A White Shirt That Divided a Church Twice

In England the surplice became a test case, and twice over. In the 1560s the question was whether ministers should be compelled to wear it at all. The returning exiles of the Marian years had seen churches in Zurich and Geneva where ministers wore a plain gown, and regarded any prescribed vestment as a remnant of the old religion and a matter on which the state should not compel. The Advertisements issued in 1566 required conformity, London clergy who refused were deprived of their livings, and the dispute became one of the founding grievances of English puritanism. The surplice was still on the list at the Hampton Court conference in 1604, alongside the ring in marriage and the sign of the cross in baptism.

Three centuries later it was fought over from the opposite direction. The Victorian dispute was about preaching: the custom had become to preach in the black gown and to wear the surplice only for the service, so clergy influenced by the Oxford Movement who preached in the surplice were seen as making a claim about priesthood. There were riots in several parishes in the 1840s, in Exeter and in London among them, and congregations barracked their own clergy over it.

That is a remarkable amount of trouble for a loose white shirt, and it is a fair measure of how much doctrine people are prepared to read in cloth.