St John of Beverley at Agincourt
DESIRING therefore to dilate the worship of God in our province especially for the elevating the praise of so great a patron: we do, with the will, advice and consent of our brethren and clergy in the said convocation, as also at the special instance of our said most Christian prince, ordain that the feast of the deposition of the said saint, which is known to fall on the seventh day of May,* that is, on the morrow of John Port Latin,* be celebrated for the future every where within our province, in the manner of a feast of one confessor and pontiff falling after Easter, with the regimen of the choir, according to the use of the church of Sarum,* for ever.
Farther, we enact, decree, and ordain that every year for the future, the said twenty-fifth day of October,* in memory of so notable a deed, be every where throughout our province celebrated with nine lessons, the three first whereof shall be the proper lessons for Saints Crispin and Crispinian, the three middle ones for the translation of St John aforesaid; and the three last out of the exposition of the gospel for several martyrs, with the Service accustomed in such cases, according to the use of Sarum.
abridged
* May 7th is the primary feast of St John of Beverley, which celebrates the anniversary of his repose (here ‘deposition’) in 721.
* The feast of St John Port Latin on May 6th commemorated a tradition going back to the third century, and set down in The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine (?1229-?1298), which told of the arrest and banishment of St John the Divine, author of the fourth gospel and ‘beloved disciple’ of Jesus Christ. See St John Port Latin. It never crossed over into the Eastern churches, and the Roman Church abolished it in 1960.
* Before the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, the Sarum Use was a modified form of the Roman Rite of Mass as celebrated at Salisbury Cathedral in Wiltshire — the Latin name for Salisbury is Sarum. During the Middle Ages, there were several such ‘Uses’ in England, including two in the North East alone, the York Use and the Durham Use. All were suppressed in something of a knee-jerk reaction after the Reformation and replaced with a simpler, sterner liturgy called the Tridentine Rite, so named because it was imposed by order of the Council of Trent, held in the Italian city of Trento in 1545-1563.
* October 25th is the secondary feast of St John of Beverley, which celebrates the translation (moving) in 1037 of his relics from York, where he was originally buried, to the Minster at Beverley, which had been founded upon the monastery which he worked so hard to build up during his lifetime.