Why was the Book of Common Prayer needed; wasn’t the Bible sufficient?
Dr. Jacobs: One of Cranmer’s chief concerns was to teach people the Bible. The Book of Common Prayer was accompanied by a Book of Homilies, the very first one of which is called “A Fruitful Exhortation to The Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture.” It begins like this:
“To a Christian man there can be nothing either more necessary or profitable than the knowledge of holy Scripture, forasmuch as in it is contained God’s true word, setting forth his glory, and also man’s duty. And there is no truth nor doctrine necessary for our justification and everlasting salvation, but that is (or may be) drawn out of that fountain and well of truth.”
So you really can’t have a higher view of the authority and sufficiency of Scripture than Cranmer did.
“to have and to hold” (http://hdl.handle.net/2027/njp.32101060109954?urlappend=;seq=700) and “with this ring I thee wed” (http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101060109954;view=1up;seq=701) are among (???) the phrases mentioned by Jacobs that are already there in pre-Reformation (pre-Cranmerian) English. Cf. the few comments I make at http://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2014/05/i-plight-thee-my-troth.html.
In my blog post I focus more on the “to have and to hold”, but note that in his edition of the printed (not manuscript) editions of the Catholic service, Dickinson gives a reading in the main body which I take to refer to printed editions dated 1513 or 1526, but in the notes, a merely orthographically variant reading derived from printed editions dated [14]97 and [14]98. (Yet even a printed edition dated 1526 would antedate the Cranmerian Book of common prayer.)
I see that Jacobs makes much of this reasonably clear in the book (204n3), and explicitly clear for “to have and to hold from this day forward” (40).