Your answers
What is the origin
of the versicles and responses at matins and evensong? And why
those particular requests every day?
The versicles and responses
in Prayer Book matins and evensong are excerpts from the psalms.
Most came from the Hours of Our Lady, the prayer-book
popular among lay people in the later Middle Ages.
The first three pairs in the
second set, "O Lord, shew thy mercy upon us," were said at Sunday
mass before the bidding prayer that asked the congregation to pray
for particular people and causes, and were also well known to
churchgoers. Thomas Cranmer chose them because they were well
known, and made his services more familiar, but he changed the
order of the first three in the second set - originally clergy,
monarch, people - placing the monarch first to reflect the royal
supremacy.
He made the versicles and
responses invariable, because he was reacting against the
complexity of late-medieval worship, and wished to make services
uniform and, therefore, easy to memorise for all in an age of
imperfect literacy.
(Professor) Nicholas
Orme (Lay Canon)
Exeter
Common Worship
begins daily prayers with Psalm 51.15 and Psalm 70.1 because
Cranmer's did in 1549. Cranmer did because medieval monks did.
Medieval monks did because the Rule of St Benedicttold
them to, c.530. Benedict told them to read John Cassian to
find out why. Cassian wrote, c.400, about the earliest
monks in the Egyptian desertfromc.270 ceaselessly turning
such verses over in their hearts.
Begin "Open our lips and
fill them with your praise" in case you are tempted to think that
it is you who begin. Continue "Come swiftly to my help" because, as
Cassian says, this verse has been picked from all scripture for
this purpose, that the downcast do not despair of saving remedies
and the spiritually successful are reminded that they cannot last
without God; "do not cease to chant them."
(Canon) Peter
Mullins
Grimsby
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