INTRODUCTION.

THE Missal now for the first time appearing in print is one of the few Irish service books, and one of the only four Irish Missals which are known to be in existence, having escaped the general destruction which befell all such articles at the dissolution of the monasteries in Ireland, A.D. 1537, and which, from a liturgical, a palæographical, and an antiquarian point of view is alike to be deplored. The other three are: I. The Stowe Missal, the property of Lord Ashburnham, described at some length by Dr. O'Conor, in his Catalogue of the Stowe Library, Appendix i. p. 47. 47. See also Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy, vol. vi. p. 398; Transactions of do. vol. xxiii. ad finem; Westwood's Miniatures and Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon and Irish MSS. p. 88. II. The Drummond Castle, Missal, the property of Lady Willoughby d'Eresby, about to be published by the Pitsligo Press. III. The Rosslyn Missal, in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh. There is an account of the two last-named missals in Bishop Forbes' valuable preface to his edition of the Scottish Missale de Arbuthnott. The present Missal, which belongs to the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and which will be alluded to hereafter as "the Corpus Missal," stands third in point of chronological order, being less ancient than the Stowe and Drummond Castle Missals, and older than the Rosslyn Missal. The grounds for determining its date will be mentioned presently.

It is a volume of small dimensions, being about six and a-half inches in length by five in breadth, but of great thickness in proportion to its height, owing partly to the solid character of the tough dark vellum on which it is written, and partly to the large handwriting with which its pages are filled. Its outer pages are blackened with age. It was originally

bound in strong wooden covers, portions of which remain, polished by long wear. It is preserved in its ancient leather satchel, the back of which is ornamented with diagonallyimpressed lines and circles now nearly obliterated by constant use. At the upper angles strong leather straps are affixed, fastened with leather ties to a broader central strap which passed over the shoulders, from which it was suspended, and so doubtless carried by many an itinerant Irish priest, visiting distant villages and outlying hamlets on foot or horseback. It was an old custom peculiar to Ireland among Western countries, but common in the East, to keep books in satchels of leather, which were called in Irish polaire or tiagha lebar, the pellîceus sacculus of Adamnan (Vit. S. Columbæ, lib. ii. c. 8, with Reeve's note). The leather cover of the Book of Armagh and that of the shrine of St. Maidoc are figured in Petrie's Round Towers, pp. 327, 332. Mr. Petrie proceeds to state that they are the only specimens of the kind remaining in Ireland or in the British Islands. Attention had not then been called (A.D. 1845) to the polaire of the Corpus Missal. Prof. Westwood (Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. xx.; Archæologia, vol. xliii. p. 136) has also found another among the Irish MSS. in the convent of St. Isidore at Rome. Various Eastern satchels of similar material and design may be seen in the British Museum. Another encasing an Ethiopian MS. is preserved in the Library of St. John's College, Oxford.

The MS. itself in its present condition consists of 212 leaves, which have been numbered consecutively, but nine leaves are missing between fol. 117 b and fol. 118 a, containing the missæ for Rogation Days and for Ascension Day; one leaf between fol. 202 b and fol. 203 a, containing a portion of the baptismal office; and one leaf or more (probably six leaves) at the end of the book, which accounts for the "Ordo commendationis animæ" ending somewhat abruptly on fol. 212 b.

Gatherings. It consists of gatherings of twelve leaves, signed in the middle of the lower margin of the last page with Roman numerals,

enclosed within straight lines in the form of a square. The signing ceases at the end of the fifteenth gathering, but it is evident from an examination of the back of the volume that there were originally nineteen of such divisions, which implies the present loss of sixteen leaves to be accounted for in the way suggested in the preceding paragraph.

Ruling. Single lines are deeply drawn on the recto of each leaf, with a hard point at intervals indicated by equidistant prickings on the extreme edge of the margins, which are only here and there observable, having frequently disappeared from the wearing away of the edges of the book. These dry lines do not extend beyond the text, which is bound between single vertical lines drawn right across the page, so as to leave a margin of about 14 inch in depth on the lower and right-hand side of the recto, and on the lower and left-hand side of the verso of each leaf, and a margin of about inch in depth on the upper and left-hand side of the recto, and the upper and right-hand side of the verso of each leaf.

Writing. It is written throughout in Latin, in large and heavy angular Irish characters, resembling those of the text of the early fragment of the Annals of Tighernach in the Bodleian Library (Rawl. B.), and of the fragment of an old Hiberno-Latin Hymnarium, which has long been in the possession of the Franciscans of the Irish Province. There are eighteen lines on each page, except where the huge size of illuminated initial letters has limited the otherwise available room, as on f. 51 a, 114 b, and in one or two cases where (after fol. 191 a), owing probably to defective ruling, the number has either been increased to nineteen, or reduced to seventeen. The words are throughout slightly spaced; such at least was the intention of the scribe, although in many instances the intermediate space is reduced to a vanishing point. Space is also occasionally economized in these two ways: extra words which a line may not be long enough to contain are protruded on to the margin, and enclosed like the rubrics and titles within an outline red border (sixteen times); or, when the first line of a new paragraph has

been written, the scribe has filled up a blank at the close of the preceding line before going on to write the line next below (five times). This method is a peculiarity of Irish MSS. The inserted words are separated from the concluding words of the preceding paragraph by a symbol known as ceann fa eite or cor fa cosan; for a specimen see fol. 171 a 7. A descriptive title is prefixed to each missa, written in red or in black ink, enclosed in a red border, and their proper designations are prefixed in the same way to the separate collects, lectiones, &c., with this exception, that the words "Epistola" and Evangelium" appear very seldom, the reference to the book in the Old or New Testament from which they are taken being substituted for them; and neither the Roman word "Introitus," nor its Sarum equivalent "Officium," occurs. In the few cases where a title is prefixed to the Introit the word " Antiphon" is used, generally represented by its initial letter. The same title is used in the Drummond and Rosslyn Missals, and may be regarded as an Irish peculiarity derived perhaps from the similar use of the term in the ancient Gallican Liturgy.

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The Introit, Psalmus, Gradual, Tract, Verses, Offertorium, and Communio, are written in a smaller handwriting than the rest of the volume. Roman numerals are frequently found in the text instead of words for numbers.

Abbreviations and Contractions.—The following is a complete list of the abbreviations and contractions which are of frequent occurrence throughout the volume, together with the marks used for their indication: :-

The ordinary mark for indicating a contraction is a short straight line placed horizontally over the word from which a portion has been omitted. This line is sometimes turned up to the right, so as to present the appearance of a small hook at that end only (~). Throughout the Canon of the Mass, and occasionally after fol. 191 a, it is obliquely but slightly drawn from the left upwards to the right, turning in an opposite direction at both ends). It usually represents the