probable hypothesis of a special British Old Latin Version of the Bible: a supposition confirmed by the discovery also of a few fragments of (apparently) such a version, here published for the first time. The series, which follows, of the documents of the Welsh Church down to the time of its absorption into the English, is one now for the first time made, and has been collected (as will be seen) from various sources, as e. g. from Peckham's Register, from the Vatican Transcripts in the British Museum, etc., etc., but in particular from the original MS., now again come to light, of the Liber Landavensis, and from the extracts from the Red Book of S. Asaph preserved among the Peniarth (formerly Hengwrt) MSS.: for the courteous loan of which two MSS. we desire to record our obligations, respectively, to P. Davies Cooke, Esq., of Owston, co. York, and W. W. E. Wynne, Esq., of Peniarth. It need hardly be added, that we have taken our extracts from Howel Dda's Laws from Mr. Aneurin Owen, not from Dr. Wotton.

2. The late lamented Mr. Robertson's unwearied research and historical skill have anticipated a large portion of our labours in respect to the Northern Churches of the island. His volumes of Scottish Councils (in the modern sense of the word Scottish) have already digested and arranged the greater part of the mass of material relating to the subject accumulated in various antiquarian publications or elsewhere, and have advanced largely upon Father Innes's brief outline prefixed to Wilkins. The task still remains for ourselves of working up also the fragmentary information relating to the period before King David, where Mr. Robertson begins; a task largely facilitated by such publications as Mr. Skene's Early "Chronicles" of Scotland (Edinb. 1867).

3. The labours of Dr. Reeves, Dr. Todd, Mr. King, and of the other and non-ecclesiastical members of that great band of Irish scholars who have recently converted Irish early history and archæology out of an almost proverbial chaos of wild and uncertified fable into something approaching to coherent and critically digested knowledge, render it now possible, almost for the first time, to produce a similarly sifted and critically arranged and edited series of Irish Church documents of the ante-Norman period. The S. Gall MSS. enable us to add the interesting collection of Irish Canons,

which was made apparently for Irish continental monasteries and missions in the early part of the 8th century, and of which hitherto only a few extracts have appeared in print (viz. in D'Achery, and in Martene and Durand). The same source, and other Swiss libraries, supply also some Irish liturgical fragments, published for the first time (with the exception of one, which is also in a printed but unpublished report of the Record Commission) in Bishop Forbes's Preface to the Arbuthnot Missal. A Penitential of Vinniaus (S. Finian), and other Irish Penitential Canons, collected by Wasserschleben, represent in our collection that class of Irish early documents. The work of the kind attributed to Cummian, and which largely coincides with the genuine Theodore, contains also so much that comes from later sources, as to make it plain, either (if the well-known Cummian, who wrote upon the Easter controversy about A.D. 634, be the author of it) that we have only in our MSS. a work founded upon his, or (if the work as it stands is to be assigned to some other Cummian) that its compiler lived as late as the 8th century, when there certainly was a Bishop Cummian at Bobbio, viz, about A.D. 711-744 (see Wasserschleben's Einleitung, pp. 64, 65). The latter seems the more likely guess. And the document, so far as it is not mere repetition, will be placed by us according to that date. All these departments of our work are in effect additional to Wilkins, who was acquainted very scantily with their subjects.

But there remains very much to be done in even, 4. the AngloSaxon period, upon which Wilkins bestowed especial pains, and which Mr. Thorpe has handled subsequently. Mr. Kemble's charters have disclosed a number of additional councils, although none of much importance; besides throwing a great deal of light upon questions of date or of genuineness. And Mr. Thorpe's ecclesiastical volume of Ancient Laws adds as we have said some valuable documents, such e. g. as that which he entitles Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and again Elfric's Pastoral Epistle, and that entitled Quando Dividis Chrisma, besides some minor additions. In the department however both of codes or digests of canons generally, and of penitential canons, both Wilkins and Thorpe are unfortunate. The Liber Legum Ecclesiasticarum, which is one of the two representatives of the former class in Wilkins, and is repro

duced as “ Ecclesiastical Institutes" by Thorpe, is (as Wilkins himself tells us, from Johnson) a transiation of a work of Bishop Theodulf of Orleans, who flourished c. A.D. 797.

Penitentials are in still worse plight. Wilkins, omitting all Irish or other Celtic documents of the kind, exhibits only one specimen of those of Anglo-Saxon times, viz. the Penitential attributed by him (as by others) to Egbert, which is in large part a mere translation into Anglo-Saxon of three books of Halitgar of Cambray, who flourished about A.D. 825. Mr. Thorpe, reprinting a better text and translation of this, but still as Egbert's, has added, under the pseudonym of Theodore's Penitential, the first half, arbitrarily severed from the remainder, of what is really a Frankish Penitential of the 9th century; of which Spelman, knowing nothing but its table of contents, had guessed that it was the lost work of Theodore. And Kunstmann, noticing the difficulty of the case, has followed Thorpe. The English editor indeed has published only a part of the document in question, which stands as a single whole in the MS. (C. C. C. C. 190, marked O by him); omitting without notice six chapters at its commencement, and twenty-two at its close, and the whole story of Furseus (as found in Bæda) at the end of c. 45; while he severs the last two chapters of the portion which he does print (putting them in different type from the rest) as plainly later than Theodore, and leaves the reader to suppose that the MS. ended with them. The very title and contents of the first chapter of the portion thus groundlessly cut away from the rest for publication, sufficiently prove, that a work written when the "Orientales provincia Germaniæ et Saxoniæ" contained settled Christian Churches, and by a writer who had "learned by experience" the customs of those Churches, could not possibly be the work of one, in whose days those parts of Germany were sunk in heathenism, and of whose life we know enough from Bæda to know certainly that he never could have been in Germany at all. The first paragraphs also of c. 20 are from a Roman Council of A.D. 721. And other portions are from still later sources, as from Charlemagne's Capitulare Ecclesiasticum of A.D. 789, and from Halitgar in 829 (see Wasserschleben, Einl. p. 18). And the entire Penitential belongs to the Frankish family of such documents. Moreover, there

is literally no ground for assigning it to Theodore beyond the guess of Spelman, who had never seen it. The genuine Penitential of the great Archbishop (so to call it, for it is in truth a general collection of canons not exclusively penitential, and it was not composed by Theodore at all, which accounts for Bæda's omitting to mention it, but was compiled by a disciple as a record of Theodore's decisions), lies after all side by side with that which has thus figured under its name, in the library of Corpus College at Cambridge. It is in C. C. C. C. 320 (designated N by Mr. Thorpe, and by some unaccountable oversight described by him as Cott. Tib. A 3, although he gives its locality correctly in his Preface); the MS., at the end of which are the verses addressed to Bishop Hæddi, printed by Mr. Thorpe, and which contains also the various readings (if those can be so called, which are taken from one work and applied to another and totally different one) printed also by Mr. Thorpe as from N. Internal evidence led ourselves to pronounce this to be the genuine Theodore. And the identical document has we find been printed as Theodore's by Wasserschleben from ten foreign MSS., one of them professedly a copy from the Cambridge MS. itself, while another contains an express statement that the work was compiled from the mouth of Theodore, and "consiliante venerabili Theodoro Archiepiscopo," and by a "discipulus Umbrensium" for the benefit of the "Angli," the greater part of it having been communicated by Theodore first to one Eoda a presbyter. Obligation also to a "libellus Scotorum," but to no other preceding work, is specially acknowledged. The existence in the work of all the quotations professing to come from Theodore's Penitential,-a fact for which we must here refer ourselves to Wasserschleben,-and the parenthetical remark of the scribe (twice, viz. in I. v. 2, and 6), that he could hardly believe such and such a canon to have come from Theodore, with other arguments for which we must here refer to Wasserschleben,-confirm the inference from suitability of contents, and render it certain that here at length we have the genuine work.

The genuine Penitential of Bæda has also been discovered and published from foreign MSS. by the same Wasserschleben. It had previously lain hid in numerous works of the kind, founded upon it, but (as is usually the case with such compositions) enlarged and

altered by subsequent Church authorities ad libitum: e. g. in the works, one with Bada's name and another without it, commonly styled De Remediis Peccatorum; both of which appear to have been all but entirely made up of the shorter and genuine document found by Wasserschleben and of a similar document belonging to Egbert.

The last-named Archbishop has suffered even more in the same way, viz. by the assigning to him of later compilations, founded upon his, but with much the same latitude with which our own work is "founded" upon that of Wilkins. We have first a short Penitential, found by Wasserschleben in a Vienna MS. and elsewhere, and especially also in one at S. Gall; which is attributed by its title to Egbert, is independent of other documents in its contents, refers to nothing subsequent to his date, and generally is suitable to him as its compiler. And at the end of this are added in the Vienna MS. two chapters, the second professing to be made up "de dictis sancti Bonifacii Archiepiscopi," or, as it stands in another entirely different compilation which happens to quote the same chapter, "edictio sancti Bonifacii ;" while the MS. at S. Gall (which Wasserschleben apparently had not himself seen) adds at the end, but without these additional chapters, the words "editio Bonifacii Episcopi." The constant interchange of MSS. between Egbert and Boniface is known from Boniface's own letters; and those who used in Germany the Penitential of the former, might naturally add to their copy some further rules made by the latter. Here then we believe we have the genuine and original work of the York Archbishop. For we have, next, two works, as above said, De Remediis Peccatorum, one with Bæda's name, the other without it, sometimes assigned to Bæda and sometimes to Egbert, but really made up almost wholly of the two shorter and (as here assumed) genuine works of both. And then, thirdly, we find in Bodl. MSS. 718 (a 10th century MS., and one of Bishop Leofric's valuable gifts

! That which Wilkins and Thorpe call Egbert's Penitential, is, as above said, really a part of Halitgar's, and does not appear even to profess to be Egbert's. His "Confessional," also in Wilkins and Thorpe, claims only to be, and may well be, a translation merely by Egbert from Latin into Saxon; and is really made up, with

the smallest possible exception, of extracts from the genuine Theodore and Egbert themselves. MS. S. Gall 243, which contains the Irish Canons, is styled Egbert's Penitential by mistake in the S. Gall Catalogue, because its scribe's name happens to have been Eadberct.