Does anyone please know if a free copy of the Sarum Missal in English exists available in portable document format (PDF)? If yes, could you please provide me a link from where I can download it.
https://archive.org/details/sarumm00cath Scroll down the above page for choice of document format. Another translation in 2 vols linked here: http://civitas-dei.eu/sarum-missal-english.htm
Would you know of a similar source for Ritual Notes (Ritual Notes: A Comprehensive Guide to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Book of Common Prayer, &c.)? I can obtain a secondhand copy and would prefer a real book in my hand. However, my wife would rather I bought no more books. Therefore, whenever possible I try to get books in PDF format or for my Kindle.
There's a late 19th century version at Project Canterbury, though not as far as I can see in PDF format. I came across the following site recently. There may be bits and pieces of interest to you. There are a couple of customaries including the Project Canterbury version of Ritual Notes. http://anglicanhistory.org/liturgy/
Its a very good one. Check out the Directorum Anglicanorum. But of these books, the best, most engaging one, even if you don’t agree with all of his liturgical approaches, is the Parson’s Handbook (in several editions) by Rev. Percy Dearmer.
I have a bit of a soft spot for Percy Dearmer. We used his hymnal 'Songs of Praise' for assembly at my school and I now like to include his hymns at church. My favourite Dearmer hymn is 'God is love, His the care' sung to the tune 'Personent Hodie'. I inherited a copy of 'The Parson's Handbook' from a Vicar of my parish when he retired in the early 1980's.
He was also involved in the incredibly good English Hymnal of 1911, along with the likes of Vaughan Williams.* From an Orthodox perspective, I think our Western Rite communities could justify venerating Percy Dearmer as a saint. * In the US, the tight coupling of the 1928 BCP to the 1940 hymnal, and the 1979 BCP to the 1980 hymnal, as good as these hymnals otherwise are, is disadvantageous. My own preference would be for parishes to have a broad choice of hymnals, but for the use of music by the great composers, especially those who composed music for Anglican use, for example, William Byrd, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Herbert Howells, George Dyson, T. Tertius Noble, Healey Willan, CV Stanford, and some of the more recent composers, such as Francis Jackson, to be used, alongside the use of Anglican chant wherever settings exist or wherever the organist is competent enough to create a single or double chant, and Plainsong, as the predominant form of singing, with recourse to the Lutheran style chorales composed by excellent Anglicans such as Charles Wesley, as a supplement, to reinforce doctrinal points in the service and facilitate congregational singing, but with Plainsong, Anglican Chant, and the works of the aforesaid composers, led by the choirs, predominant, with the goal being to teach the congregation how to sing the latter, with the choir leading but not in an exclusive manner. One sees this in Orthodoxy and also in Diocesan Latin Masses (where enthusiasm for the old rite has prompted a surprising number of people to learn enough to be able to at least partially join in, and there is often a chorale at the end of the mass; once I heard “Christ our Lord is Risen Today” by Charles Wesley, at the end of an Easter Sunday Missa Cantata at an RC parish). From antiquity, the members of the laity who can sing along are allowed to do so; depending on the rite, this can be quite easy, with the Russian Old Believers, the Carpatho-Rusyns, and the Copts and Syriac-speaking churches having the most amount of congregational accompaniment to the choir; those Greek Orthodox churches using Byzantine chant also frequently get a great deal of lay participation, and of course in a monastery, all the brethren sing; musical ability also is usually a prerequisite to ordination in the churches of the East, especially churches like the Coptic and Syriac Orthodox Church where the priest and deacons have some incredibly difficult chants, passed down by vocal tradition, which they alone intone). I should also note I greatly love the chorale, and consider the implementation of all of these beautiful, tonal hymns so easy for the congregation to sing, a major accomplishment of Protestant Europe. Anglicanism simply benefits from having more than that on offer musically, and low church parishes which rely too heavily on chorales in my view are just not sufficiently setting themselves apart from Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, et al. Also, some of the hymns, even a few by Charles Wesley, are doctrinally questionable (although John Wesley helped his brother in this respect). “Praise and worship” music, the use of the guitar and instruments and styles commonly associated with rock and roll or country western or other counter-cultural music is to be rejected absolutely, as the latter tend to be doctrinally either devoid of content or in error, sentimental, and contrary to the directive of St. Paul that worship be conducted decently and in order, which I intend to post a thread about. One thing I dislike greatly about the current Archbishop pf Canterbury Justin Welby is his connection to Holy Trinity Brampton, which strikes me as being a church far too open to this type of confused worship. An Anglican parish should be as far removed from a non-denominational evangelical or Calvinist “mega-church” as possible.