Red-Letter Day
also known as Holy Thursday, Great and Holy Thursday, Sheer Thursday
Maundy Thursday is the Thursday of Holy Week, on which the church keeps the night of the Last Supper: the institution of the Eucharist, the washing of the disciples' feet, and the agony in the garden. It takes its name from the Latin mandatum, the new commandment given at that table. Kept at Jerusalem, Antioch, North Africa and Asia Minor by the late fourth century, it has carried the reconciliation of penitents, the blessing of the year's holy oils, and the giving of alms.
On the night before he suffered, Jesus ate a last meal with his disciples. At that table he took bread and a cup and gave them as his body and his blood. He rose from the meal, laid aside his garments, tied a towel about himself, and washed the feet of the men who would shortly abandon him. Then he went out to a garden to pray while they slept, and there he was betrayed with a kiss. Maundy Thursday is the day the church keeps that night.
The day is named for a commandment given at that table. The Book of Common Prayer of 2019 says so in its own rubric: "Maundy Thursday receives its name from the mandatum (commandment) given by our Lord: 'A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.'" The English word travelled from the Latin through Anglo-Norman and Middle English, where a maunde could mean either the Supper itself or the washing of feet that followed it.
The oldest surviving description of how the day was kept comes from a pilgrim, a woman named Egeria, who was at Jerusalem around 381 to 384 and wrote home about it. What she describes is not a service but a night's work. At the eighth hour the people gather earlier than usual, because everything must finish sooner. The bishop offers the oblation, and then a second offering is made behind the Cross, in a place used for it on no other day of the year. Before the dismissal the archdeacon raises his voice and tells them what is coming: "Let us all assemble at the first hour of the night in the church which is in Eleona, for great toil awaits us to-day, in this very night." They go home to eat, and then they go out, up to the Mount of Olives, over the cave where the Lord had been with his apostles that same night, from hymns to lessons to more hymns, until at first cockcrow they come down to Gethsemane by the light of more than two hundred candles, weak with fasting and moving slowly, to hear the Gospel of the arrest. Egeria says the sound of the people weeping could probably be heard as far as the city.
Around that night the church hung everything it needed to do before Easter. This was the day, at Rome from the early fifth century, on which public penitents were absolved and readmitted before the offertory, so that they could receive at Easter. It was the day, from the fifth century on, when the chrism and the oils were consecrated for the coming year's baptisms and confirmations and anointings of the sick, so that the day quietly supplied the twelve months after it. It was the one day of the year on which, in North Africa, the ordinary rule of fasting before communion was set aside. In medieval England the day was called Shere Thursday, and men shaved and cut their hair before Easter, and were shriven. In England it also became the day the king gave alms, and for a long stretch the day the king knelt and washed the feet of the poor.
The footwashing itself came to this day slowly and unevenly, which is a matter for the history below. What has never been in doubt is what the day is for. Its own texts say it plainly. The proper preface appointed for Maundy Thursday still begins where John's Gospel begins that night: "Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end; and on the night before he suffered, he instituted these holy mysteries."
You already know how to do a large gesture once. The church has argued for centuries about whether an annual kneeling forms love or excuses you from it, and the argument is not settled by wanting to be on the right side of it. Notice what the day actually asks: not a feeling about the Supper, but a body at a table and a body at someone's feet. Notice, too, that the men whose feet were washed that night ran away before morning, and were washed anyway. The gesture was not a reward for reliability. If your love for the people nearest you had to survive on what you did for them this week rather than on what you believe about them, what would it look like by Easter?
The day is better attested than most of Holy Week, and the sources cluster tightly. The earliest hard canonical text is canon 50 of the Synod of Laodicea, a council dated only somewhere between 343 and 381, which forbids breaking the fast on the fifth day of the last week in Lent. It legislates about an observance already customary, so the practice is older than the canon by an unknown margin. Egeria's pilgrim diary, around 381 to 384, gives the fullest early description. John Chrysostom preached on the day at Antioch, traditionally in 388, in a homily headed in the manuscript "On the Holy and Great Thursday"; he cut it short because the congregation was waiting to communicate. Augustine is answering questions about the day around 400. Conciliar canons from Hippo and Carthage in 393 and 397 record a dispensation from the pre-communion fast, and a letter of Innocent I to Decentius of Gubbio, dated 416, records the Roman reconciliation of penitents. Four regions attest the observance within roughly one generation, and no source located here identifies a point of origin or a first mover. The evidence shows the day already diffuse by the time anyone writes about it.
The single most striking finding concerns the footwashing. Egeria, the earliest eyewitness, describes the Eucharist and the all-night vigil and mentions no footwashing at all. Around 400 Augustine still treats it as a disputed custom not fixed to this day, kept by some in Lent and by others in the Easter octave: "Many, however, have not accepted this as a custom, lest it should be thought to belong to the ordinance of baptism; and some have not hesitated to deny it any place among our ceremonies." The gesture was certainly being practised, at Milan and in North Africa, in the late fourth century, and the treatise On the Sacraments, traditionally ascribed to Ambrose though its modern editors print it as the work of an unknown author, notes that the Roman church did not share the custom. The earliest evidence of the washing being required on this day is the Seventeenth Council of Toledo in Visigothic Spain in 694, which bound bishops and priests to wash the feet of those subject to them under pain of excommunication, and legislated because the custom had lapsed in places. Whether the Roman development attested in the seventh-century sacramentaries and the Spanish origin reported by Britannica are two developments or one fact described twice has not been resolved here.
Other elements moved in the other direction. The Council in Trullo, in 692, quoted the Carthaginian exception, that the mysteries are not performed except by men who are fasting, "except on one day in the year on which the Supper of the Lord is celebrated," and then repealed it: "it is not right to break the fast on the fifth feria of the last week of Lent." The day's most distinctive concession lasted roughly three centuries and was withdrawn. The reconciliation of public penitents faded with the order of public penitents itself, absorbed into private confession; no source consulted gives a date by which it ceased.
Because the day gathers so much, its keeping varies widely. In the West the bells fall silent from the Gloria of the evening Mass until the Easter Vigil, and wooden clappers take their place; across France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Czechia and Hungary children are told the bells have flown to Rome, returning in France with the Easter eggs. The altar is stripped. The night office of Tenebrae, Matins and Lauds anticipated the evening before, extinguishes its candles one by one, the Sarum Ordinal prescribing twenty-four of them; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls it "a sort of funeral service, or dirge." The reserved Sacrament is carried to an altar of repose and watched, a beautiful custom that is also a young one, first mentioned only at the close of the fifteenth century. In the Philippines and its diaspora the Visita Iglesia takes worshippers to seven churches in a night, praying at each altar of repose.
Elsewhere the day is domestic as well as liturgical. German-speaking lands call it Gründonnerstag and eat green herbs with eggs and potatoes, Frankfurt's seven-herb green sauce best known among them. Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes keep it as a public holiday; Sweden dropped it from the working calendar in 1772. In England the sovereign still distributes Maundy money, minted for the purpose, to as many recipients as the sovereign's years. In the Byzantine tradition, Great and Holy Thursday joins Vespers to the Liturgy of St Basil and, in the evening, keeps the Matins of the Twelve Gospels, though the account of it here rests on secondary sources rather than the rubrics themselves. Coptic practice washes the feet of the whole congregation, not a representative twelve.
Egeria's account of the day is chapters XXXV and XXXVI of her Itinerarium, quoted here from the translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, The Pilgrimage of Etheria (SPCK, 1919), pages 69 to 73, digitised at archive.org/details/pilgrimageofethe00mccliala. The archdeacon's warning and the account of the weeping at Gethsemane both stand there; readers should note that the bishop's comforting of the people at daybreak is printed in that edition under Good Friday, not under this day.
Augustine's report that footwashing was not yet fixed to the day is Letter 55 to Januarius, chapter 18, section 33, in the translation of J. G. Cunningham for the first series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, volume 1, at newadvent.org/fathers/1102055.htm. The repeal of the fasting exception is canon 29 of the Council in Trullo, in Henry Percival's translation for the second series, volume 14, at newadvent.org/fathers/3814.htm. Toledo's 694 canon on the washing of feet is summarised at newadvent.org/cathen/15557b.htm; the wording often quoted from it belongs instead to the Catholic Culture article "The Washing of Feet on Maundy Thursday."
Calvin's objection is his Commentary on John at 13:15, at ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom35.iii.iii.html; the translator is not named in the material available here.
The 2019 collect, proper preface, footwashing rubric and the explanation of the day's name are in the Anglican Church in North America's Book of Common Prayer (2019), in the leaflet Concerning Maundy Thursday and the Maundy Thursday liturgy, both at bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net. The 1549 Holy Week readings are at justus.anglican.org, as is the 1662 original-manuscript text of the collects, epistles and gospels; the 1928 American propers are at episcopalnet.org.
Mary I's maundy of 3 April 1556 is described in a letter of Marco Antonio Faitta to Ippolito Chizzola, calendared in the Calendar of State Papers, Venice, volume 6, number 473, pages 434 to 435, at british-history.ac.uk. John Mirk's account of Schere Thursday is item 29 of his Festial, edited by Theodor Erbe for the Early English Text Society, extra series 96 (1905), pages 125 to 127. The Tenebrae apparatus, the stripping of the altar, and the late first mention of the altar of repose are all from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, at newadvent.org/cathen/14506a.htm, /01349a.htm and /12776b.htm respectively.
The Anglican record is a documented thinning and recovery. From 1549 through 1662 the "Thursday before Easter" receives an Epistle, 1 Corinthians 11, and a Gospel, Luke 23, the trial before Pilate, and no collect of its own; Good Friday by contrast receives three. John 13 has no liturgical existence on the day at all in the classical books. The first proper collect in that line appears in the American Book of Common Prayer of 1928, which also admits John 13:1 as an alternative Gospel. The 1979 book gives the day a full liturgy with the footwashing rubricated; the 2019 book appoints Exodus 12, Psalm 78, 1 Corinthians 11 and John 13 or Luke 22, and directs that "When observed, the ceremony of the washing of feet appropriately follows the sermon."
The Roman recovery is datable. A general decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, Maxima Redemptionis Nostrae Mysteria, of 16 November 1955, moved the Mass from morning to evening and placed the footwashing inside the Mass after the homily, where an ordinary parishioner could see it for the first time since 1570. A decree of 6 January 2016 replaced the rubric's "The men who have been chosen" with "Those who are chosen from amongst the people of God," so that the group may represent "the variety and the unity of each part of the people of God."
The counter-witness deserves its own line. Calvin, commenting on John 13:15 in 1553, called the annual ceremony "a farce which they were playing on the stage," and argued that Christ "does not here enjoin an annual ceremony, but bids us be ready, throughout our whole life, to wash the feet of our brethren and neighbours." The objection has a modern echo: interviews published in 2024 report the rite quietly dropped in some churches for reasons of class discomfort and building logistics rather than theology.
Several things remain contested. The Synoptic Gospels place the Last Supper on 15 Nisan as the Passover meal itself; John places it on 14 Nisan, with the lambs being slaughtered at the hour of the death. Positions in circulation include a plurality of Jewish calendars that year, a preference for John's dating as the more historically precise, and a reading of John's placement as deliberate theology rather than chronology. Nothing in this account depends on settling it. Within the history of the observance, the Carthaginian canon number is given as 24 by one reliable source and 29 by another; a Council of Hippo canon naming the day could not be located at all; and the received shorthand that Nicaea in 325 settled the Quartodeciman question is not a quotation from the Nicene canons. The English royal maundy is documented from King John in 1210, but its dates rest on tertiary compilations, and the end of the royal footwashing is variously reported: James II was the last monarch to wash feet himself, in 1685, though a competing record places William III doing so in 1698; the Lord High Almoner continued until 1737; no monarch attended between 1698 and 1932.
Almighty Father, whose most dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it in thankful remembrance of Jesus Christ our Savior, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Imbomon /ˈɪm.boʊ.mɒn/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Exodus 12:1–14Psalm 78:15–26v1 Corinthians 11:23–26(27–34)John 13:1–15 or Luke 22:14–30