unigenitum tuum sancti spiritus obumbratione concepit et uirginitatis gloria permanente huic mundo lumen aeternum effudit,' &c. The words Quae et unigenitum...aeternum effudit' are by, I believe, universal consent attributed to Urban II., who improvised them late in 1094 or early in 1095, when about to open the Council of Piacenza. I infer, therefore, that the present volume, even if begun as early as the spring of 1094, cannot have been finished before the summer of 1095. I believe that ordinarily it is not easy to find a closely approximate terminus ad quem for the date of an undated manuscript; nor is ours an exception to the rule. The character, however, of the script forbids us to travel far into the twelfth century; and when we find at fol. 173 v. a mass for king, queen and people we may feel morally certain that the queen is the first consort of Henry I. The terminus ad quem would thus range from 1100 to 1118, with a preference for the earlier half of the period. Now, the mass is certainly supplementary to the missal; and I do not think that the handwriting, which is somewhat smaller and bolder than that of the rest of the volume, can fairly be regarded as other than that of a new scribe. The vermilion, too, of the rubrics is of a brighter tint than the rest. It may perhaps be worthy of remark, moreover, that in none of the prayers is there any mention of a proles regia. These considerations would seem to justify us in assigning the mass to a date slightly later than the coronation and first marriage of Henry I., and to place our terminus ad quem in the summer of 1100. Assuming, then, for a moment that the missal was out of the hands of the scribe in or before the summer of the year 1100, let us turn to fol. 47. We there find that, the scribe having provided for the recitation on Easter-Monday of the Preface, the 'Communicantes' and the 'Hanc igitur' of the previous day, his assignment of the second and third of these constituents was noted and, as it would seem, adversely called into question by one of whom I shall have occasion to speak again as 'the reviser.' This reviser wields the pen, for the most part, with authority, as though he were one whose nihil obstat had been solicited before the book should be used at the altar of St Augustine's. Nevertheless, instead of suppressing a manifestly intrusive line of text and rubric, he timorously places a note in the margin,- Hac die non dicimus communicantes nec hanc igitur.' Surely the person for whose information this was written was not one of themselves, but a stranger, or at least one who, if not a stranger, though amongst them was not of them; else why the first person plural? Surely he was the prospective owner of the book; else why such a memorandum in such a place? Surely he was one whom it was not for the reviser to command; else why the memorandum at all? On referring to the chronological table prefixed to Thomas of Elmham's Historia,' I find that on the thirteenth of March, 1099, a stranger to the monastery was consecrated Abbot of St Augustine's in the person of Hugh, a Fleury monk'; and it seems to me that such an one, the alumnus of a house which had within living memory supplied half England with books on the resuscitation of religious houses destroyed by Danish invaders, which boasted a scriptorial school of unsurpassed renown, and which at this moment had colonies of its scribes in our island, may have been, of all men, the most likely to chafe against the conservatism of a very conservative house, and to aim at amplifying and expanding its venerable liturgy into conformity with the missals by this time in general use throughout western Christendom. On the whole, then, I do not think that a more plausible conjecture than this can be found as to the date and the occasion of our manuscript; namely, that it was executed in or about the summer of 1099 for the personal use of Hugh of Fleury, the newly consecrated Abbot of St Augustine's. If I may take for granted, what I hope to prove in the sequel, that the monks of St Augustine's were still in possession of one or more of the missals which their founder brought to Canterbury in the year 597, I should say that the Corpus MS. was executed on the understanding that, whatever new masses might be proposed for use in their monastery, so much of its constituent and so much of its verbal text as was referable to the august document of which Gregory the Great was the compiler should undergo no change. On this subject I will make one or two very brief observations, and will then address myself to the task that lies before me. I. The scribe, who certainly had before him a collection of Prefaces such as we find in Pamelius and Muratori, and who seems to have been unwilling to assign one and the same Preface to the Feast of the Epiphany and the succeeding Sunday, followed the use by this time almost universal and apportioned the composition 'Quia notam fecisti,' &c., to the first of these days [fol. 16, lin. 19], and the 'Quia per unigeniti,' &c., to the second; but a correcting hand has broken boldly in upon this change, and, erasing so much of the Quia notam' as 1 There are two entries under the date 1099. Obitus Wydonis. Jacet in cryptis ante altare sancti Ricardi,' 'Hugo I. Florye. Hic fuit primus benedictus extra ecclesiam suam apud Lambedam, ab episcopo Londonensi Mauricio, iii. Idus Martii.' would catch the eye of the celebrant when reciting the Illation, has written in the margin the old proper Preface which St Gregory had, in obedience to a venerable tradition, appropriated to the feast. 2. It is in the Prefaces that we most vividly realize a possible effect of the collocation in one document of constituents taken from different sources. At fol. 41, lin. 3, and at fol. 46, lin. 4, the Easter Preface begins with the copulative conjunction-'Et te quidem,' &c.; whilst at fol. 47, lin. 3, in an assignment which is almost certainly the scribe's, it opens with the customary 'Te quidem.' The difference is, in itself, slight enough; but, since the initial conjunction involves the substitution of a long for a short Illation, I see in it an innovation, indeed, but an innovation which no scribe would have been likely to try to impose upon an ancient religious community; and am therefore inclined to regard it as a change made by St Gregory himself. 3. This leads me to mention a peculiarity of the Corpus MS. which inevitably arrests the attention of those who inspect its pages for the first time. I refer to the erased Prefaces. At a comparatively early date no fewer than fifty-eight of the seventy Prefaces in the Proprium de Tempore were, by means of a pencilled cross or obelus in the margin, condemned to suppression; and in the Proprium Sanctorum all, with the scant exception of three, received the same treatment. This condemnation was followed up in the former group by the erasure of fifty-five out of the fifty-eight, in the latter by the erasure of all the condemned save ten. But we shall see in due time that twelve of these thirteen survivals of the condemned are accidental, and the thirteenth is an exception which proves the truth of my surmise as to the motive for leaving the verbal text of the intruders uncorrected where it chanced to be susceptible of correction'. All that it at present behoves me to add is that the only Prefaces unstigmatized by the cross or obelus are compositions in respect of which there is the very highest probability that they survived by right of survival, and that that right had been assured them by derivation from the original document. If ever there was a felix culpa it surely was that which introduced so 1 I refer to the preface in honour of St Marcellus, which declares him not to have been a martyr [fol. 74v., lin. 6] in contradiction to the mass itself, which emphatically says that he was. This, I repeat, is the only condemned Preface in the Proprium Sanctorum which the knife would seem of set purpose and deliberately to have spared, the presumable object being to leave documentary proof that the series of compositions of which it was a member were alien amplifications, in the case, at any rate, of primitive masses. That this particular mass was in the original missal is proved by a passage in the Micrologus which tells us (Cap. XLIII.) why it was that Gregory gave St Marcellus, although a martyr, the officium proper to a confessor. long a tale of alien Prefaces into the missal before us. But for that offence, the volume would not have been enriched, as now we find it, by salvage from no less precious a collection than St Augustine's antiphonary, the companion of his mass-book. And I am bold to add that, but for that offence, the volume would long ere this have perished, and, with it, all memory, all trace, all hint of the liber missalis which the great Gregory's forty missionaries brought with them when thirteen centuries ago they set foot on our shore-all memory, all trace, all hint, save the meagre account given us by Archbishop Egbert. How far the Corpus MS. corresponds with that account we shall see in due time. THE RUBRICS OF THE PROPRIUM De Tempore. If, indeed, the Corpus MS. be, what I believe it to be, a complex document comprising, with some slight but inevitable modifications, the several contents of the very liber missalis which Augustine brought to Canterbury, and, intermingled with these, such accumulations as in the course of five centuries accrued to the original store, it must be of the first importance to know which of the several masses contained in the Proprium de Tempore correspond to Sundays and other anniversaries recognized by Gregory in his great editorial undertaking. Of the masses contained in the first sixty-five leaves (fol. 7—fol. 71 v.) there are some which cannot have had a place in any such book as St Augustine's liber missalis: 1. Liturgiologists are, I believe, unanimously of opinion that St Gregory knew nothing of any such mass as that, at fol. 14 v., in honour of the Circumcision. The author of the 'Micrologus' says (Cap. XXXIX.), -'In octaua Domini iuxta Romanam auctoritatem non officium "Puer natus est" sed "Vultum tuum" cantamus; et orationem gregorianam "Deus qui salutis aeternae," non illam "Deus qui nos" dicimus'? The mass, that is to say, of his preference was that which in our book is entitled 'De Sancta Maria.' It occurs at fol. 15; where, curiously enough, it not only follows the compilation entitled 'In die circumcisionis Domini' but also takes precedence of that for the First Sunday after Christmas-a double misplacement of some significance. 2. The mass just mentioned, 'Dominica prima post natale Domini,' cannot, I think, establish a claim to rank as Gregorian. 1 Migne, CLI. 1007 C. 3. Nor can that entitled 'In octauis Epiphaniae' claim a Gregorian antiquity; for, as we are informed in a letter written 'ad Albinum abbatem' by Charlemagne on the subject of octaves, 'Natiuitas sanctae Mariae non qualem diximus habet octauam, quia non est pro stola prima cui adhibeatur in octaua secunda. Similiter nec Annunciatio Domini, nec Ypopanti, nec Epiphania, nec Decollatio sancti Ioannis, neque Natalis Domini; cum de matre nascendo non acceperit stolam primam, sed moriendo primam et resurgendo secundam'.' 4. St Gregory does not seem to have provided for more than three Sundays after Epiphany; for Abbot Berno of Reichenau, who, although a comparatively late authority, for he lived early in the eleventh century, nevertheless claims our respect as an acute and industrious liturgiologist, says in his treatise 'De celebratione Aduentus Domini' (cap. III.), 'Habentur enim inter Natale Domini et Septuagesimam officia quatuor per dies dominicos"; a passage the context of which evidently implies that in his day the Gregorian officia for the Sundays in question were believed to be equivalent in number with the Sunday masses of that season put forth by St Gregory. Hence the mass at fol. 18 entitled 'Dominica tertia' must be regarded as post-Gregorian, as also must that on fol. 171 v. for yet another Sunday after the Epiphany. 5. So, too, must that beginning at fol. 71, lin. 5, of which the same author tells us that, although it figures in some sacramentaries, it is not authentic; whilst the author of the Micrologus (cap. LXII.) intimates that he knows of but one Sunday that can be termed 'Praeparatio Domini Aduentus".' 6. In accordance, too, with an opinion which seems to be unanimous amongst the old liturgiologists, we must regard as post-Gregorian the masses for all the Thursdays in Lent before Holy-week, and also that for the Thursday in Whitsun-week. Again, the missal which Augustine brought to Canterbury cannot have assigned the mass 'In letaniis' to the place it occupies in our volume, the Monday before Ascension-day (fol. 50 v.). Nor, if it be true that the procession and mass 'In litaniis majoribus' were instituted as late as the year 598, can it have stood where we now have 'De sancto Marco euangelista' (fol. 86 v.). And, indeed, it has none of the preliminary prayers which are assigned in other books to the greater litanies. It may, however, have stood in St Augustine's liber missalis M. R. 1 Quoted by D'Azevedo, p. 24. 3 lb. CXLII. 1084 B. 2 Migne, CXLII. 1084 A. 4 lb. CLI. 1022 A. |