SAXON PERIOD--_continued._
Amongst the kings who, in the seventh century, governed parts of
Anglia, Edwin stands out prominently as a beacon of beneficent
rule. Two stories concerning him are treasured from childhood, viz.
his conversion to Christianity, through the bringing back to his
recollection a mysterious vision by Paulinus, and the speech of
the royal counsellor, who compared human life to the flitting of a
sparrow through a festal hall. But one of his philanthropic measures
is of special interest in the present connection. Edwin had been by
compulsion a wanderer. He knew the trials of a fugitive’s life. He
had experienced the hardships of long journeys on tedious roads which
lacked accommodation for travellers; so, with a heart full of sympathy,
he caused to be set up in the highways stakes, and ladles chained to
them, wherever he had observed a pure spring. Bede remarks that he
carried a tufa before him; he deserves that it be never displaced.
The entertaining of strangers seems in these times to have fallen
to the clergy: hence the constant injunction to them to attend to
hospitality. It is in this sense that Mr. Soames is justified in saying
(_Anglo-Saxon Church_) that clergymen were in fact the innkeepers of
those ancient times. One of the Excerpts of Ecgbright enjoins ‘that
bishops and priests have an house for the entertainment of strangers,
not far from the church.’
It would be naturally expected that the Church should have made some
effort to stem the wide-spread inebriety of the Saxon population. And
such was the case. We have on record an almost continuous series of
ecclesiastical canons, decrees, and anathemas bearing upon the national
intemperance. Theodore, seventh Archbishop of Canterbury (668-693),
decrees that if a Christian layman drink to excess, he must do a
fifteen days’ penance. In the following century, Bede, in a letter to
Egbert, Archbishop of York, writes: ‘It is commonly reported of certain
bishops that the way they serve Christ is this--They have no one near
them of any religious spirit or continence, but only such as are given
to laughter, jokes, amusing stories, feasting, drunkenness, and the
other snares of a sensual life--men who feed their belly with meats,
rather than their souls with the heavenly sacrifice.’
In the middle of the same century, Winfrid, Archbishop of the
Germans (upon whom the Pope conferred the name of Boniface), writes
to Cuthbert, Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘It is reported that in your
dioceses the vice of drunkenness is too frequent; so that not only
certain bishops do not hinder it, but they themselves indulge in excess
of drink, and force others to drink till they are intoxicated. This
is most certainly a great crime for a servant of God to do or to have
done, since the ancient canons decree that a bishop or a priest given
to drink should either resign or be deposed. And Truth itself has said:
“Take heed to yourselves lest at any time your heart be overcharged
with surfeiting and drunkenness;” and St. Paul, “Be not drunk with
wine wherein is luxury;” and the Prophet Isaias, “Woe to you that are
mighty to drink wine, and men of strength at drunkenness.” This is an
evil peculiar to pagans, and to our race. Neither the Franks, nor the
Gauls, nor the Lombards, nor the Romans, nor the Greeks commit it. Let
us then repress this iniquity by decrees of synods and the prohibitions
of the Scriptures, if we are able. If we fail, at least, by avoiding
and denouncing it, let us clear our own souls from the blood of the
reprobate.’
This great Anglo-Saxon missionary not only preached but practised. His
Benedictine monks he describes as men of strict abstinence, who used
neither flesh, wine, nor strong drink.
The Excerptions of Ecgbright date about the middle of this century.
Johnson, _English Canons_, assigns them to 740; Sir H. Spelman to 750.
Amongst these are several sayings and canons of the fathers respecting
intemperance. Thus (No. 14)--‘That none who is numbered among the
priests cherish the vice of drunkenness; nor force others to be drunk
by his importunity.’ (No. 18)--‘That no priest go to eat or drink in
taverns.’
In the supplemental Excerptions of the same Ecgbright (MS. marked K.2,
in the CCCC. Library), we have (No. 74) ‘A canon of the fathers. If
a bishop, or one in orders, be an habitual drunkard, let him either
desist or be deposed.’
In the same Excerpts, penal intoxication is defined--‘This is
drunkenness, when the state of the mind is changed, the tongue
stammers, the eyes are disturbed, the head is giddy, the belly is
swelled, and pain follows.’
In 747 a council was convened by Cuthbert at Cloves-hoo. The 9th canon
bids priests ‘by all means take care, as becomes the ministers of
God, that they do not give to the seculars or monastics an example of
ridiculous or wicked conversation; that is, by drunkenness, love of
filthy lucre, obscene talking, and the like.’
The 21st canon ordains ‘that monastics and ecclesiastics do not
follow nor affect the vice of drunkenness, but avoid it as deadly
poison.... Nor let them force others to drink intemperately, but let
their entertainments be cleanly and sober, not luxuries, ... and that,
unless some necessary infirmity compel them, they do not, like common
tipplers, help themselves or others to drink, till the canonical, that
is the ninth hour, be fully come.’
Canon 20 enacts: ‘Let not nunneries be places of secret rendezvous for
filthy talk, junketing, drunkenness, and luxury, but habitations for
such as live in continence and sobriety.’
In the year 793 Alcuin gave good advice to the brethren at Jarrow:
‘Absconditas comessationes et furtivas ebrietates quasi foveam inferni
vitate.’
One of the Saxon drinks to which reference has been made, viz.
_piment_, seems to have been drunk to excess in the eighth and ninth
centuries. Piment was a fascinating compound; it was in fact a liqueur.
The word is probably derived from _pigmentarii_, apothecaries who
originally prepared it. The most common varieties of it were hippocras
and clarry. In the year 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle forbad the
use of piment to the regular clergy, except on solemn festival days.
In the eighth century, taverns or ale-houses where liquor was sold
had been established, and very soon fell into disrepute. Hence the
injunction of Ecgbright that no priest go to eat or drink at a tavern
(_ceapealethelum_).
A good idea of the proportionate consumption of meats and drinks can be
obtained from the sales and gifts of provisions to the monasteries. For
instance, as has been already alluded to, we find from the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle that in the year 852, Ceolred, Abbot of Medeshamstede
(Peterborough), and the monks let to Wulfred the land of Sempringham,
on the condition that, after his decease, the land should return to
the minster, and that Wulfred should give the land of Sleaford to
Medeshamstede, and each year should deliver into the minster sixty
loads of wood, twelve of coal, six of faggots, and two tuns full of
pure ale, and two beasts fit for slaughter, and six hundred loaves, and
ten measures of Welsh ale.
But the regulations of the various monasteries widely differed, as did
the regulations of each monastery at different periods. It would appear
that at one time the use of wine was prohibited in the monastic houses;
thus, in the year 738, wine was _permitted_ to the monks of England by
a decree of Bishop Aidan, founder of Lindisfarne monastery. Sometimes
a large allowance was granted; thus Ethelwold allowed his monastery a
great bowl from which the _obbæ_ of the monks were filled twice a day
for their dinner and supper. On their festivals he allowed them at
dinner a sextarium of mead between six of the brethren, the same at
supper between twelve of them. On certain great feasts he gave them a
measure of wine.
It will be necessary when dealing with the times of King Edgar to
advert at some length to Benedictine Monachism, so we may postpone for
the present an estimate of conventual morality.
It is instructive to observe how a courageous and virtuous soul may
maintain its purity unsullied amidst surroundings the most calculated
to tarnish it. To live in any century of Saxon times was a moral
ordeal. To possess certain tastes was to enhance the probation. The
life of King Alfred furnishes us with a lesson of the type intended.
His intellectual powers and tastes would have strewn the path of most
men with briars, if not precipitated them into pitfalls. The love of
music and poetry, the concomitants of which were the ruin of so many of
his contemporaries, was conscientiously treasured by him as a talent to
be occupied. At a time when the horn of mead circulated at a festival
as freely as the harp; at a time when the song of the Northmen too
often became the pretext for intoxication and its kindred vices, Alfred
was seeking wisdom from its true source; his life was an embodiment
of temperance, soberness, and chastity. Many of his renderings of the
Roman philosopher Boethius, whose work, _De Consolatione Philosophiæ_,
he translated, or rather paraphrased, display his own sentiments on
such matters. In transmitting them, he has transmitted himself. In some
cases the thoughts of his author are widely expanded. His description,
for instance, of the golden age: ‘Oh! how happy was the first age of
this world, when every man thought he had enough in the fruits of
the earth. There were no rich homes, nor various sweet dainties, nor
drinks. They required no expensive garments, because there were none
then; they saw no such things nor heard of them. They cared not for
luxury; but they lived naturally and temperately. They always ate but
once a day, and that was in the evening. They ate the fruits of trees
and herbs. They drank no pure wine. They knew not to mix liquor with
their honey. They required not silken clothing with varied colours.
They always slept out under the shade of trees. The water of the clear
spring they drank.’ Such is the paraphrase of the king. The following
is the language of Boethius:--‘Too happy was the prior age, contented
with their faithful ploughs, nor lost in sluggish luxury; it was
accustomed to end its late fasts with the ready acorn; nor knew how to
confuse the present of Bacchus with liquid honey; nor to mingle the
bright fleece of the Seres with the Tyrian poison. The grass gave them
healthful slumbers. The gliding river their drink.’
One more example may be given; the passage which treats of tyrannical
kings: ‘If men should divest them of their clothes, and withdraw from
them their retinue and their power, then might thou see that they be
very like some of their thegns that serve them, except that they be
worse. And if it was now to happen to them, that their retinue was for
a while taken away, and their dress and their power, they would think
that they were brought into a prison, or were in bondage; because from
their excessive and unreasonable apparel, from their sweetmeats, and
from the various drinks of their cup, the raging course of their luxury
is excited, and would very powerfully torment their minds.’
What other king would thus have caricatured his own order? What other
man would have treated his own surroundings with such persiflage?
Surely here he must have blindly adhered to the text of his author. Is
it so? The English of Boethius is, ‘If from the proud kings whom you
see sitting on the lofty summit of the throne ... any one should draw
aside the coverings of a vain dress, you would see the lord loaded
with strong chains within. For here greedy lust pours venom on their
hearts; here turbid anger, raising its waves, lashes the mind; or
sorrow wearies her captives, or deceitful hope torments them.’
And yet the life of Alfred, so full of achievement as well as purpose,
was brought to a premature close. He died at the age of fifty-two. The
disease which had clung to him in boyhood was replaced in manhood by
another, equally grievous. The protracted banquets, ‘day and night,’
of his nuptial festivities are assigned as the probable cause. His
biographer, Asser, remarks:--‘His nuptials were honourably celebrated
in Mercia, among innumerable multitudes of people of both sexes; and
after continual feasts, both by night and by day, he was immediately
seized, in presence of all the people, by sudden and overwhelming pain,
as yet unknown to all the physicians.’ We further learn that this
complaint attached to him for more than twenty years. If this historian
intends that the king’s malady was the result of debauchery, the whole
tenor of his life is a flat contradiction. The panegyric of the poet
Thomson in his _Seasons_ is unimpeachable:--
Whose hallow’d name the virtues saint,
And his own Muses love; the best of kings!
Allusion has been made to native vineyards. The vine is mentioned in
the laws of Alfred, ‘_Si quis damnum intulerit vineæ vel agro, vel
alicui ejus terræ, compenset sicut ejus illud æstimet_’ (cap. xxvi.).
In the Saxon Calendar there is a set of drawings illustrating the
various employments and pastimes of the year; the one attached to
the month of February gives some men pruning trees, vines apparently
among them. However, this proves little, for the cuts appended to the
months for gathering in the vintage represent scenes of hawkings
and boar-huntings; the labours of the husbandmen being evidently
subordinate. (A copy of this is inserted in Strutt’s _Horda_, vol. i.
pl. xi.)
Something less than half a century from the death of Alfred brings us
to the tragical end of King Edmund the Elder, for which unquestionably
strong drink has to answer. Amidst much variety of statement on the
part of the chroniclers, certain details seem fairly established. The
day of the occurrence was the anniversary or Mass-day of St. Augustine
(May 26), a day always observed among the Anglo-Saxons whose apostle
he was. A banquet was held at which Leof, a noted outlaw, was present.
While the cup was circulating the king observed the intruder. Heated
with wine he started from his seat, seized the outlaw, and felled him
to the ground. Leof grappled with the king, and with his concealed
dagger stabbed his royal antagonist, A.D. 946. The event is said to
have happened at Pukelechirche (Pucklechurch), in Gloucestershire,
where was a palace of the Saxon kings.
Hard indeed it was for a king to escape such surroundings if even his
disposition so prompted him. Of this the narrative of King Edwy affords
abundant proof. On his coronation day, he retired from the revels of
the banquet (_linquens læta convivia_), to his own apartments, much to
the chagrin of the guests, who peremptorily sent to fetch him back.
Dunstan and Cynesius were the agents employed. The king, probably
loathing the drunkenness of a Saxon debauch, declined to return, upon
which he was dragged by Dunstan from his seat to the hall of revelry.
We may wonder that so distinguished an ecclesiastic should thus have
urged the king to a scene of intemperance, but it is not wholly
inconsistent with other details of his actions, of which the following
narrative will serve as an illustration. King Athelstan dined with
his relative Ethelfleda. The royal providers came to see if all was
ready and suitable. Having inspected all, they told her, ‘you have
plenty of everything, provided your mead holds out.’ The king came
with numerous attendants. In the first salutation the mead ran short.
Dunstan’s sagacity had foreseen the event, and provided against it.
Though the cupbearers, as is the custom at royal feasts, were all the
day serving it up in cut horns and other vessels, the liquor held out.
This delighted the king, and much credit redounded to Dunstan (Turn.
_A. S._, lib. vii. c. iii. who cites MS. Cott. Cleop. B. 13).
But the very name of Dunstan at once conveys us to the arcana of
Monachism, and to the consideration of some of its alleged vices. Our
business is to confine ourselves to the aspersions cast upon it on
the score of intemperance. Two cautions are here necessary. First, in
estimating the morality of the monks, it must be remembered that in the
tenth century the monastic system had acquired a vast development, some
of the monasteries containing several hundred inmates, many of whom
were laymen. To these latter the intemperance is attributed by some
Roman Catholic writers, whilst others do not hesitate to charge the
monastic orders with excesses. In the next place it was the interest
of Dunstan and his party to expose the irregularities of the _secular_
priests, whom he hated as much as he despised, and whose ejection he
compassed to make room for the _regular_ monks, his pets. The harangue
of King Edgar to the council convened by Dunstan may be taken as the
saint’s indictment of the clergy, of whom the king says:--‘They spend
their days in diversions, entertainments, drunkenness, and debauchery.
Their houses may be said to be so many sinks of lewdness. There they
pass the night in rioting and drunkenness.’[26]
Verily, King Edgar nearly anticipated by a thousand years the
legislation proposed by the United Kingdom Alliance. Strutt says of him
that, by the advice of Dunstan, he put down many ale-houses, suffering
only one to exist in a village or small town; and he also further
ordained that pins or nails should be fastened into the drinking-cups
or horns, at stated distances, so that whosoever should drink beyond
these marks at one draught should be liable to a severe punishment.[27]
We shall have occasion to notice, when discussing the canons of Anselm,
how this very pin-drinking, devised as a prohibitive measure, became a
source of drunkenness.
Bad as was Edgar in some respects, we must clear him from a
charge preferred against him by Palgrave, and to some extent by
Lappenberg--that the vices of the foreigners who were incorporating
themselves received encouragement from the king. Whatever countenance
he gave to the Danes, it was not through them that the English
became drunkards; that vice they had been already schooled in, and
independently. The imputation, however, of these modern writers is
readily traceable to the chronicles of Henry of Huntingdon and William
of Malmesbury.
The Church certainly in this reign vied with the throne in checking
intemperance. Thus the following canons occur in a code drawn up by
Dunstan:--
(26) ‘Let no drinking be allowed in the Church.’
(28) ‘Let men be very temperate at Church-wakes, and pray
earnestly, and suffer there no drinking or unseemliness.’
(57) ‘Let Priests beware of drunkenness, and be diligent in warning
and correcting others in this matter.’
(58) ‘Let no Priest be an ale-scop, nor in any wise act the
gleeman.’
In some penitential canons which Mr. Johnson assigns to Archbishop
Dunstan, with the date A.D. 963, occur in canon vi. the words, “I
confess Intemperance in eating and drinking, early and late.”
The following injunctions occur in Elfric’s canons:--
(29) ‘Let no Priest sottishly drink to Intemperance, nor force
others so to do, for he should be always in readiness if a child
is to be baptized, or a man to be houseled. And if nothing of this
should happen, yet he ought not to be drunk, for our Lord hath
forbidden drunkenness to His ministers.’
(30) ‘Let no Priest drink _at taverns_ as secular men do.’
(35) ‘Nor ought men to drink or eat intemperately in God’s house,
which is hallowed to this purpose, that the Body of God may be
there eaten with faith. Yet men often act so absurdly as to sit up
by night, and drink to madness within God’s house.’
But for them ‘twere better that they
In their beds lay,
Than that they God angered,
In that ghostly house.
Let him who will watch,
And honour God’s saints,
With stillness watch,
And make no noise,
But sing his prayers,
As he best can;
And let him who will drink,
And idly make noise,
Drink at his home,
Not in the Lord’s house,
That he God dishonour not,
To his own punishment.[28]
Other enactments may be discovered by the curious, scattered about
the pages of early synods, _e.g._ nunneries were not to be houses of
gossiping and drunkenness, and beds of luxury, but of sober and pious
livers. An injunction this, evidently necessary, for Fosbroke (_British
Monachism_, p. 22) speaks of the nuns of Coldingham as using oratories
for feasting, drinking, and gossiping. The same author introduces us
to the austere rule, as followed by the Britons, of Pachomius, that
singular institutor of the cenobitic life in Upper Egypt in the fourth
century. Abstinence seems to have been in force; at any rate there was
a clause forbidding wine and _liquamen_ (probably cider or perry) out
of the infirmary. The inmates were also prohibited _taverns_[29] when
necessity called them abroad. On such occasions they were restricted to
‘consecrated’ places. We have already seen that taverns at this time
were anything but respectable, so ordinary travellers rarely used them;
hence the propriety of this inhibition.
The requirements of Fulgentius, the African anchorite and bishop, were
less severe. Among regulations of diet we find: ‘To have no more meat,
drink, or clothes, than the rule allowed.’ ‘Not to eat or drink but at
stated times.’ ‘No one to take any meat or drink before the abbot.’
The monastic rules of Dunstan were certainly laxer. The ordinary times
for drinking were not too few, whilst special solemnities called for
special refreshment. In the latter category we become acquainted with
their _caritates_ or charities--that is, cups of wine, to drink which
the monks were summoned by sound of bell into the refectory, and which
must have been rendered peculiarly palatable by their listening to the
_collation_, which signified a reading of the lives of the fathers
or devout books; from which edification late suppers have derived
their name. These _charities_ varied in their composition: sometimes
they consisted of beer, sometimes a kind of honey _compôte_. Such
_indulgences_ or allowances of drink were also called _misericord_.
In the great monasteries the _Poculum Caritatis_ was placed at the
upper end of the refectory, on the abbot’s table. It was nothing more
nor less than the old wassail-bowl, the latter word obtaining its name
from the verbal formality adopted in health-drinking.’[30]
Enough has been said to correct the very common impression that the
Benedictine orders were self-mortifying ascetics. Wealthy and learned,
at times useful to souls as well as bodies, their virtues have often
been overstated, whilst their vices no less frequently have been
palliated or denied.
The canons of King Edgar’s reign furnish an almost complete epitome
of the manners of the time. His twenty-eighth canon enjoined strict
temperance at
_Church Wakes._
Much confusion has been displayed by various writers in treating of
the origin and rationale of these observances. Sir H. Spelman saw in
them such occasions of gross intemperance, that he derives the word
‘wake’ from a Saxon word meaning _drunkenness_. But the derivation is
to be found in the fact that _wake_ and _watch_ are the same words. The
feast obtained its name from the night spent in _watching--waking_.
Mr. Bourne rightly remarks[31] that at the conversion of the Saxons by
Augustine, the heathen Paganalia were continued among the converts,
with certain regulations, by order of Gregory the Great. This pope
enjoined that on the _day of dedication_, or the birthday of holy
martyrs, whose relics are there placed, the people should make to
themselves booths of the boughs of trees, round about those very
churches which had been the temples of idols, and should observe a
religious feast; that beasts be no longer sacrificed to the devil, but
for eating, and for God’s glory; that when the people were satisfied,
they should return thanks to the Giver of all good things.[32] Here is
the origin of the wake. The abuse of the original solemnity followed
in accordance with the moral law of gravitation. At first, all was
decorum; the people assembled at the church on the vigil or evening
before the saint’s day, with burning candles, where they were wont
devotionally to _wake_ during the night. In process of time ‘the pepul
fell to letcherie, and songs, and daunses, with harping and piping, and
also to glotony and sinne; and so tourned the holyness to cursydness;
wherefore holy faders ordeyned the pepull to leve that waking, and to
fast the evyn. It is called vigilia--that is, waking in English--and
eveyn, for of eveyn they were wont to come to churche.’[33] We shall
find that in the reign of Edward III. Archbishop Thoresby adopted
drastic measures to remedy such like abuses; whilst about the same time
Chaucer, in his _Ploughman’s Tales_, censures the priests for caring
more for pastimes than for their duty. He says they were expert
At the wrestlynge, and at the _wake_,
And chief chantours at the nale.[34]
The end of all this was that they were suppressed, and fairs were
instituted on or near the saint’s day, to which the original name
attaches in many villages.
Upon the whole, the action of King Edgar was favourable to the cause of
temperance, and the perpetuation of his name on a tavern sign in the
city of Chester, which, according to the legend, has existed ever since
his time, could only be regarded as a piece of irony, were it not that
it treasures the memory of the Saxon king being rowed down the Dee, as
some report, by eight tributary kings.
An incident in the reign of Edward, the son and successor of Edgar,
is especially worthy of note as introducing us to the origin of the
custom called _pledging_ in drinking. Strutt (_Manners and Customs of
the Ancient Britons_), who evidently accepts the opinion of William
of Malmesbury, gives us the old form or ceremony of pledging, as
follows:--The person who was going to drink asked the one of the
company who sat next to him whether he would _pledge_ him, on which
he, answering that he would, held up his knife or sword to guard him
whilst he drank; for while a man is drinking he necessarily is in an
unguarded posture, exposed to the treacherous stroke of some secret
enemy. Thus a _pledge_ was a security for the safety of the person
drinking. This is said to have dated from the death of King Edward
(commonly called Edward the Martyr), A.D. 978, who was murdered by
the treachery of his step-mother Elfrida. The motive for her act is
well known. Of the two claimants to the throne, Edward and Ethelred,
she had preferred the latter, her own son, to his elder half-brother,
her stepson. The story is told very differently by the chroniclers
Gaimer, William of Malmesbury, and others; but the general purport
is that Edward, when out hunting, determined to visit Elfrida, who
was living with her son Ethelred at Corfe Castle. The queen went
out on his arrival, received him with hypocritical kindness, and
pressed him to alight, which he declined. ‘Then drink while you are
on horseback,’ said the queen. ‘Willingly,’ said the king, ‘but first
you will drink to me.’ The butlers filled a horn of claret and handed
it to her. She drank the half of the filled horn, and then handed it
to the king. While he was eagerly drinking from the cup presented,
the dagger of an attendant pierced him through. Dropping the cup, he
spurred his horse and fled. Soon he fainted through loss of blood,
and fell from his saddle. His feet hung in the stirrups, by which he
was dragged till life was extinct. It is only right to state that Mr.
Brand (_Popular Antiquities_) takes a different view of the meaning of
pledging. He imagines the phrase ‘I pledge myself’ to mean simply ‘I
follow your example.’ But while most writers refer the custom to the
Saxon incident of Edward’s death, Dr. Henry, in his _History of Great
Britain_, refers the custom to the fear of the Danes; while Francis
Wise, in his _Further Observations upon the White Horse_, with eclectic
caution remarks: ‘The custom of pledging healths, still prevalent among
Englishmen, is said to be owing to the Saxons’ mutual regard for each
other’s safety, and as a caution against the treacherous inhospitality
of the Danes when they came to live in peace with the natives.’
FOOTNOTES:
[26] The whole harangue may be found in Rapin’s _History of England_,
vol. i. p. 108 (2nd ed. 1732).
[27] W. of Malmesbury (§ 149) quaintly adds as the reason for the gold
or silver pegs:--‘That whilst every man knew his just measure, shame
should compel each neither to take more himself, nor oblige others to
drink beyond their own proper share.’
Compare some lines to be found in _Holborn Drollery_, 1673--
‘Edgar, away with pins i’ th’ cup
To spoil our drinking whole ones up.’
Cf. also the account of these tankards in Pegge’s _Anonymiana_, 1809.
[28] This last metrical passage is added by Thorpe (_Ancient Laws
and Institutes_, vol. ii. p. 356). Sir H. Spelman gave it up as
irrecoverable. His words are ‘reliqua abscidit nequam aliquis
plagiarius.’ See Johnson’s _Collection of Laws and Canons_, sub-canon
35 of Elfric.
[29] A like prohibition occurs in Apost. Can., 46.
[30] The explanation given by Selden in a note on Drayton’s
_Polyolbion_, song 9, is perhaps as good as any. He says:--‘I see a
custome in some parts among us. I mean the yearly Was-haile in the
country on the vigil of the new yeare, which I conjecture was a usuall
ceremony among the Saxons before Hengist, as a note of health-wishing.’
[31] _Antiquitates Vulgares._
[32] The copy of this letter, which Gregory sent to the Abbot Mellitus
(A.D. 601), will be found in Bede, _Eccles. Hist._, lib. i. ch.
xxx. It is not to be supposed that Pope Gregory originated such an
ordinance. Festivals or dedications, called _encænia_, were well known
to the early Church, _e.g._ Sozomen (ii. 26) gives an account of the
dedication festival in memory of Constantine’s Church at Jerusalem. Cf.
also Hospinianus: _De festis Christianorum_, p. 113.
[33] Homily for the vigil of St. John Baptist. Harl. MS.
[34] _i.e._ ale-house.