The name "altar" has been all along retained in the Coronation Office of the kings of England, where it occurs frequently. It was also recognized in the canons of 1640, but with the reservation that "it was an altar in the sense in which the primitive church called it an altar and in no other." In the same canons the rule for the position of the communion tables, which has been since regularly followed throughout the Church of England, was formulated. In the primitive church the altars seem to have been so placed that, like those of the Hebrews, they could be surrounded on all sides by the worshippers. The chair of the bishop or celebrant was on their east side, and the assistant clergy were ranged on each side of him. But in the middle ages the altars were placed against the east wall of the churches, or else against a reredos erected at the east side of the altar, so as to prevent all access to the table from that side; the celebrant was thus brought round to the west side and caused to stand between the people and the altar. On the north and south sides there were often curtains. When tables were substituted for altars in the English churches, these were not merely movable, but at the administration of the Lord's Supper were actually moved into the body of the church, and placed table-wise -- that is, with the long sides turned to the north and south, and the narrow ends to the east and west, -- the officiating clergyman standing at the north side. In the time of Archbishop Laud, however, the present practice of the Church of England was introduced. The communion table, though still of wood and movable, is, as a matter of fact, never moved; it is placed altar-wise -- that is, with its longer axis running north and south, and close against the east wall. Often there is a reredos behind it; it is also fenced in by rails to preserve it from profanation of various kinds.
In 1841 the ancient church of the Holy Sepulchre at Cambridge was robbed of most of its interest by a calamitous "restoration" carried out under the superintendence and partly at the charge of the Camden Society. On this occasion a stone altar, consisting of a flat slab resting upon three other upright slabs, was presented to the parish, and was set up in the church at the east wall of the chancel. This was brought to the notice of the Court of Arches in 1845, and Sir H. Jenner Fust (Faulkner v. Lichfield and Stearn) ordered it to be removed, on the ground that a stone structure so weighty that it could not be carried about, and seeming to be a mass of solid masonry, was not a communion-table in the sense recognized by the Church of England.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. -- For altars in the ancient East see M.
Jastrow, Religion of Assyria anid Babylonia; Perrot and
Chipiez, Art in Chaldea (i. 143, 255); Sir i. Gardiner
Wilkinson, A Second Series of the Monners and Customs of
the Ancient Egyptians, ii. 387; Benzinger's and Nowack's
works on Hebraische Archaologie. For classical altars,
much information can be obtained from the notes in J. G.
Frazer's Pausaniae. See also Schomann, Griechische
Alterthumer, vol. ii.; the volume on "Gottesdienstliche
Altcrthumer" in Hermann's Lehrbuch der griechischen
Antiquitaten. On domestic altars and worship see
Petersen, Hausgottesdienst der Griechen (Cassel, 1851).
On plural dedications consult Maurer, De aribus graecorum
pluribus deis in commune positis (Darmstadt, 1885). For
Christian altars, reference is best made to the articles on
the subject in the dictionaries of Christian and liturgical
antiquities of Migne, Martigny, Smith and Cheetham, and
Pugin, where practically all the available information is
collected. See also Ciampinus, Vetera Monumenta (Rome,
1747), where numerous illustrations of altars are to be found;
Martune, De antiquis Ecclesiae ritibus, iii. vi. (Rouen,
1700); Voigt, Thyslasteriologia sive de altaribus veterum
Christianorum (Hamburg, 1709); and the liturgical works of
Bona. Many articles on various sections of the subject have
appeared in the journals of archaeoloeical societies; we may
mention Nesbitt on the churches of Rome earlier than 1150
(Archaeologia, xl. p. 210), Didron, "L'Autel chretien"
(Annales archeologiques, iv. p. 238), and a paper by
Texier on enamelled altars in the same volume. (R. A. S. M.)
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