Before leaving this subject an effort should be made to remove a misconception. A common modern fallacy is that there is a distinction between the crosier and the pastoral staff, the latter name being assigned to the crook of a bishop, and the former to the processional cross borne before an Archbishop. The late Dean Hook, if he was not the originator of the idea in an article in his "Church Dictionary," at any rate did much to propagate it thereby, and it is now frequently found in books of reference. But the use of the words in the past is all against it. It is true that crosier comes from the Latin _crux_, a cross, but from the same root too, come crook and crutch; so that nothing can be proved from the derivation. It would seem that the original form of the word was _crose_, as it is given in a quotation used above, whence the chaplain who bore it was a crosier. From this it became the crosier's staff, the crosier-staff, and finally the crosier; all having reference to the crook of Episcopal Authority. Bishops in Battle. BY EDWARD LAMPLOUGH. After William, Duke of Normandy, came in with great toil and rout of war, on Senlac's evil day, it was not difficult to apply the poet's lines to many a proud prelate of the Anglo-Norman epoch:-- "Princely was his hand in largess, heavy was his arm to smite, And his will was leaded iron, like the mace he bore in fight." Not that English Bishops had not found it necessary to take the field in pre-conquest times, when the old Danish wars convulsed the island, and the inhabitants suffered severely from the unbridled passion and cruelty of a barbarous and heathen soldiery. Many a grand old Anglo-Saxon prelate found himself called upon as a Christian and a patriot to take his station in the van of the king's army, to bar the path of the invader, and fence with sword and spear the ancient churches and the fruitful plains of his beloved island. The old English chroniclers have preserved for us the names of a few of those warrior bishops. Ealstan, Bishop of Sherborne, may be specially referred to. A.D. 823, he assisted Prince Ethelwulf during an expedition into Kent, and in 845 he was one of the commanders in the great victory over the Danes at the mouth of the Parret. He died, full of years and honours, in that unhappy and troublous 867, having held the Bishopric of Sherborne fifty years. His successor, Bishop Heahmund, was not so fortunate; he fought under Ethelred and Alfred during the sanguinary and disastrous campaign of 871, and was slain at Marden, when victory remained with the Danes. When Edmund Ironsides encountered Canute at Assingdon, and was betrayed by that infamous traitor Edric Streon, among those who swelled the huge death-mounds was Ednoth, Bishop of Dorchester, and Abbot Wulsy, but Hoveden asserts that "they had come for the purpose of invoking the Lord on behalf of the soldiers."