ranches,
archbishop of Rouen, as to the propriety of a bishop wearing a chasuble
at the consecration of a church, Lanfranc maintaining as an established
principle that the vestment should be reserved for the Mass. By the 13th
century, with the final development of the ritual of the Mass, the
chasuble became definitely fixed as the vestment of the celebrating
priest; though to this day in the Roman Church relics of the earlier
general use of the chasuble survive in the _planeta plicata_ worn by
deacons and subdeacons in Lent and Advent, and other penitential
seasons.

At the Reformation the chasuble was rejected with the other vestments by
the more extreme Protestants. Its use, however, survived in the Lutheran
churches; and though in those of Germany it is no longer worn, it still
forms part of the liturgical costume of the Scandinavian Evangelical
churches. In the Church of England, though it was prescribed
alternatively with the cope in the First Prayer-Book of Edward VI., it
was ultimately discarded, with the other "Mass vestments," the cope
being substituted for it at the celebration of the Holy Communion in
cathedral and collegiate churches; its use has, however, during the last
fifty years been widely revived in connexion with the reactionary
movement in the direction of the pre-Reformation doctrine of the
eucharist. The difficult question of its legality is discussed in the
article VESTMENTS.

_Form._--The chasuble was originally a tent-like robe which fell in
loose folds below the knee (see Plate I. fig. 4). Its obvious
inconvenience for celebrating the holy mysteries, however, caused its
gradual modification. The object of the change was primarily to leave
the hands of the celebrant freer for the careful performance of the
manual acts, and to this end a process of cutting away at the sides of
the vestment began, which continued until the tent-shaped chasuble of
the 12th century had developed in the 16th into the scapular-like
vestment at present in use. This process was, moreover, hastened by the
substitution of costly and elaborately embroidered materials for the
simple stuffs of which the vestment had originally been composed; for,
as it became heavier and stiffer, it necessarily had to be made smaller.
For the extremely exiguous proportions of some chasubles actually in
use, which have been robbed of all the beauty of form they ever
possessed, less respectable motives have sometimes been responsible,
viz.