Why did Thomas Cranmer replace the word “altar” with “table” in the rubrics of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer?

In order to impress on people that Holy Communion was a meal using ordinary food and drink, Cranmer had doubtless had it in his mind that all altars should be removed from parish churches and replaced by ordinary tables of a domestic kind, tables being the setting for a meal and altars for a sacrificial offering. This at least became the policy in some parts of England, as evidenced by the following events showing that the English Reformers were all in strong agreement with Cranmer on this matter.

On 27th March 1550, after Nicholas Ridley had been appointed Bishop of London, John Hooper wrote to Bullinger, ‘He will, I hope, destroy the altars of Baal, as he did heretofore in his church when he was Bishop of Rochester’. Hooper was able to further comment that ‘many altars have been destroyed in this city (London) since I arrived here’.⁴² In 1551 Edward’s Regency Council led by Edward Seymour issued a letter requiring this step to be taken, although their order noted that ‘altars in the more part of the churches of this realm, already upon good and godly considerations [be] taken down’. It is not altogether clear but the London diocese may perhaps have lagged behind others in the matter. At any rate bishop Nicholas Ridley was charged ‘to give substantial order throughout all your diocese, that with all diligence all the altars in every church … within your said diocese, be taken down, and in the stead of them a table be set up in some convenient part of the chancel, within every such church or chapel, to serve for the ministration of the blessed communion’.⁴³ The Council’s letter gave reasons ‘why the Lord’s Board should rather be after the form of a Table than of an Altar’:

First, the form of a table shall more move the simple from superstitious opinions of the Popish mass unto the right use of the Lord’s Supper. For the use of an altar is to make sacrifice upon it: the use of a table is to serve for men to eat upon. If we come to feed upon him spiritually to eat his body, and spiritually to drink his blood which is the true use of the Lord’s Supper; then no man can deny but the form of a table is more meet for the Lord’s board than the form of an altar.⁴⁴

When the following year Cranmer published his second Prayer Book it was clear for all to see that he had endorsed the Council’s requirement because in all the rubrics the word altar had been replaced by the word table. At the start of Communion the priest, ‘instead of standing humbly afore the middes of the altar’ (1549) was now required to stand ‘at the north side of the table (1552 and 1662) with the further instruction that the table having at the time of communion a fair white linen cloth upon it, shall stand in the body of the Church, or in the chancel where Morning and Evening Prayer be appointed to be said’.

The point of this instruction was to make clear that no sacred or holy space is necessary in order to receive the sacrament of communion. The requirement of the priest to stand at the north side of the table meant that he would be standing at the long side of the table arranged lengthways down the aisle or sanctuary with the people gathered round. This is also clear from a number of early woodcuts showing the congregation sitting round the table on which there is a substantial loaf of bread and a large chalice. Cranmer did in fact later allow sitting at Communion in his 1553 Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum.⁴⁵

Nigel Scotland, The Supper: Cranmer and Communion, 22-23