No Rails in St. Mary’s Chapel?

By The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane

The first time I visited Nashotah House in 2006, I was struck by the absence of altar rails in the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin. As a doctoral student at the time, much of my dissertation had to do with the material context of Elizabethan and early Stuart churches. Anglican worship spaces have changed considerably over the centuries and the arrangement with which many of us are familiar today owes much to the seventeenth century, specifically to a coterie of clergy who surrounded King Charles I in the 1630s, a circle usually called “Laudians.” To my delight in 2006, I spotted both Charles and Archbishop William Laud memorialized in the windows of St. Mary’s Chapel. I knew that I had to return to the House – and so I did in 2010 as a seminarian.  But back to those absent rails.There is a lesson here for us.

The combination of King Edward VI’s Royal Injunctions and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer rid England of stone altars. They were systematically destroyed. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s plan for communion tables would be a new experience for English Christians. When needed, a wooden table was brought into the chancel and turned length-wise, that is, with the narrow ends pointing east (the far end of the chancel) and west (the nave). This wasn’t merely a free-standing table; with this position, the table could in no way be mistaken for the old altar. After Morning Prayer, Litany, and Ante-Communion (the first half of the Communion service), those who intended to receive would leave the nave and enter the chancel for the Eucharistic prayer. There, they knelt all around the table while the officiating minister stood on the north side, that is, facing the south wall of the chancel. He would have appeared sideways to anyone still lingering in the nave. After the words of institution, the minister immediately delivered the bread and the cup to the communicants where they were. The east end, where the old altar had stood, was just a gash, a present absence. Perhaps Decalogue boards were affixed to the wall to display the Ten Commandments, God’s Law which drives sinners to the gracious savior.  One of the handful of changes to this pattern ordered by Queen Elizabeth I was that the table ought to be stored where the old altar had been when not in use. But this was a storage pattern, not the position for the Communion service itself. For many of us, including low churchmen, this arrangement seems quite strange; it runs against our sensibilities. But we must realize that this was the mainstream, prayer-book practice.  

In the seventeenth century, that circle of clergy mentioned previously – the Laudians – led a program of change within churches; these men were fixated on “the beauty of holiness.” They took the Elizabethan storage plan (placing the table along the east wall) and made it the fixed position for the Communion service. And in many churches, they also built rails around the table. The purpose of the rails was to combat, as they would have said it, profanation. The Laudians struggled to define worship spaces as intrinsically holy. And they pressed that behavior in those places ought to befit a sacred space. It is good to remember here that in the sixteenth century, the Church of England exhibited ambiguity about sacred space. While there were sermons on caring for churches and against idolatry in the official Books of Homilies, there was no formally approved liturgy for consecrating new worship spaces (although some clergy were hard at work to rectify that). In their writings, speeches, and sermons to promote their new rails, the Laudians traded salacious stories of school children using the table as a writing desk, of dogs wandering too close, even snatching communion bread, of workmen using the table as a brace while hammering nails, and even a woman dangling her toddler along the table-top while urine ran down the child’s leg. These stories were intentionally provocative (and perhaps entirely fabricated), meant to justify the need for the new rails. The purpose, then, was that demarcation of sacred space. While the Laudians did insist on communicants kneeling at the rail to receive, that purpose seems to have been secondary. One episode from Suffolk in the 1630s makes the point. Thomas Woolrich, a layman, was ready and willing to kneel to receive communion as the rubrics of the prayer book directed. But he refused to kneel at the newly built rails, citing to his priest that no such rails appeared in any established canon or rubric. Note that Woolrich wasn’t a Puritan. Rather, he was a run-of-the-mill, ordinary prayer-book conformist. The purpose of the rails was to effect a change in sensibilities, and over the course of the seventeenth century, especially following the Restoration in the 1660s, that new sensibility was sealed in Anglican consciousness: the space around the communion table, now called an “altar,” was and is perceived as set apart, consecrated, and holy.

What then are we to make of the absence of a rails in the Chapel of St. Mary the Virgin, the beating heart of Nashotah House, an heir not only to the Laudians but also to the Tractarians after them? Well, let’s think about that. The purpose of rails in the seventeenth century, again, was to demark a holy space. So, the question we should be asking is, does anyone doubt that perception and sensibility in our beloved chapel? Would even casual visitors have the sense that the space beyond the choir stalls is mundane or quotidian? The answer is no. I recall times when I wandered into that chapel late at night, not always for prayer but sometimes to practice for my “dry Eucharist,” an assignment for liturgy class, or to run through in my head what would be expected of me at the Thursday solemn service. Even in those moments, I knew I was in the presence of holiness. I am far from alone in that experience and in that sensibility.  

So, in this sense, perhaps the rails aren’t needed in that chapel. We might say the guardrails aren’t needed there. Rails are indeed a good thing in most churches and needful for a variety of reasons. But St. Mary’s Chapel is doing fine without them. 

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The Rev. Dr. Calvin Lane is affiliate professor of Church History at Nashotah House and associate rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Dayton, Ohio.  Dr. Lane is the author of The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church and Spirituality and Reform: Christianity in the West, c1000-c1800.  He also teaches for Wright State University and United Theological Seminary.