Confirmation and Baptism After the Reformation
Baptism and confirmation both survived England’s Reformation more or less intact in terms of general shape, but the details the reformers stripped out (and the ones they left in) are an extremely careful, selective edit — a clear sign, perhaps, of actual adherence to medieval practices rather than wholesale abandonment.
The most significant practical change in baptism was the shift in timing from the near-universal same-day christening driven by fear of an unbaptised infant’s damnation to the 1549 Prayer Book’s move of routine baptisms to the following Sunday after matins, though genuine emergency baptism — by any layperson, using the same fixed formula — was still fully legal and unchanged. Ceremonially, 1549 retained a surprisingly large set of the old ritual furniture: the sign of the cross on forehead and breast, the white chrisom cloth, triple dipping in the font, even a version of the priest’s traditional charge to the godparents. The more radical 1552 revision eliminated the church-door opening segment entirely, dropped the chrisom cloth and anointing altogether, and reduced the entire physical ritual down to a single dipping (or pouring) of water plus one solitary sign of the cross on the forehead afterwards — a change controversial enough that even the single remaining cross would become a flashpoint for Puritan objection later in the century.
Confirmation underwent the most radical change of all. Medieval confirmation had never been tied to any fixed age — surviving images show bishops confirming literal infants, and the real, chronic problem for centuries had simply been getting access to a bishop at all, given England never had more than about seventeen of them covering the entire country. The Reformers deliberately reversed this logic, requiring a child to first pass a genuine spoken examination (the catechism) proving they understood the Creed, Commandments, and Lord’s Prayer before a bishop would confirm them at all, turning what had been, for a millennium, essentially an accident of geographic access, into a legitimately new, delayed rite of passage tied to demonstrated learning rather than mere parental initiative.
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