 1) the rosary was deemed to be promising salvation by works rather than faith alone, 2) excessive devotion to the Virgin Mary and 3) not in the bible. [Sometime soon I’ll come back and address these for our times and the modern Anglican rosary.] Laning notes that rosaries continued to be used into at least the 1600s “when one seventeenth-century Puritan clergyman in south-west Wales…was reduced to imploring his congregation, if they insisted on using their rosaries, at least to use them ‘prayerfully and with thought’” (p. 16). Its a shame that Laning didn’t look at the legends of the Irish penal rosaries. The legend seems to be alive and well today but I don’t recall ever seeing much evidence.

Most of this work is dedicated to material culture of prayer beads and how to wear them. She discusses the materials beads and their accessories were made from, the guilds that produced them and the significant commerce in beads and components. The guilds specialized to the degree that by 1260 in Paris there were three specialized guilds: one for bone/horn workers, another for shell and coral workers and lastly for amber and jet workers. Jewelers or goldsmiths made paternosters of gold, silver and gems. Archaeologists could find this as a handy summary to identify prayer beads, particularly when components were shipped unassembled.

You should find everything you need to know to make an accurate replica of a medieval paternoster or rosary here. This would be a great project for the Jedi cum knights (or the ladies they fight for/over) at Kent U’s medieval days. Paternoster beads would also be a great teaching tool for medieval history or literature from the Age of Chaucer right through Shakespeare. I’ll leave you with the quote from The Vision of Piers Plowman (19:375-383) (c. 1375) that Chris Laning takes her title from:

“There was no Christian creature that any wits had… that didn’t help to increase the quantity of holiness; some by bedes bidding and some by pilgrimage, and others by private penance, and some by pennies dealing [almsgiving] …Cleanness of common [people] and clerks’ clean living made unity, holy church, in holiness stand.” (p. 74)

From Book of Cerne to Books of Hours

Its odd the circuitous route that research sometimes leads you on, or I’m just not very disciplined at staying on topic. Hmmm… well, that’s possible. Anyway, one of the interesting tangents that my study of Bede’s breviate pslater has taken is that breviate psalters are most commonly found in private devotional books and later Books of Hours. This continuity from Anglo-Saxon devotional books, like the Book of Cerne, to late medieval Books of Hours, primarily for the laity, and eventually to today’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the prayer book of the English reformation that is still used today, is intriguing.

The Book of Common Prayer is a somewhat odd in the history of prayer books because it is for both corporate and personal prayer. Indeed, even the daily prayer is written in such a way that it can be used corporately. The Book of Common Prayer has many advantages: it is covers all possible needs for corporate liturgy, catechism and historical documents, most needs for private prayer and perhaps above all is an instrument of unity for the Anglican Communion. As such it has had an immense impact on the English diaspora as this one book owned by the laity made it possible to carry the faith around the globe. Today each national church in the Anglican Communion produces their own revised text or uses a historic Anglican version of the BCP. One of the disadvantages of the BCP is that as an Episcopalian instrument of unity planning and executing revisions is an extremely long and arduous process. The current BCP for the US was produced in 1979 and the previous was in 1928. To my mind the greatest disadvantage of changing so slowly is its effect on the BCPs usefulness for private prayer. Anyway, I have digressed too far away from my topic for today. One of the give-aways of the Book of Hours impact on the BCP is the inclusion of a full psalter.

A while back MJ Toswell wrote an interesting paper on the relationship between late Anglo-Saxon psalters and Books of Hours. One of the things I find really interesting is that these late A-S psalters had collects after each psalm (which turns the psalm into a Christian prayer). So it is more of a devotional book than a transcript of one book of scripture.

“the frequency with which a psalter manuscript in the later Anglo-Saxon period concludes with a set of prayers and a litany, itself a formalized prayer, suggests the notion of a short reading (a psalm, easily identified in these manuscripts and clearly punctuated for reading aloud or silently) followed by a prayer. This is, of course, the process underlying the development of private devotional texts, whether in Latin or in the vernacular. (p. 18)

“Although these manuscripts [Books of Hours] varied in size and decoration, they were almost always commissioned by one person for his, or usually her, own use. They included short versions of the Offices for private use, personal prayers and meditations, and selected didactic texts for enlightenment. The texts were often a mixture of Latin and the vernacular. The prayers, meditations and sermons were generally couched in fairly simple terms, and were lavishly illustrated as a further aid to comprehension and for glory.” (p. 20)

Although there are format differences (such as the development of distinct offices), the elements of the Book of Hours are found in the late medieval psalter texts and the Book of Cerne and related texts. I think that is fascinating. Its a shame that the practice of producing Books of Hours has gone out of style.

M. J. Toswell “The Late Anglo-Saxon Psalter: Ancestor of the Book of Hours?” Florilegium 14: 1995-6, p. 1-24