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How the Interregnum Suppressed Anglican Worship

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How the Interregnum Suppressed Anglican Worship

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

During the Puritan dominated Commonwealth that followed the English Civil War, Parliament moved repeatedly against prayer book worship, restricting it by degrees before prohibiting it outright in 1645. In its place came the Directory for Public Worship, a Presbyterian leaning replacement for the Book of Common Prayer, and the following year parliamentary ordinance went further still, abolishing episcopacy itself. For a decade and a half, the established Church of England effectively ceased to exist in the form it had held before the war.

That suppression ended only with the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, which brought the Act of Uniformity, passed on 19 May 1662, reinstating the Book of Common Prayer as the law required standard for worship. The reinstatement carried its own cost that same August, when an estimated 1,200 to 2,000 Puritan clergy who would not conform to the restored prayer book were evicted from their livings in what became known as the Great Ejection.

What this period changed for Anglican worship was a decade and a half interruption followed by a restoration that itself reshaped the church, trading the older Puritan clergy who would not conform for a Church of England once again defined, by law, around the Book of Common Prayer that the Commonwealth had banned outright in 1645.

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Book Of Common Prayer 1662 (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikipedia, 2026View the Source
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