North Side, East Side, South Side, West Side

I posted the comment below on Facebook in response to an article advocating the use of the North Side with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. One of the things that the Liturgical Movement of the last century got right was the reintroduction of the Westward Position. The debate over the Eastward Position versus the North Side is a tempest in a tea pot. The idea that one is not fully Anglican if one does not adopt either of these two positions—one from Medieval times and the other from the English Reformation is reminiscent of the attitude that the Judaizers took in the early days of Christianity.

As Frederick Meyrick points to our attention in his article on the Eastward Position in Charles H. H. Wright and Charles Neil’s A Protestant Dictionary (1904), the primitive position is that the officiating bishop or presbyter stand to the east of the Communion Table, facing west. Among other things this enables the congregation to fully see what the president is doing and to hear what the president is saying. The Eastward Position blocks the president’s actions from the view of the congregation and makes his words difficult to hear.

The North Side suffers from similar drawbacks. The president is turned sideways to the congregation, a position which makes the Manual Acts difficult to see and his voice difficult to hear.

When the North Side was adopted, communion tables were placed in the body of the nave or at the entrance of the chancel and were placed lengthwise with the congregation gathered around the table for the Lord’s Supper. They were not placed against the eastern wall and surrounded by communion rails, an arrangement that was introduced by the Laudians during the reign of Charles I and retained at the Restoration.

I reproduced the entire article on the Heritage Anglican Network blog: The link is http://theheritageanglicannetwork.blogspot.com/2011/08/eastward-position.html. If you are unfamiliar with Wright and Neil’s A Protestant Dictionary, it is available on the Internet Archive website. The link is https://archive.org/details/aprotestantdicti00wriguoft/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater.

A number of Frederick Meyrick’s works are available on the internet: The link is http://anglicanhistory.org/england/fmeyrick/.

J. T. Tomlinson’s works are also available on Internet Archive. The link is https://archive.org/search.php?query=j%20t%20tomlinson