> as lemmas

6. bidding of beads, beads-bidding; bidding of prayers, bidding prayer. As to these expressions there has been a series of curious misapprehensions. The original meaning down to the Reformation was ‘praying of prayers,’ i.e. saying of prayers, praying; cf. bid v.¹ 7e. From an early date in the Christian church, it was the custom to request the prayers of the faithful in behalf of certain persons and things; and in the 16th cent., in England, forms of allocution or direction to the congregation, telling them whom and what to remember in ‘bidding their beads’ or ‘prayers’ were authoritatively put forth. As bid in the sense of ‘pray’ was now becoming obsolete, the meaning of the expression was forgotten after the Reformation, and bid taken in the sense of ‘order, direct,’ so that in the reign of Elizabeth the ‘bidding of prayers’ was applied to the allocution itself, as if = ‘the directing or injoining of prayers.’ With the later use of the verbal noun as a gerund directly governing an object, we have in the 17th cent. ‘the form of bidding prayers’ or ‘prayer’ (= precationem hortandi); and later still, a misunderstanding of the grammatical construction in this phrase has led to this exhortation to the people (in which ‘concionatores populum hortabuntur ut secum in precibus concurrat’ Sparrow Collect. Articles, 1671) being commonly called ‘the bidding-prayer,’ as if it were itself a kind of prayer qualified by the attribute ‘bidding’.