For a further description of these and other features which are
characteristic of or peculiar to the Celtic liturgy the reader is
referred to F. E. Warren's _Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church_
(Oxford, 1881).
Period II. _The Anglo-Saxon Church._--We find ourselves here on firmer
ground, and can speak with certainty as to the nature of the liturgy of
the English church after the beginning of the 7th century. Information
is drawn from liturgical allusions in the extant canons of numerous
councils, from the voluminous writings of Bede, Alcuin and many other
ecclesiastical authors of the Anglo-Saxon period, and above all from a
considerable number of service-books written in England before the
Norman Conquest. Three of these books are missals of more or less
completeness: (1) the _Leofric Missal_, a composite 10th- to
11th-century MS. presented to the cathedral of Exeter by Leofric, the
first bishop of that see (1046-1072), now in the Bodleian library at
Oxford; edited by F. E. Warren (Oxford, 1883); (2) the missal of Robert
of Jumièges, archbishop of Canterbury (1051-1052), written probably at
Winchester and presented by Archbishop Robert to his old monastery of
Jumièges in the neighbourhood of Rouen, in the public library of which
it now lies; edited by H. A. Wilson (London, 1896); (3) the _Red Book of
Derby_, a MS. missal of the second half of the 11th century, now in the
library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
A perusal of these volumes proves what we should have expected a priori,
that the Roman liturgy was in use in the Anglo-Saxon church. This was
the case from the very first. That church owed its foundation to a Roman
pontiff, and to Roman missionaries, who brought, as we are told by Bede,
their native liturgical codices with them (_Hist. Eccles_. lib. ii. cap.
28). Accordingly, when we speak of an Anglo-Saxon missal, we mean a
Roman missal only exhibiting one or more of the following features,
which would differentiate it from an Italian missal of the same century.
(a) Rubrics and other entries of a miscellaneous character written in
the vernacular language of the country. (b) The commemoration of
national or local saints in the kalendar, in the canon of the mass and
in the litanies which occur for use on Easter Even and in the baptismal
offices. (c) The presence of a few special masses in honour of those
local saints, together with a certain number of collects of a
necessarily local character, for the rulers of the country, for its
natural produce, &c. (d) The addition of certain peculiarities of
liturgical structure and arrangement interpolated into the otherwise
purely Roman service from an extraneous source. There are two noteworthy
examples of this in Anglo-Saxon service-books. Every Sunday and festival
and almost every votive mass has its proper preface, although the number
of such prefaces in the Gregorian sacramentary of the same period had
been reduced to eight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account