Worship at Trinity Chapel, Lincoln's Inn, London, 22 May 1623

Abstract

The worship service conducted in Trinity Chapel at London's Lincoln's Inn the hours of eight and eleven on the morning of Thursday, 22 May 1623 turns out to be the single most thoroughly documented worship service held in England between the Elizabethan Settlement of religion and the outbreak of the English Civil War.1 Unique to this event, there is visual evidence as well as numerous written records, both official and unofficial, which together shed a great deal of light on what Trinity Chapel looked like in its original configuration as well as what happened during this worship service inaugurating religious use of Lincoln's Inn's new worship space. Included in diese documents are lists of who participated in the service, where the participants stood, kneeled, or sat, and when - as well as what - they said and did, and to some extent what they thought about what was happening at the time and in the days and weeks that followed. As Judith Maltby has justly pointed out, religious historians' fascination with the spiritually disgrunded in early modern England has obscured the extent to which use of the Book of Common Prayer provided the basic framework for English worship and spiritual formation after 1559 in parish churches, chapels, and cadiedrals across the country.2 Our purpose here is to contribute to a redressing of this imbalance and to promote broader discussion about the conduct of worship in post-Reformation England by making available, all together and in accessible form, the unique set of materials documenting events at Trinity Chapel on the Feast of the Ascension in 1623. Taken together, this material demonstrates that by 1623 the Book of Common Prayer was sufficiendy familiar, customary, and expected in worship by Englishfolk that its use in the consecration of Trinity Chapel was fluid and coherent, the newly-constructed building was clearly designed to accommodate its particular spatial requirements, and the modifications to the regular order of Divine to make this event into a ceremony of consecration were done in an informed and appropriate manner. The designers and performers of this ceremony clearly knew what they were doing and how to do it effectively; their actions reflect their long-time experience of common practice and a clear understanding of how to achieve in performance the liturgical outcomes they sought. In this introduction, we will sketch out die kinds of information contained in die various documents, enabling historians to understand what they now have available. This material includes various visual and written records of die chapel and its Dedicatory Service as well as a reconstruction of Trinity Chapel's original floor plan. The fabric of Trinity Chapel provides part of die visual record ( fig. 1 ) , an image in one of its stained glass3 windows showing die building itself as well as die act diat began die Service of Consecration, die act of building's key being handed over (fig. 2).4 An image of Trinity Chapel from the mid-1 700s shows another view of its original external appearance5 (fig. 3). The bill for carpentry and woodwork done in the chapel by Price the Joiner (Document 1 ) provides clues as to furnishings that enable us to reconstruct the building's original floor plan (fig. 4) and note similarities and differences between the layout in 1623 and the way Trinity Chapel appears today (fig. 5). An image from another portion of the chapel's original windows records John Donne's contribution to the chapel's construction (fig. 6). Perhaps more important, Latin manuscripts in the Archives of Lincoln's Inn provide two independent accounts of what happened at Trinity Chapel on the morning of 22 May 1623 that, when taken together, offer an almost minute-by-minute description of the morning's activities. George Montaigne's officially notarized document of consecration (Document 2) gives an outline of the actual worship service and the process of its performance. …