Surplice

The Latin name gives the reason for the shape. Superpelliceum means over the fur garment, and the garment in question was the pelisse, the fur-lined choir dress that clergy in northern Europe wore to survive long offices in stone churches with no heating. An alb is cut close and gathered at the waist with a cincture, which will not go over a fur coat; a surplice is cut wide, put on over the head, and hangs loose from the shoulders with very full sleeves.

It is white linen, undecorated apart from occasional lace at the hem and cuffs, and knee length or longer. The cotta, shorter and with narrower sleeves, is the Italian form and is what most servers and choristers wear in practice.

Its liturgical place is the office rather than the eucharist. A priest wears a surplice for choir offices, for the occasional services of baptism, marriage and burial, for preaching, and for anything at which he is present without celebrating; he wears the alb and chasuble to celebrate. Clerks, servers, choristers and lay readers wear it as the general garment of anyone functioning in the sanctuary or the choir, which makes it by a wide margin the most commonly seen piece of Christian liturgical clothing in the west.

In England the surplice became a test case, and twice over. In the 1560s the question was whether ministers should be compelled to wear it at all. The returning exiles of the Marian years had seen churches in Zurich and Geneva where ministers wore a plain gown, and regarded any prescribed vestment as a remnant of the old religion and a matter on which the state should not compel. The Advertisements issued in 1566 required conformity, London clergy who refused were deprived of their livings, and the dispute became one of the founding grievances of English puritanism. The surplice was still on the list at the Hampton Court conference in 1604, alongside the ring in marriage and the sign of the cross in baptism.

Three centuries later it was fought over from the opposite direction. The Victorian dispute was about preaching: the custom had become to preach in the black gown and to wear the surplice only for the service, so clergy influenced by the Oxford Movement who preached in the surplice were seen as making a claim about priesthood. There were riots in several parishes in the 1840s, in Exeter and in London among them, and congregations barracked their own clergy over it.

That is a remarkable amount of trouble for a loose white shirt, and it is a fair measure of how much doctrine people are prepared to read in cloth.