Latin West
The Sarum Use
What a Western exorcism looked like before Rome standardised one — a parish priest's forms, in the same book as baptisms and burials.
In its own terms
What this body is doing
The Sarum Manuale is the working book of an English parish priest: baptism, marriage, visitation of the sick, burial, and the exorcistic forms among them. Its importance to this section is what its ordinariness demonstrates. The Latin West did not lack rites before 1614; it had many, varying by diocese and use, and the Roman book that followed was a consolidation of that inheritance rather than an invention.
It is also the one body here whose practice stopped. The Sarum use was suppressed under Elizabeth in 1559, which is why this tradition survives as a printed book rather than as a living rite, and why the corpus can date the end of it as precisely as the beginning.
Where it stands in the tree
Descent
Separated from
The Latin West · 1078Not a split but a use: a local variant of the Latin rite, established at Salisbury after the Conquest and followed across much of England and Wales until it was suppressed.
The same questions asked of every body
What it holds
Are the gifts still given?
Not established here. Not an exorcism question, and the one that decides the rest. A body holding the gifts ceased with the apostles has no room for a deliverance ministry; a body holding they continue has no reason to license one.
Who may act?
Described from a text the corpus holdsThe parish priest, as part of the ordinary pastoral round.
The forms sit in the Manuale beside baptism, marriage and visitation of the sick.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
What counts as evidence?
Inferred from the surrounding textsNot established. The corpus has not transcribed the rite.
Named and dated here, not yet read clause by clause — so this is a gap rather than a finding.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
Where is the spirit?
Inferred from the surrounding textsIn the person, and in salt and water blessed for use.
Exorcism of the elements is a standard feature of Western manuals of this period.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
Whom do the words address?
Inferred from the surrounding textsBoth God and the spirit, in the Western pattern the 1614 rite later fixes.
Read from the family of Western manuals rather than from the text itself.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
What restraint is written in?
Inferred from the surrounding textsThe parish setting and the priest's ordinary authority.
Read from where the forms sit in the book rather than from a stated caution.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
What closes the matter?
Inferred from the surrounding textsThe rite ends, in the Western pattern.
Untranscribed here.
Manuale ad Usum Percelebris Ecclesiae Sarisburiensis · medieval use; printed 1506
What it uses
Rites
The Sarum Exorcistic Forms
Suppressedprinted 1506 · Latin
The pre-Reformation English rite, from the Sarum Manuale. Shows what a Western exorcism looked like before Rome fixed one in 1614.
Named and dated; not yet transcribed · on the rites page
This page records what a body holds and where that is written down. It takes no position on whether any of it is true, and nothing here is instruction — the rites are described by what they contain, never as something to follow.