C of E clothing

July 6, 2007 2:16 AM

Is there a good site that explains Church of England ecclesiastical garb?

For example, C of E vicars seem to wear either purple, blue or black shirts. Is there a distinction or is it personal preference? I assume there is informal and formal uniform—chasuble for "important" services but dog-collar and shirt for more run of the mill services? Or does it depend on high/low church? Are there any other "uniforms" a vicar might be expected to wear?

How much freedom does a vicar have in choosing his/her chasuble? Is there a kind of fashion subculture, or is a vicar likely to choose something that reflects his/her particular interests?

What are trainee vicars expected to wear, above and beyond casual clothes? Is part of being ordained a trip to the ecclesiastical outfitters to buy all the garb?

If you work in the church then please accept my apologies for my ignorance in these matters! Thanks.

posted by humblepigeon to society & culture (11 comments total)

The only part I can help with are the colours: they change depending on the church year, e.g. green is the main colour used when nothing special is happening, purple is used around lent and white at (I think Christmas and Easter). See the bottom of this page.
posted by patricio at 2:22 AM on July 6, 2007

Can't help with the rules, sorry. However, thanks to a slightly misguided idea for a promotion at a previous job, I do know where they get them from. Try here: Christian Resources Exhibition. There is a whole industry supplying everything you'd ever need to run a church, from candlesticks to photocopiers... It was one of the more interesting 4 days of my life (look, nuns, pew shopping!)
posted by Helga-woo at 2:53 AM on July 6, 2007

The Ship of Fools forum is very helpful and very CofE oriented; if you ask there, I'm sure you'll get good answers. (The 'ecclesiantics' subforum is always up for a more-detailed-than-you'd-imagine garb debate).
posted by Jeanne at 3:25 AM on July 6, 2007

I second the recommendation of the Ship of Fools forum. If you ask the same question there, you are likely to get more info than you will ever need (they are a tad obsessed with chasubles and copes).

I also found this site. And this page gives a very brief history.
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 4:08 AM on July 6, 2007

Church of England garb (on the long-term historical level) is actually the result of a decades-long 'battle' which has its roots in the Oxford movement and various identify conflicts. If you really want to know, read Glorious Battle. Warning: it wasn't actually a glorious battle. The author admits, in the beginning, that the period he covers is unpopular with church historians because it isn't quite as... interesting... as what came before.
posted by tmcw at 7:16 AM on July 6, 2007

This page has a pie chart showing the colors of the liturgical seasons; growing up in a methodist church I remember that this is what they went by to decorate the church and preacher; I imagine it's about the same for C of E.
posted by frobozz at 8:39 AM on July 6, 2007

(Disregard my last clause which is wrong, my brain was temporarily out of order.)
posted by frobozz at 8:52 AM on July 6, 2007

it looks like this page might have some details. I found this whilst trying to find kit-out a priest which turned out to be Roman Catholic anyway...
posted by unless I'm very much mistaken at 9:51 AM on July 6, 2007

I wasn't sure if you were referring to street clothes or what is worn during actual church services. And, even then, what is worn during services depends on the type of service being conducted.

In the old days, when they were not in church celebrating services, Anglo-Catholic priests wore cassocks; some still do. Note that the Anglican cassock is distinct from the Roman cassock.

Modern priests (and deacons), of whatever ecclesiastical flavour, usually wear clergy shirts over trousers, if male, or clergy blouses with skirts or trousers, or bibstocks/dickies with collars underneath a regular blouse with skirts or trousers, if female.

Now, as to the colour of the clergy shirt/blouse: Black is the customary colour for priests and deacons, but these days clergy shirts come in a bewildering variety of colours. (Striped, even!) The only special colour is purple—those are only worn by bishops. And, just to be confusing, there are two different shades of episcopal purple—a deep bluish purple, or an almost-magenta shade of purple. As far as I have been able to determine, it's merely personal preference as to which colour a bishop will choose. In my diocese, for instance, the diocesan bishop always chooses the bluish purple, and his suffragans go for the more magenta shade; but the diocesan's predecessor preferred the magenta shade. Whatever.

As for conducting services, is it a choir office or a Eucharistic service? If it's Matins or Evensong (Morning or Evening Prayer), or some service where the Eucharist won't be celebrated, cassock and surplice are worn, sometimes with a tippet (a black stole-like garment, usually adorned with one's seminary crest). (It may be that the seminary-crest-on-tippet reference is a U.S. Episcopal thing, as that's what I'm most familiar with; C of E'ers may want to chime in, here as to whether you do that, too.)

Although the liturgical colours may change as far as altar coverings, etc., depending on the season of the church year, one's attire during a choir office does not change depending on the season.

For a eucharistic celebration, OTOH, the customary garb in this day and age (except in perhaps an exceedingly low-church area, where it might be surplice over cassock, with a stole) would be a white cassock-alb, with a coloured stole worn over that corresponding to the season of the year. Although many Anglicans use the Roman sequence of colours, there are some pre-Reformation usages still extant in England (Sarum, from Salisbury, for instance).

Over the cassock-alb and stole would be worn a chasuble, again in the liturgical colour of the season. Note that the chasuble is only worn when celebrating the Eucharist; the celebrant (presider) puts it on at the offertory, and not before (so it would never be worn in the pulpit, for instance).
posted by kentk at 1:50 PM on July 6, 2007

Shirts don't reflect the colors of the liturgical year, but stoles do. Purple is the shirt color reserved for bishops.

This is also a rather good site.
posted by 4ster at 3:42 PM on July 6, 2007

This is a complicated question to answer, because of the many different forms of churchmanship (from very Low to very High) in the modern Church of England. Broadly speaking, however, there are three main schools of thought on vestments:

1. The standard set of vestments -- the default option, if you like -- would be cassock, surplice, scarf and hood. (You can see it illustrated here.) You will find this in many middle-of-the-road Anglican parishes, where it is simply taken for granted as the normal clerical costume. You will also find it in some conservative evangelical parishes, where it is regarded as a distinctively Protestant or Reformed costume (because it indicates that the minister is professionally trained and authorized to preach the Word of God).

2. Many Anglican evangelical clergy do not wear vestments at all. The preacher may wear a suit and tie (or maybe dogcollar and coloured shirt), other worship leaders will be more informally dressed. Twenty years ago this would have been quite unusual, but it has spread very rapidly and is now, I think, becoming the norm in most evangelical parishes, particularly the fast-growing urban parishes where there is less pressure from older parishioners to stick to the old ways.

3. In parishes with an Anglo-Catholic tradition, the main Sunday service will be a eucharistic service, and the clergy will wear eucharistic vestments. The main eucharistic vestment is the chasuble (the one that looks like a poncho), worn over a cassock or alb. (The shape of the chasuble, and other minor details of the vestments, will vary according to churchmanship: see here for vestments that might be worn in a conservative Forward in Faith parish, and here for vestments that don't go quite so far in a Roman direction.)

An experienced Anglican churchgoer quickly learns to read the signs that identify the churchmanship of a particular parish (e.g. whether the noticeboard reads '8am Morning Prayer, 10am Family Service', or '10am Morning Prayer, 11am Holy Communion', or '8am Low Mass, 10am Solemn High Mass'). It's totally absurd, of course (like so much else in the Church of England), but I love it.

Your other questions:

1. Shirt colour. Purple is for bishops only; other than that it's a matter of personal preference, though traditional clergy will tend to favour good old-fashioned black. The clerical collar is now the standard clergy 'uniform' outside church. (The late Alec Vidler used to argue that the clerical collar was a detestable Roman Catholic innovation, and that Anglican clergy ought to wear a black shirt with a white tie. It didn't catch on.) Anglo-Catholic clergy might appear at church functions in a Roman cassock and biretta, but only the most eccentric clergy (I know of only one) would wear this out of doors.

2. Styles of chasuble. Yes, there is quite a lot of choice. (Go here if you want a good laugh at some disastrous style decisions; e.g. I'm a tree! and Fr Kiteman the Human Kite.) The colour of the chasuble is supposed to vary according to the season: green for 'ordinary time', purple for Advent and Lent, white for Christmas and Easter, etc.

3. Trainee vicars (properly called 'ordinands'). Many clergy build up quite large collections of vestments. Among Anglo-Catholic ordinands it is a popular rite-of-passage to visit Rome and pop into Gamarelli's, the papal outfitters, to stock up on clothing before getting ordained. But copes and chasubles (unless very plain) will be valuable and expensive, and usually belong to the parish church rather than to individual clergy. Special vestments are often handed down from retired clergy to younger colleagues, though I have sometimes seen them for sale on eBay, where they attract fierce competition.

(This reminds me of one of my all-time favourite AskMeFi questions, What is tat? which got a hilariously wrong answer referring to the Gnostic scholar Tatian. Comedy gold!)
posted by verstegan at 3:06 AM on July 9, 2007