The Book of Common Prayer provides that "Ornaments of the Church" and of her ministers, shall be "retained and in use" as in the second year of King Edward VI. This first of the Alcuin Club Tracts examines which ornaments were actually in use in that year, during the incessant changes of the English Reformation. It avoids both Low Church rigor and the indiscriminate adoption of ornaments in use in the Church of Rome, but never adopted in England or else abolished by 1549. The third edition, here reprinted, contains extensive addenda, including a caustic commentary on Archbishop Sandys' glossing of the Elizabethan legislation, which held that "retain and use" can mean "retain but not use".