it to be read aloud, and at the end of the reading remarked emphatically, 'This Aldebert you speak of must have taken leave of his senses; and those who use this mischievous letter (scelerata epistola) are a pack of silly children;' after which we may hope that no more was heard of the document at the Roman Court. It continued, however, to be copied with various changes and amplifications, and it even found its way to England. Copies of it exist in Anglo-Saxon, while it is also twice quoted at length in the sermons of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (1003-1023). Some of the versions of the letter enter rather more into detail as to what was precisely prohibited. No one is to walk or ride from place to place on Sunday unless it be in performing some errand of charity or to go to church. All business and household work, shaving the head or beard, the baking of bread or the washing of clothes, pleading in the law courts, or frivolous laughter are denounced without distinction. I am quoting here from a version contained in an eleventh-century MS. preserved at Munich. Although these injunctions are rather more severe than anything that was ever practically enforced, still they can nearly all be justified from various decrees of early councils or illustrated by the authentic monuments of history. There is no reason to believe that this foolish apocryphal letter had anything to do in creating the custom, but rather that it embodied restrictions already understood. To enter, however, upon a discussion of the rules for Sunday observance in the first ten centuries would take me beyond the scope of this paper. I will confine myself here to the point brought into prominence in 1200 by the mission of the Abbot of Flai, viz. the hours of cessation from work. In insisting that the Sunday rest should begin with the canonical hour of None on the previous day, Eustace was not propounding any novelty to his English hearers,7 though, in his deference to the apocryphal letter, he was certainly 226. Sammlung Englischer Denkmäler, iv. Wulfstan. Ed. A. Napier, pp. 215 and 5 Latin 9,550; see the text printed by Delehaye in the paper referred to. I am indebted to the author for a tirage à part of this little dissertation. • To take a single example. The unwillingness to travel on a Sunday comes out well in the interview between St. Cuthbert and Queen Ermenburga in the life of the former. The sermons of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York (1003-1023), which quote and attach great importance to the letter fallen from heaven,' repeat again and again that Sunnandages freolsung (Sunday's celebration) was to last fram Sæternesdæges none oth Monandæges lihting (from Saturday's None to Monday's dawn). Wulfstan tells us further, that in token of this period of rest, the river Jordan, which was hallowed by the baptism of Jesus Christ in its waters, never rose in flood between the midday of Saturday and the Monday morning. Even before Wulfstan's time the principle was accepted in the laws of Edgar that the Sunday rest began at noon the day before and lasted until Monday morning. (Thorpe, Ancient Laws, &c., i. 112, 157.) It may be found stated with equal clearness in the Old English Homilies of the twelfth century edited for the Early Eng. Text Soc. by Dr. R. Morris, going beyond the evening-to-evening rule adopted by the Canon Law.8 Probably when the 'letter from heaven' was first fabricated there was no idea of notably extending the bounds of Sunday observance. It must be remembered that the series of canonical hours -hora tertia, hora sexta and hora nona-were more commonly understood as periods than as points of time. They were, I fancy, almost as vague in their signification as the terms forenoon and afternoon would now be with us. Hora nona stood for the period of three hours, more or less, according to the duration of daylight, which immediately preceded the vesper hour. A scrupulous person who wished to preserve the vesper hour from profanation would probably in the early centuries have said that the obligation of rest began from the ninth hour, meaning, not the middle point of the afternoon, but the conclusion of the period of None. But the rule which assigned the hour of None as that at which it was lawful to break the fast in penitential seasons exercised in course of time a potent influence in modifying the manner of reckoning. Regarding the ninth hour as a point of time, it was the moment which stood midway between noon and sunset; but regarding it as a period, any hungry monk or layman was free to contend that None, or the ninth hour, began immediately upon the termination of Sext. The sixth hour was undoubtedly midday, and consequently when the sun reached the meridian the moment had come when the office of None could be lawfully recited and the monks could go straight to their dinner. By this very natural process it came to pass that None, which is of course identical with our word 'noon,' became permanently associated with midday. As for the rest, the privileges and obligations of the Sunday developed by an equally natural process under the silent influence of that old maxim of the canonists, Favores sunt ampliandi et odiosa sunt restringenda. So far as Sunday meant release from the burden of distasteful toil, Sunday, i.e. the privileges of the Sunday, began with None or noon on the Saturday. On the other hand, so far as Sunday meant a period of church-going and compulsory idleness, industrious people adhered mordicus to the primitive rule that the duties of Sunday, like those of the Jewish Sabbath, began only with vespers at sundown. A very similar process of reasoning influenced the observance of Sunday evening. No one, it was maintained, could be bound to work until the religious services of the day had been brought to a conclusion with vespers, after which it was obviously impossible to begin working in the dark. Per contra, the arrival of the vesper hour released all who wished from the restrictions peculiar to the Lord's Day, and 8 Decretum Gratiani, c. 1, D. 3, De Cons. Pronunciandum est ut sciant tempora feriandi per annum, id est: omnem dominicam a vespera usque ad vesperam, ne a Judaismo capiantur. Cf. Hartzheim, Concilia Germaniæ, II., 18. Concil. Mog. (813), c. 36. money-getting folk felt free to set about their business in view of the morrow. It would appear that Eustace of Flai, believing seriously in the 'letter fallen from heaven,' endeavoured to make the privileges and the obligations of the Sunday once more coincident, but in this he does not seem to have achieved any permanent success. Still, besides the effective crusade he directed against the Sunday markets, he probably did something to establish more firmly the practice of knocking off work on Saturday at midday, the process being aided by a custom, which dates from about this period, of ringing a bell at noon on Saturdays and vigils as a signal that the time for rest had arrived. In the metrical Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland, by Hector Boece, we read of a Council held in Scotland in 1202, the year after Eustace's second visit to this country: That samin yeir decreittit wes and done Alsveill [as well] of secularis as of priest or clerk. On Setterday at twelf houris suld ring At nune, and halie baith in kirk and queir, In audience that everie man micht heir. It would be easy to produce evidence, and some will incidentally come under our notice in the course of this paper, that the idea of knocking off work, not at the vesper hour, but with the midday bell rung on Saturdays and vigils of feasts, never lost its hold down to the sixteenth century. The Statute Book itself confirms it when it more than once prescribes that on Saturdays and vigils the workman is to be paid for only half a day. But the point comes out still more clearly in the ordinances of some of the City companies and the various guilds. Take, for instance, those of the Loriners' Company, drawn up in 1260: II. Item, that no one of the trade shall work upon Saturday after noon sounded and rung out at his parish church. III. Item, that as to the feasts of Our Lady and the days of the Apostles, and their Vigils, after noon rung, and the weeks of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, and the other feasts that are commanded by the Church to be held, the same are to be held as the Sunday.10 So again Mr. Wylie tells us that as late as 1429 the London grocers had a rule that they should 'sell no ware on Sunday or holiday that vigil is, but that great high need may excuse.' 11 Or, to cite an instance from one of the statutes just referred to, we are told in 4 Henry the Fourth, cap. 14: • Hector Boece, The Buik of the Croniclis of Scotland, 11. 44,446 seq. 10 Riley, Liber Custumarum (Rolls Series), p. 78. 11 England under Henry IV., vol. iii. p. 198. Labourers shall not take any hire for the holy days nor for the evens of the feasts when they do no labour but till the hour of noon, but only for the half day. It is clear from other statutes of the same period or later that with the 'evens of feasts' Saturday was meant to be included. While, therefore, it is quite ridiculous to suppose that the preaching of the Abbot of Flai had any influence in creating our present tradition of Sunday observance, it is likely enough that he really did contribute in some measure to the institution of the Saturday half-holiday. If on the last day of each week the shophand and the hard-worked city clerk are able to get away for an afternoon of football or cycling or Volunteering, they probably owe the privilege at least in part-to the eloquence and the reputed miracles of the old Norman monk who made his tour through England just seven centuries ago. In any case, Eustace of Flai and the forger of the letter fallen from heaven' may divide the honours between them. But however warmly the 40-hours' Sunday, beginning at Saturday noon, may have been welcomed when regarded as a merely optional privilege, and however lasting may have been the combined effect of the apocryphal letter and of the Abbot's preaching, there is nothing to suggest that really well-instructed people ever regarded the obligation of rest as extending beyond the natural day of twenty-four hours. The point seems to me to be of some little importance, and has been strangely overlooked by writers on mediaval economics. Let me first of all give an illustration of this truth which is for many reasons significant. Towards the close of the year 1200, the very year in which Eustace of Flai paid his first visit to England, St. Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, was passing through Normandy on his way home from a pilgrimage to the Grande Chartreuse. He rested for a day at St. Omer, and in this town there was brought to his notice an extraordinary prodigy, as it was deemed, about which the people were greatly excited. A certain baker, drawing a batch of loaves from his oven on a Monday morning, had allowed one of them to fall. The loaf broke and blood flowed from the fracture. Others were cut into, and, though there was no sign of anything unusual in the external appearance of the bread, the same thing happened in each case. One of the loaves was brought to the bishop, and it was broken open in the presence of himself and his chaplain, who has left us the account. Blood again flowed, as before, and they carried away with them fragments of the loaf as relics. The point, however, which concerns us here is the explanation which the chaplain gives of the portent. The bread, he says, had been kneaded on the Sunday, and God had wished by this miracle to mark His horror of this infraction of the law of rest. These, be it noticed, were loaves of fermented bread. But, he goes on, there had been baked in the oven at the same time a batch of loaves which were not leavened. They were prepared in the evening of the Sunday after vespers, and, inasmuch as the law had not been broken in this case, no sign of blood or of anything extraordinary was seen in them. Let me remark en parenthèse that there seems no reason to question the exactitude of the facts, which are vouched for by an eyewitness whose reputation for conscientious truthfulness stands very high.12 Such phenomena have been repeatedly recorded both by pagan authors in classical times and by scientific observers in the present century. The liquid which flows from the bread is not of course blood, but an excess of moisture which has been deeply stained by a rapid growth of some one of the pigment microbes, notably the bacillus prodigiosus, so called from its startling resemblance to the colour of blood. Excess of moisture and the admixture of yeast seem to be necessary conditions for the full development of this phenomenon, which occurs nevertheless quite sporadically and unaccountably. It is noteworthy that a scientific commission, appointed by the French Government to examine and report upon some similar appearances in a batch of bread supplied to the French Army about fifty years ago, record as a result of actual experiment that while the discoloration was very marked in the fermented bread made from a particular specimen of flour, the unleavened biscuits and cakes made from the same flour were perfectly clean and wholesome.13 But to return to the question of Sunday rest. St. Hugh's chaplain, who tells this story, wrote his account about the year 1213 and makes no reference to the Abbot of Flai or to any theory according to which work on the Sunday evening after vespers would have been as unlawful as that done in the morning. The inference seems obvious that upon educated men who knew their canon law the Abbot of Flai's teaching and his apocryphal letter had made no impression. It is perhaps natural that those who believe that the mediaval Sunday brought with it not one day only but a day and a half of enforced idleness should speak rather severely of the hardship thus entailed on the poor. Over and above the Sundays, the holidays prescribed by the common law 14 and further added to by the provincial constitutions of the Ecclesia Anglicana numbered some fifty or sixty in all, and many of these had vigils. An able writer, 12 See Mr. Dimock's preface to the Magna Vita (Rolls Series) and the English Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln, recently edited by the writer. 13 A fuller discussion of the facts and references to these reports will be found in the Life of St. Hugh of Lincoln just referred to. 14 I use the phrase common law in its mediæval and ecclesiastical sense, meaning the canon law which bound the whole of Christendom, as opposed to provincial enactments which affected only a particular country or province. See Maitland's Roman Canon Law in the Church of England. |