Commontide
Each day in the calendar is shown in the liturgical colour of its season or its feast. The Book of Common Prayer itself prescribes no colours — neither the books of 1549, 1552, 1559 and 1662 nor the BCP 2019 — so a calendar that shows them must follow some other authority, and should say which. This page says which, and gives the source and page for every colour the calendar uses.
By default the calendar follows the sequence Percy Dearmer set out in The Parson’s Handbook (1899), the book behind the “English Use” and much Anglican practice since. Dearmer took it from the Pontificals of London (1406–26) and Canterbury (1414–43), believing it to be “a sequence that was in national use at the time of the Ornaments Rubric, and was authoritative.”
Later study does not bear that out. Hope and Atchley, in English Liturgical Colours (1918, pp. 152–153), show that those Pontificals give the sequence as the use of the Roman Court, secundum romanam curiam, not of London or Canterbury, and that England never had a diocesan sequence of its own; Archbishop Chichele’s Pontifical sets the Salisbury rule beside it. The calendar keeps Dearmer’s sequence not as the medieval use of England, but because it is the one the Anglican Church in North America keeps: its BCP 2019 Scripture leaflets follow it almost day for day.
It keeps violet for Advent and Lent, white for the feasts of our Lord and the Easter season, red for martyrs and Pentecost, and green for the ordinary Sundays after the octave of the Epiphany and after Trinity.
The leaflets’ own sequence is offered as a second choice in Settings, under Liturgical Colours.
Dearmer asks for red through Passiontide, from Passion Sunday to Easter Eve. The calendar begins that red at Palm Sunday, as the ACNA leaflets do, so the Fifth Sunday in Lent keeps the Lenten violet. Good Friday is black, as Dearmer’s table prints it.
Dearmer gives yellow for St. Mary Magdalene and for Confessors. The calendar shows them in white and gold, the coupled pair in which yellow is commonly displayed.
Dearmer colours the Sundays from Septuagesima violet. The BCP 2019 allows those three Sundays to be observed as Septuagesima but does not require it, and the calendar does not observe them, so they remain green.
Where Dearmer is silent — feasts kept since his day, such as Christ the King and the Confession of St. Peter — the calendar follows the ACNA leaflets, and the table below marks each such row.
A Sunday is shown in the colour of its season: green after Trinity, violet in Advent and Lent, white in Eastertide, red on Palm Sunday. The Prayer Book ranks Sundays among the holy days — the tables of 1559 and 1662 begin “All Sundays in the Year” — and the calendar marks that rank by always naming the Sunday, as it names a feast, rather than by a colour of its own.
Hope and Atchley’s English Liturgical Colours (1918) tabulates the older English uses of Salisbury, Wells, Exeter and Westminster — red, for instance, for the Sundays after Trinity, and the Lenten array of unbleached linen. It is being prepared as a further choice. A blue Advent, which Hope and Atchley also give, can be chosen in Settings.
The Roman and Byzantine calendars, where they are offered, show their own traditions’ colours. The calendar does not lay Roman or Byzantine colours over the Anglican year.
Each row gives the colour under each sequence, with the source, the page, and the words the colour rests on.