The background to the Church of England's Prayer Book crisis, culminating in two failed attempts to gain parliamentary approval for a revised Book of Common Prayer in 1927 and 1928, is generally well known. The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, which had been set up in 1904 to investigate continuing reports of irregularities and breaches of the canons governing public worship, delivered its report in 1906. The Commission heard and recorded a great deal of evidence, and its conclusion has become familiar through frequent quotation. The law regulating public worship, the Commission found, was “too narrow for the present generation.” They continued: “It needlessly condemns much which a great section of Church people, including many of her most devoted members, value, and modern thought and feelings are characterised by a care for ceremonial, a sense of dignity in worship and an appreciation of the continuity of the Church, which were not similarly felt at the time when the present law took its present shape.” Following the report's publication, serious moves began toward the revision of the 1662 Prayer Book. Dan Cruickshank's study of the ecclesiastical processes that would occupy the next twenty years attends closely to a significant period in the history of the Church of England and the Anglican Communion that has been somewhat eclipsed in recent major publications on Anglicanism.

Cruickshank sets out to add two dimensions that are lacking in existing studies of the Prayer Book crisis: a closer examination of the liturgical theology, especially in relation to “doctrinal shifts” expressed in liturgical changes; and careful attention to the treatment of ecclesiology and the “radical realignment in Church-State relationships” (2). The execution of the project is, however, problematic in two broad areas. The first of these concerns definitions. Liturgical theology—as the work of Aidan Kavanagh, David Fagerberg, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Joris Geldhof makes clear—sees liturgical engagement itself as primary theological formation. The liturgy is thus not to be treated pragmatically as an instrument for demonstrating theological principles or working out doctrine. Ecclesiology, likewise, seeks to understand the nature and being of the church as church. While the question may be sharpened in the examination of relationships with the state, that is not quite the same thing. The second difficulty is the evidence on which the book depends. Cruickshank's methodical and extensive reading of the records of the Convocations of Canterbury and York and the National Assembly delivers a detailed sequence of official events, agendas, and decisions. What it cannot provide is the thickening of context available in correspondence, biography, and journalism. Without that additional density, some rather angular conclusions are inevitable.

One example will illustrate these points. In his preliminary literature survey, Cruickshank refers to Ronald Jasper's study, The Development of Anglican Liturgy, 1662–1980 (SPCK, 1989). While acknowledging this work as an “invaluable” foundation for understanding the historical influences on liturgists of the 1970s and 1980s, he goes on to observe that “understandably for a liturgist, Jasper did not fully comprehend the ecclesiological contentions of the revision process” (3). Acquaintance with Jasper's edition of Walter Howard Frere: His Correspondence on Liturgical Revision and Construction (SPCK, 1954) would have made clear the sophisticated grasp that Frere and his editor were able to bring to bear on unfolding events and their later interpretation.

W. H. Frere was one of those experts appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury in 1912 to form the “Committee of scholars of acknowledged weight, whose advice can be sought with regard to liturgical and other proposal with which Convocation is now dealing,” formally proposed by Charles Gore (Jasper, Walter Howard Frere, 26). This formidable body encompassed a breadth of churchmanship and had five bishops among its members. Several other members would go on to become bishops. Over the next six years, with some lapses (mainly thanks to the failure of the House of Bishops to consult the body it had appointed as its adviser), the Committee accomplished work on the use of the psalter and the arrangement of the lectionary, made recommendations for the reservation of the sacrament, and achieved the daunting feat of producing a revised consecration prayer. The complexity and detail of this work, and its dependence on the best available sources in recent scholarship, is undetectable from Cruickshank's brief summary (26).

Had Cruickshank engaged with it, he would have made connections between episcopal speakers in Convocation and their relationship with the group of experts. He would also not have been able to present the revisions that were ultimately presented as a steady incorporation of Ritualist and Anglo-Catholic elements, which might once have been controversial. This is little more than a caricature of a program that sought not to Catholicize the liturgy but to enrich what Frere described in a memorandum following the House of Bishops’ rejection of a revised canon in 1915 as “the worst liturgy in Christendom” (Jasper, Walter Howard Frere, 59). The objective of the Committee was to offer something that satisfied those clergy who might otherwise amplify the service of Holy Communion with material from the Roman Rite. A genuine wish for unity motivated the work, even if that meant sacrificing personal preference. The liturgist F. E. Brightman, also a member of the Committee, returned his notes on the bishops’ work to say that he would “die in the last ditch” to defend some essentials, including “that we all say the same thing at the altar” (Brightman to Rev. Dr. Claude Jenkins, Magdalen College, Oxford, 26 September 1915, LPL MS 1642, 1–2v).

Cruickshank's other findings are significant but cannot be dealt with in detail. He argues that the process saw a much greater stake for the laity in church governance and their involvement in liturgical revision, though he qualifies this toward the close of the book, acknowledging that the lay people who sat on church committees were middle class and gentry and that very few were women (122). He also offers a sympathetic picture of Archbishop Davidson as an enabler rather than a reluctant reformer. For this, he would have found ample corroboration in Frere's correspondence. He shows, accurately, that the permissive use of the 1928 Prayer Book, even though it had been defeated in Parliament, opened the way for the later progress of liturgical revision. Whether he is right in concluding that the Church of England continues to be haunted by the Prayer Book crisis seems difficult to defend at a time in the life of the Anglican Communion when diversity is the norm and structure trumps words. The most painful period in the Church of England's recent liturgical memory is the protracted synodical process leading up to the publication of Common Worship during the 1990s.