THE EDITOR'S PREFACE

TO THE MEMBERS OF

The Early English Text Society.

THE early English treatise on the Mass, which has for some years appeared among the intended publications of this Society as the Lay-Folks Mass-Book-a title adopted to indicate its purpose is at length placed in the hands of the members. It has been so long delayed from various unforeseen causes, and chiefly in the hope of finding the needful manuscripts.

I have altogether failed in the search for a copy of the original treatise, and our earliest and best text (B) is a transcript of the English translation, which has been subjected to systematic verbal alterations at the hands of a midland scribe of the fourteenth century. From a comparison with text E, which is an independent transcript by a west-midland scribe of a hundred years later, there do not appear to be any variations that leave us in doubt as to the tenour of the original translation. With the help of text C, though that, like texts A, D, and F, has undergone a ritual revision, it would not be difficult to restore the verbal forms, if a textus restitutus were the object of the Society.

My attention was in the first instance drawn to the British Museum MS. (our text B) by Mr. Maskell's extracts from it in the notes to his Ancient English Liturgies. It was one of the first books I asked for on my next visit to the Readingroom, and, besides its curious ritual information, I was much struck by the fact that it was the only document I had met with that enables us to know the prayers which the unlearned of our forefathers used at mass, and by the light it threw upon

their inner religious life from a point of view different from that afforded by the many mediæval sermons (*) that have come down to us. I made as many extracts as I had time for, and there my concern with it might have ended, but that some ten or twelve years afterwards I was asked to help in the work of this Society. When I agreed to edit this manuscript, which was all I originally undertook to do, I had very little idea of the time it would be hanging about, nor of the inroad which it would make on my leisure, but having undertaken it, I have been unwilling to put it forth in an incomplete condition. That I have done so, has not been from any sparing of trouble on my part. When I went through the transcript, which Mr. E. Brock had made for the Society, with close attention, as a man does who has undertaken the task of editor, I found not only what I had forgotten or had not observed when I had examined the manuscript, that it was a translation, but also that it was the work of a scribe who was not familiar with the northern dialect in which, as I hope to prove to the satisfaction of the reader, the translation had been originally written.

I was unwilling to send it to the press without an attempt to procure copies of this, and of the original from which it had been translated. I circulated a print of the British Museum MS. in the hope of getting the needful information, and I am almost ashamed to think of the time I have myself * NOTE.-Besides the series of medieval sermons, the E. E. T. Society has already printed Myrc's Duties of a Parish Priest, edited by Mr. Peacock, and Oure Ladyes Myroure, edited by Revd J. H. Blunt. The present editor has undertaken Archbishop Thoresby's Catechism in English, with the Latin as agreed on in the Convocation of York, A.D. 1357, both from the authentic copy inserted in this Archbishop's register, and a Lollard paraphrase from a MS. in the Lambeth Library to be printed on the opposite page. This with the few pieces in this volume will complete the extant authorized English formularies of the Northern province.

The Committee propose to continue this series by the Festival from the MSS. or Caxton's edition, the Oculus Sacerdotis in English verse, and some English Primers and Offices in English for the Southern province, which are known to exist in larger numbers than those hitherto found in the North.

spent, as I had opportunity, in hunting through manuscripts and searching catalogues; and I am sorry to have to add, what is of more consequence, the trouble I have given to my friends, and to others whose help I could only claim on the score of their being able to assist in the enquiry.

After all, the result has been that, not to mention other libraries at home and abroad, I have had to give up the hope of finding the missing MSS. in the British Museum, the Bodleian, the University Library at Cambridge, the public libraries at Paris and Edinburgh, the Lambeth Library, the libraries at Durham, Lincoln, and other cathedrals in this country, at Ushaw and other Roman Catholic colleges, or in the libraries at Rouen and Caen, where, from the Norman origin of the treatise, it seemed not impossible that a copy may have found its way at the revolution among the spoils of some Norman monastery or manor house.

I did, however, succeed in getting to know of other MSS., which, though later than the Museum MS., are interesting as showing the changes that were afterwards introduced. Mr. Furnivall told me of the fragment printed from the Advocate's Library at Edinburgh (Text A); and also of the MS, in the University Library at Cambridge (MS. D), which Mr. Bradshaw, the librarian, had been good enough to mention to him. Professor Skeat placed at my disposal his own transcript of our text F. I venture to offer to these gentlemen the thanks of the Society and my own for their kindness in helping me; and equally to those also, who though unsuccessful, were not less ready in giving their time and trouble for the search. I had myself noticed the mention of our text C (Corpus Library, Oxford) and text E (Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge) in Barnard's Catalogus Librorum MSS. Angliæ et Hiberniæ, a book which at the end of nearly two hundred years remains without a second edition, invaluable as that would be, if it were brought down to the present

time.

A transcript of the Oxford MS. I obtained without any difficulty, but I did not receive our E text until the texts B, C, and F had been arranged and printed in a three-text form.

It appeared to Mr. Furnivall and the committee to be of such dialectic interest that it has been added as a fourth text. Although it is late, and written by a very illiterate scribeperhaps from that very circumstance-it has retained what I am disposed to think will be found to be the wording of the original, if that should ever be recovered; and it justifies my conjectural insertions in text B, where there were holes in the vellum of the MS.

In the course of the enquiry I obtained transcripts of several MSS. relating to the mass, which had not been published. Three of them are printed in extenso in the Appendix, and I have quoted largely from some of the others in the notes.

It may have been disappointing not to find the originals of which we were in search, but it is hardly to be wondered at, when we consider the wear and tear of small books in constant use, and the risk of their being "defaced and abolished" in times of religious persecution, when the narrow bigotry which destroyed the service-books would not have spared books of private devotion. The Book of Common Prayer is a much larger book, and must have existed in a far greater number of copies, and yet how few are known of the early editions. Of those in the time of Edward the Sixth no doubt great numbers were brought in and burnt in the time of Queen Mary; but take the case of the many editions known to have been printed in the long reign of Elizabeth,-how rare they are. No doubt many were destroyed when churches and parsonages were "rabbled" in the civil wars; but the puritans, when they got the upper hand, did not pretend to do this under colour of written law, even when they so far prevailed that a third conviction of using the Common Prayer was followed by a year's imprisonment.

The Bidding Prayers according to the use of York are added as the complement of the private prayers of the people at the mass, and as being the only devotions in English which were used publicly in our churches before the reformation. The series is not complete, only four MS. York Manuals being known to have escaped the ravages of time and the system

atic destruction to which they were exposed in common with other service-books. The Hours of the Cross from the unique MS. Hora in the York Minster Library make up our scanty array of liturgical forms in the mother tongue, but they are all that are known to have been used in the Northern province. (1)

The ordinary of the mass is given in the Appendix, as the four texts obviously suggest a reference to the service to which they were subsidiary; and there must be members of the Society who have not a missal within reach, and most certainly not a missal of an English use of the period of the MSS. I have appended a mass according to the use of York, not so much because I could do so with least trouble from having made a transcript of it many years since, but because it was the one used in the greater part of the north of England, where the translation appears to have been made; and also because, whilst equally answering the purpose of those who do not care to investigate the specific differences of particular uses, it may be very acceptable to others who have had their attention drawn to the study of comparative liturgiology, from the extreme rarity of missals of the York use, (2) and the silence of liturgiologists as to its peculiarities.(3)

In the translation, as my object was simply to convey to the English reader the grammatical force of the Latin, I have not been tempted to make a vain effort to emulate the rythmical flow of the revisers of our old service-books, which is essential to any translation for liturgical use; but I have used the prayer-book rendering of the parts which they retained.

(1) There are many prayers for personal use in the Hora. See Notes, p. 248, &c.

(2) When the Appendix was stereotyped, now more than four years ago, Mr. Maskell's Ancient Liturgies was the only work where the student could find the York Mass. He there gave the ordinary of the mass from the printed edition of 1517; but Dr. Henderson's edition of the York Missal was soon after published for the Surtees Society, and for this he collated all the known MSS. and editions. He gives (Vol. II. p. 358) a list of the manuscripts, seven in number, and of twentyfour copies of the five editions known to be extant.

(3) See Notes, p. 353(3) and p. 355(10).