In this guest post, the Revd Professor Andrew Atherstone, a member of the General Synod’s House of Clergy, reviews the origins of Canon B17 and summarises the Convocation debates of the 1940s and 1950s which led to its current framing’; he concludes by proposing that Synod should look again at this question for the changed world of the 2020s.

The Church of England’s General Synod in February 2025 generated media headlines for many reasons. Perhaps the least expected was a sudden furore concerning gluten-free bread and alcohol-free wine at Holy Communion. In response to a question from Canon Alice Kemp, General Synod was instructed that wheat and alcohol are essential components of Holy Communion, as confirmed by an opinion from the Legal Advisory Commission.[1] This news shocked many parishes across the Church of England which routinely make provision for communicants with gluten or alcohol intolerances.

The apparent ‘ban’ was picked up by national newspapers from The Guardian and The Independent to The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Even The Sun covered the story. Trying to avert another PR disaster, the Church of England quickly issued a clarification – what it meant to say was that ‘gluten-free’ bread and ‘alcohol-free’ wine are permitted, provided they contain ‘tiny traces’ of wheat and alcohol. In other words, canonically speaking, the wheat and alcohol content may be substantially reduced but not entirely removed.[2]

This publicity has placed Canon B17 under the spotlight, which reads as follows:

Canon B17: Of bread and wine for the Holy Communion

1. The churchwardens of every parish, with the advice and direction of the minister, shall provide a sufficient quantity of bread and of wine for the number of communicants that shall from time to time receive the same.
2. The bread, whether leavened or unleavened, shall be of the best and purest wheat flour that conveniently may be gotten, and the wine the fermented juice of the grape, good and wholesome.
3. The bread shall be brought to the communion table in a paten or convenient box and the wine in a convenient cruet or flagon.

This article surveys the origins of Canon B17, especially the Convocation debates of the 1940s and 1950s concerning wheat bread and fermented wine. It shows how these contested parts of the canon owe a great deal to the Church of England’s theological culture in the postwar period and appeals for a fresh look at these questions for today’s Church.

Canon law reform

In the decades immediately after the Second World War, the Church of England was absorbed in the revision of the old Jacobean canons of 1603/04. Many canons were out of touch with modern practice and needed a complete overhaul, though the canon concerning bread and wine at Holy Communion required only modest updating. Canon 20 of 1603 reads: 

Canon 20 (1603): Bread and wine to be provided against every communion

The churchwardens of every parish, against the time of every communion, shall, at the charge of the parish, with the advice and direction of the minister, provide a sufficient quantity of fine white bread, and of good and wholesome wine, for the number of communicants that shall from time to time receive there; which wine we require to be brought to the communion table in a clean and sweet standing pot or stoop of pewter, if not of purer metal.[3]

The emphasis here is not on the chemical composition of the bread and wine but upon their quality – ‘fine white bread’ and ‘good and wholesome wine’. These were to be the best versions of bread and wine available in the local community, fit for use in divine service, not cheap alternatives. The Latin version of the canon has panis siliginei, that is, ‘bread of wheat’, but the English version makes clear that what mattered was the quality of the product, not the specific ingredients. Fine white bread was the best the seventeenth century had to offer, more expensive than coarse brown bread made from rye which was eaten in poorer households.

When the Church of England’s Canon Law Commission published revised canons in 1947, it stuck closely to the language of 1603 concerning the bread and wine, now divided into three parts:

Draft Canon 26 (1947): Of bread and wine for the Holy Communion

1. The churchwardens of every parish, against the time of the Holy Communion, shall provide, at the charge of the Parochial Church Council, with the advice and direction of the minister, a sufficient quantity of bread and of wine for the number of communicants that shall from time to time receive the same.
2. The bread shall be white and of fine quality, and the wine good and wholesome.
3. The bread shall be brought to the communion table in a paten or convenient box and the wine in a convenient cruet or flagon.[4]

Canon 26 became Canon B17. It is immediately apparent that the two ideas being hotly contested today – insistence upon ‘wheat’ bread and ‘fermented’ wine – were missing from the original draft. They were both inserted in 1949 during the revision debates.

Wheat bread?

The bread was to be ‘white and of fine quality’, but at the Canterbury Convocation in 1949, Frank Streatfeild from Winchester diocese observed that in the austerity of post-war Britain it was not always possible to find ‘absolutely refined flour’.[5] Indeed, bread and flour had been rationed for two years by the Attlee Government between 1946 and 1948 during the international cereals crisis.[6] Therefore, on Streatfeild’s proposal, the canon was made less strict, speaking only of ‘the best and purest wheat flour that conveniently may be gotten’, a deliberate echo of the rubrics of the Holy Communion service in the Book of Common Prayer. This was not intended to tighten the canon by naming wheat but to loosen it. It was a practical recognition that, on some occasions, the best bread might be difficult to obtain, so flexibility was important.

In the Prayer Book rubrics, wheat bread signified the best ordinary bread, as distinct from wafers. Cranmer’s First Prayer Book in 1549 mandated that communion bread throughout the realm should be ‘unleavened and round’. But as the Reformation progressed, his Second Prayer Book in 1552 declared: 

And to take away the superstition which any person hath, or might have, in the bread and wine, it shall suffice that the bread be such as is usual to be eaten at the table with other meats, but the best and purest wheat bread that conveniently may be gotten.

The chief contrast Cranmer intended to draw was not between wheat bread and wheat-free bread but between ordinary bread and wafer bread. It was not to be a specially manufactured religious product, but an everyday staple that could be supplied by the local bakery, ‘such as is usual to be eaten at the table with other meats’. Once again, the wheat was a sign of its quality as the best type of bread available in Tudor England, not a sacramental essential.

One of the chief principles of the Church of England’s canon law revision in the post-war decades was that the canons should be capacious enough to embrace the range of mainstream eucharistic practices which had developed in contemporary parishes across Anglicanism’s theological breadth. On that basis, for example, eucharistic vestments were legalised for the first time since the Reformation, despite some stern Protestant resistance.[7]

The nature of communion bread had also been fiercely contested since the Reformation. Although the Canon of 1603 initially secured a victory for ordinary bread over wafer bread in Anglican practice, wafers were reintroduced by the Victorian ritualists.[8] The question was litigated repeatedly, and wafers were famously declared illegal by the Purchas Judgment of 1871 – Elphinstone v Purchas (The Arches Court of Canterbury) [1871] UKPC – because they were not ‘the best and purest wheat bread’. However, in the new spirit of canonical liberty in the 1940s, to make space for all Anglican traditions there were calls to include wafer bread explicitly within the range of permitted Anglican practice. The bishops in 1948, therefore, added a new phrase to the draft canon, ‘whether loaf or wafer’.[9]

The word ‘wafer’ was emotionally charged. It remained of dubious legality and brought back too many painful memories of 400 years of theological wrangling. It might also have required special parliamentary legislation to change the law. Therefore, when Canon 26 returned to Convocation in 1957 for a second round of revision, the word ‘wafer’ was dropped. Maurice Wood (later Bishop of Norwich) argued that it was better simply to allow a ‘wide and charitable interpretation’ of the word ‘bread’. George Bell (Bishop of Chichester) agreed that the canons should not be overly detailed or prescriptive by defining certain types of bread. Eric Kemp (later Bishop of Chichester), part of the revision committee responsible for steering the canons through Convocation, liked the phrase but emphasized that the key principle they were seeking to establish was that ‘the kind of bread used in the Eucharist was a matter of indifference’.[10] Convocation agreed that there should be ‘legal toleration of both practices which now prevailed in the Church’, though expressed in less emotive language. Therefore, as a neat solution, the phrase ‘whether loaf or wafer’ was replaced by ‘whether leavened or unleavened’, to the satisfaction of all parties.[11]

Wafers, not wheat, absorbed Convocation’s attention. No one discussed wheat or suggested that this particular cereal was significant for the validity of the sacrament. Its inclusion in the canon was accidental. The link between coeliac disease and gluten was not discovered until after the Second World War, through the pioneering research of Dutch paediatrician Willem Karel Dicke and other medical scientists, too late to be appreciated by Anglican canon lawyers in the 1950s.

Fermented wine?

In many ways, the trend of post-war canon revision was towards greater inclusion, especially by allowing space for Anglo-Catholic practice. However, concerning communion wine the canons became more exclusive, and excluding. For the first time, fermentation was laid down as obligatory.

Debates about alcohol raged throughout the nineteenth century, with the growth of the temperance and teetotal movements and a better understanding of the medical causes of alcohol addiction. The question divided Anglicans. For example, in reaction against the moral claims of total abstainers, the bishops at the third Lambeth Conference in 1888 resolved:

“that the use of unfermented juice of the grape, or any liquid other than true wine diluted or undiluted, as the element in the administration of the cup in Holy Communion, is unwarranted by the example of Our Lord, and is an unauthorised departure from the custom of the Catholic Church.”[12]

Within twenty years, however, this controversial statement was being redebated by the bishops at the 1908 Lambeth Conference, some of whom campaigned energetically for unfermented grape juice to be permitted.[13] Clergy in the early twentieth century argued that the Canon of 1603 spoke only of ‘good and wholesome wine’, not of fermentation, and therefore unfermented wine could be offered at Holy Communion at the minister’s discretion.[14] The practice spread throughout Anglican parishes in response to local pastoral needs.

During canon law revision, Gregory Dix (1901-52), Anglican liturgist and Benedictine monk, tried to settle this debate once and for all. At the Canterbury Convocation in 1949, he asked for the insertion of the phrase, ‘the pure fermented juice of the grape’. Dix asserted that this was a matter of considerable importance because, from an Anglo-Catholic perspective, it affected the validity of the sacrament. He knew that some Church of England clergy used unfermented grape juice but wanted the canon to be explicit, “so that there could not be in the minds of any faithful communicants coming to the altar any question about the Sacrament having been validly and properly consecrated.”

Dix was supported by Percy Hartill (Archdeacon of Stoke-on-Trent) who argued that wine, by definition, means fermented grape juice, as used by Jesus at the Last Supper. It was not a matter of respecting Anglo-Catholic scruples, as Dix had suggested, but of ‘loyalty to our Lord’s institution’. This was not a matter of ‘hair-splitting’ over definitions, Hartill insisted, but a fundamental question about whether ‘the Church or any section of it or any minister of it dared to claim an authority to vary what our Lord Himself appointed as the outward sign’. Likewise, theologian T. G. Jalland suggested that the Manichaean sect in the fifth century had rejected wine at Holy Communion. With heightened rhetoric, he asked whether the Church of England was ‘on the side of the Manichaeans’ or ‘on the side of history Christianity’?

There was strong pushback against Dix’s proposal. Tom Livermore from Southwark diocese observed that some Anglican parishes used unfermented grape juice ‘as a matter of conscience’, with full approval of their PCCs, and generosity should be shown towards those who ‘on conscientious grounds avoided the use of wine’. Francis Warman (later Archdeacon of Aston) said that if the sacrament’s validity hinged on whether the grape juice was fermented or unfermented, then he ‘despaired of the Church of England’. Walter Browne (Archdeacon of Rochester) warned that many of the Church’s past difficulties concerning Holy Communion had been due to ‘over-definition’, and they should not make the same mistake again by creating a canon that would lead to disputes over the meaning of fermentation and the degrees of fermentation. Russell White (later Bishop of Tonbridge) described Dix’s amendment as ‘most unwise’ because it would impose a new burden on Anglican consciences. He argued from the Thirty-Nine Articles that the sacrament was effectual ‘because of Christ’s institution and promise’ (Article 26), not because of the nature of the wine. In the final speech of a long debate, Alfred St John Thorpe (vicar of Watford) urged that Dix’s amendment should be resisted and that they should stick to ‘the plain language of the Prayer Book’ rather than dividing the Church of England over such matters. Despite these voices of protest, Dix’s insertion of ‘pure fermented juice of the grape’ was carried in Convocation’s Lower House by 82 votes to 44.[15] It was tweaked by the bishops to drop the word ‘pure’, for fear that it would lead to long technical and legal controversy over what did or did not constitute ‘pure’ fermented grape juice.[16]

Building on this draft canon, other Anglican authorities began to assert that fermentation was essential. For example, the Liturgical Commission (created in 1954) outlined its principles for liturgical revision in its first published report, including:

“where Scripture gives positive guidance in regard to any rite, that guidance must be followed. Thus the use of water in Baptism and the use of bread and wine (the fermented juice of the grape) in Holy Communion are essential, though the water may be used by affusion or immersion, the bread may be leavened or unleavened, and the wine may be red or white.”[17]

Wide flexibility in the character of the wine was permitted, according to this new liturgical dogma, except not in its fermentation.

When the revised canon returned to Convocation in 1957, there was again strong contest over the phrase ‘fermented juice of the grape’.[18] Alfred Rawlinson (Bishop of Derby) advised that if alcoholics could not tolerate a sip of alcohol, they should communicate in one kind only. Robert Mortimer (Bishop of Exeter) argued that in Western Christendom the validity of the sacrament depended in part on ‘the correctness of the matter’, so for the Church of England to permit unfermented wine would have negative ecumenical repercussions with the Church of Rome. Eric Kemp believed that Anglican incumbents who offered unfermented grape juice were inflicting wrong upon their congregations. In a nice historical twist, Alice Kemp, who challenged this canon in General Synod in 2025, is the daughter of Eric Kemp, who steered it through Convocation 68 years earlier.

Other Anglican voices in 1957 continued to argue that fermentation should be deleted from the draft canon. Archdeacon Gordon Savage (later Bishop of Southwell) suggested the words were ‘an unnecessary elaboration’. He pointed out that Jesus at the Last Supper spoke only of ‘the fruit of the vine’ (Matthew 26:29), so that was the dominical requirement, not fermented wine. Even if the vast majority of parishes used fermented wine, there were some who did not, and Savage believed it was wrong for canon law to ‘put an increased burden upon their consciences’. He asked: ‘Was it seriously held that fermentation added something to wine without which the wine was deficient as a sacramental element?’ There had been similar Anglican debates about whether the bread should be leavened or unleavened, but ‘sensible people’ would not deny the validity of the sacrament on any such grounds, Savage declared.

Further resistance came from Robert Wright (later vicar of Christ Church, Mayfair), a teetotaller, who described it as ‘a great moral issue’. He praised the work of Alcoholics Anonymous and observed that a considerable body of Anglicans would be hurt if this part of the canon was retained. Wright pleaded for ‘liberty and charity’ to prevail ‘for the sake of the weaker brethren who needed help’. Furthermore, he observed that if the elements at Holy Communion must be identical to those used by Jesus at the Last Supper, then it was inconsistent to permit leavened bread while forbidding unfermented wine. Maurice Wood, who himself always used fermented wine, likewise appealed for ‘the consciences of the minority to be respected’. John Mann (an assistant bishop in Rochester diocese) also wanted the Church of England to be better at welcoming alcoholics who could not partake fully in Holy Communion without being put in ‘very real danger’. He argued that to exclude them from the cup was equivalent to ‘denying them one of the means of grace’.

As these debates demonstrate, far from being the ‘settled position’ of the Church of England, the use of fermented wine was moot. A majority in the post-war Convocations voted for reference to ‘the fermented juice of the grape’ in the new canon, but it remained a lively Anglican conversation.

A call for canonical reform

Canon law functions best when it evolves to meet the needs of the current generation of the Church. As our cultural context changes and medical knowledge improves, so the canons must flex to catch up with best pastoral practice. Canon B17 has not been debated or updated since the 1950s and is no longer fit for purpose in the 2020s. The canons are brought into disrepute if they are significantly out of step with established eucharistic practice in many parishes. For the Church of England to be forced to defend Canon B17 in the public media by arguing that the law only requires ‘tiny traces’ of wheat and alcohol is the modern equivalent of tithing mint and anise or straining out gnats (Matthew 23:23-24).

A better way forward is necessary. The time is ripe for these questions to be reopened by the House of Bishops and the General Synod. We need canons fit for today’s context, which reflect the best models of pastoral care, which allow liberty and generosity across the variety of the Church of England’s eucharistic traditions, and which enable as many communicants as possible to be welcomed fully and to receive both bread and wine at Holy Communion.

Andrew Atherstone

The author is a member both of the Church of England’s Liturgical Commission and of the Faith and Order Commission

[1] General Synod, February 2025, Question 46. See further, ‘The Use of Non-alcoholic Wine and Gluten-free Bread’ (2014), in Legal Opinions Concerning the Church of England (ninth edition, London: Church House Publishing, 2020).

[2] ‘No, We’re Not Banning “Gluten-free” Bread or “Non-alcoholic” Communion Wine’ (press release, 10 February 2025), www.churchofengland.org.

[3] The Anglican Canons 1529-1947, edited by Gerald Bray (Woodbridge: Church of England Record Society / Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 288-91.

[4] The Canon Law omf the Church of England: Being the Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Canon Law, together with Proposals for a Revised Body of Canons (London: SPCK, 1947), p. 119.

[5] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (13 January 1949), p. 59.

[6] Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Bread Rationing in Britain, July 1946 – July 1948’, Modern British History vol. 4 (1993), pp. 57-85.

[7] John Maiden and Peter Webster, ‘Parliament, the Church of England and the Last Gasp of Political Protestantism, 1963-4’, Parliamentary History 32 (2013), pp. 361-77.

[8] Christopher Haigh, ‘“A Matter of Much Contention in the Realm”: Parish Controversies over Communion Bread in Post-Reformation England’, History vol. 88 (2003), pp. 393-404.

[9] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (14 October 1948), pp. 435-7.

[10] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (1 and 2 October 1957), pp. 230-8, 271-8.

[11] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (15 January 1958), pp. 60-1.

[12] Conference of Bishops of the Anglican Communion, holden at Lambeth Palace, in July 1888: Encyclical Letter from the Bishops, with the Resolutions and Reports (London: SPCK, 1888), p. 21.

[13] For example, Samuel Thornton, ‘The Cup in Holy Communion’, The Churchman vol. 23 (1909), pp. 657-65.

[14] The Permissive Use of Unfermented Wine in the Holy Communion (Blackburn, 1913); Unfermented Wine (London: SPCK, 1917).

[15] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (13 and 14 January 1949), pp. 59-60, 79-84.

[16] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (12 October 1949), pp. 318-21, (12 and 13 January 1950), pp. 19-20, 129.

[17] Prayer Book Revision in the Church of England: A Memorandum of the Church of England Liturgical Commission (London: SPCK, 1957), p. 30.

[18] Chronicle of Convocation of Canterbury (1 and 2 October 1957), pp. 238-46, 288-9.’

Cite this article as: Andrew Atherstone, “Wheat bread and fermented wine at Holy Communion? The origins of Canon B17” in Law & Religion UK, 17 February 2025, <https://lawandreligionuk.com/2025/02/17/wheat-bread-and-fermented-wine-at-holy-communion-the-origins-of-canon-b17/>