Which Ocean was the real one?

We Englishmen ... I won't presume to speak for the Scots ... are extremely (nowadays everybody says incredibly) insular. This fault was encouraged during my own childhood by talk of a Second Elizabethan Age ... the phantom-heroics of the Age of Elizabeth Tudor were still, in their fictionalised forms, alive and well. It had been a time when Englishmen went to sea and robbed Spanish galleons ... and this was laudable. Englishmen had engaged on coastal raids upon Spain, and (how incredibly witty!) we were taught to think of this as Singeing the Beard of the King of Spain. I put it to you that the realities behind these childish pieces of xenophobic fiction represented a childish distraction from the political and military realities of the authentic sixteenth century, which had a Mediterranean bias.

But our native style of imperialist culture went back before my time, to that of an earlier English queen (Disraeli knew that his Sovereign was a woman!). And, decades before, the Fabers and the Mannings had been, to a degree, alienated from many of the assumptions and icons of mainstream English culture. Faber was not the only convert to seek an ultramontane version of Catholicism. The Protestant Ascendancy suspected Roman Catholics of disloyalty: juridically, this was nonsense; Romanists fought and died for the Empire and for Victoria Queen Empress as loyally as did any Protestants. But psychologically there was a certain truth in these antitheses. 

The expansion of the Empire Imperatricis auspiciis evoked memories of that earlier imperial period of Gloriana, and received inspiration from a romantic perception of the two Queens and of devoted service to them. Is it an accident that the Victorians loved little stories such as the one about the pirate Raleigh (whose father had nearly been torn to pieces by the people of Devon in 1549) and his use of his cloak to protect his Sovereign from puddle-water? We know that there was a market for stirring manly tales about Elizabethan seadogs, because they were written by a Charles Kingsley; he was the attacker of S John Henry Newman; he shared sado-masochistic fantasies with his fiancee and liked the thought of kissing women's feet. 

One of Kingsley's characters says, in Westward Ho (1855): "you owe [your preservation] to the prayers of that most pure and peerless virgin, by whose commands you sailed: the sweet incense of whose orisons have gone up for you daily, and for whose sake you were preserved from flood and foe, that you might spread the fame and advance the power of the spotless championess of truth, and right, and freedom--Elizabeth your queen."

Indeed, Boleyn's daughter and the Mother of God were alternative and, to a degree, exclusive icons: during a sea-battle later in Westward Ho "the smoke cleared away, the gorgeous painting of the Madre Dolorosa, with her heart full of seven swords, which, in a gilded frame, bedizened the Spanish stern, was shivered in splinters." That such sentiments are not entirely remote from reality is guanteed to this day by the state of the statue of our blessed Lady Vulnerata in the seminary at Valladolid.

While Kingsley's sort of fantasy-history was being written, 'the real world' was happening the other side of the Pillars of Hercules.

A King for England??

 What to do about a Queen Regnant who lacks a husband?

I am writing, of course about, a woman who in her own right holds the rights to the Crown of (let us say)  England. I am not writing about all those women who, simply by marrying or being married to a male who happened to be a lawful Sovereign, acquired what is is essentially a courtesy title of "Queen". Such women are commonly termed Queens Consort. (There may be intriguing ambiguities here: I think I read somewhere that the besotted Tudor VIII planned to use parliamentary jiggery pokery to confer upon La Bolena the status of Sovereign. And let us not get into Williamnmary.)

But, before the long 'reign' of Bloody Bess had habituated England to thinking of Virgin or Almost Virgin Queens, there was an assumption that if the person upon whom the English Crown lawfully devolved happened to be both female and unmarried ... she needed a husband. Accordingly, the early years (decades?) of the Second Tudoress were overshadowed by the question: whom will the Queen marry? Were the winner of this jackpot to be a foreign prince, there would be implications for international politics, as there had been in the time of Queen Mary I. If Elizabeth condescended to an English Spouse, our internal national politics would be likely to be engaged.

In the 1570s, Mediterranean politics were of interest to the Mediterranean powers. How safe were Cyprus and Malta from Islamic aggression ... Sicily ... elements of Spanish power in North Africa ...?

Further North, how real were the 'marriage negotiations' between Elizabeth and the youngest brother of Charles IX, the Dule of Alencon (the Duke of Anjou having been elected King of Poland in 1573)? In an age when Dukes were rarae aves and came into the international category of 'Princes', and when the English aristocracy had few enough dukedoms, the holder of the Dukedom of Norfolk was naturally a person of interest to some.

But was Boleyn's daughter the only woman whose marriage prospects or intentions engaged thoughtful Englishmen?

To be continued.

THOSE WIDE WOUNDS

 During the long resistance of the English people to the imposition by Tudor despots of schism and heresy, a dispossessed monk wrote a hymn of which I offer you the first two stanzas. I won't take my quotation any further, because ... well, I'll be honest with you ... he does rather go on about the dissolution of the monastic houses!

"Christ crucified!/ For thy wounds wide,/ Us commons guide/ Which pilgrims be/ Through Goddes grace/ For to purchase/ Old wealth and peace/ Of the spirituality."

I invite you to imagine youself as one of a great concourse of devout (or even not so devout) lay folk, called to take part in a demonstration of lay power and of sound lay liturgical foundations. Buoyed up by the support of your fellow parishioners, if ... to pick an example ... you were among the the fifteen hundred well-appointed horsemen and the large numbers of footmen from Ripon, who had gathered there before dawn on the morning of 18 November 1569, perhaps you were particularly proud to be marching behind a banner made by a daughter of an important local family, the Nortons. 

If the banner she had worked on followed the customary design of banners of the Five Wounds, it must have been in preparation for quite a time ... she couldn't have thrown it together overnight. 

Wherever you and your friends went, there would be Protestant wooden Communion Tables to smash up and burn. Bonfires could be fed by the Book of Common Prayer; the Bible; the homilies; metrical psalters; and John Jewell's Apology for the Church of England. One participating churchwarden had poked the flames with his staff, declaring "See where the homilies fleith to the devyll".

Did you all sing the hymn I printed above? I don't know how many printing presses there might have had access to (in the South West, the Abbey Press at Tavistock had of course fallen victim to the Dissolution).

But, in any case, did they, do you, think the first stanza was ... a bit trite, a tadge obvious and platitudinous and over the top? Those rhymes Crucified, wide, guide?

Perhaps you are right. But I can offer a little piece of converging evidence.

In the Resurrexio Domini which I mined for this blog during the Octave Week of Easter, those boom boom boom English rhymes were not available since the language was Cornish. But we find there the same emphasis on how widely open the Lord's wounds were. Cleopas and his Socius sit with the Stranger at table and the Socius comments that me a wel the wolyow/ warbarth a les ... where a les means wide, widely. The same word appears a few lines lower (a les ol y wolyow a-thyragon pan guylsyn) and in succeeding dialogue, including sites where there is no suggestion of rhyme making it prescriptive or even helpful.

I suspect that the wideness of the Lord's gaping wounds was a customary topos of medieval Catholic devotion. 

Multilayered Successes!!!

 As we successfully generate more 'ecological' energy, will such an increase stimulate a greater demand for and use of energy?

Callimachus, Caravaggio ... (2)

In 1605, what is arguably Caravaggio's finest picture appeared upn the scene in S Augustine's Church in Rome. It was a painting of the Mother of God with her Divine Child. Two pilgrims are approaching them, on their knees, and neither is very smartly dressed. The man has piedi fangosi, dirty feet; the woman is wearing a cuffia sdrucita e sudicia, a torn and dirty headdress. I do not know what precedents there may be for such a display; but the facts recorded are that the popolani raised a schiamazzo, an enormous din. 

They were not accustomed to this sort of thing. Indeed, I rather wonder whether they were accustomed to the concepts of "Art", of "Art History", or the prospect of special young ladies commuting up and down Bond Street to discuss their common profession over yet another cup of coffee. Today, in a compartmentalised world, "Art" is a "subject". Specialists make a "career" out of it. Attributions are advanced and then withdrawn; international exhibitions are organised in the hope that, seeing certain pictures together, it will or will not  become clear whether the same hand produced them. Odium philologicum is an important ... and lucrative ... part of the game. 

To us, it does not matter that those piedi fangosi might teach us a lesson, or draw us more closely into the lesson that Mary's Son was Incarnate and Crucified for your and my redemption. 

We shall be none the wiser because we have looked upon the long, pure lines of the neck of the Immaculate as she leans forward, compassionately down upon those who kneel before her and her Son.

Whether or not Caravaggio lived a good life, in Loretto and Walsingham the devotion to the Truth of the Incarnation is strengthened  by our knowledge that this Mystery was worked out in an ordinary Home like that in which we each of us have lived.

From late Greek fun to aristocratic Roman Gardens (1)

By the time of the Seicento, many people throughout Europe, but not least in Rome, were impressed to see before their own very eyes, gleamingly white statues from antiquity; and great profit was made by those enterprising individuals who dug them up, restored broken arms and noses, and sold them on to their fellow-countrymen or to visitors from the North who were performing the Grand Tour. You can, for example, see a splendid collection at Petworth, where bits continues to be tacked on at the end of the House to provide more exhibition space for the Earl's collection.

But, in an important respect, viewers and collectors alike were being deceived. Those statues were not planned or executed in order to be gleaming white marble. They were, in Antiquity, polychrome. (There is a fine book on this published in Copenhagen by the Carlsberg Glyptothek.) What Winckelmann admired and Thorvaldsen carved is so different from the Classical realite as to be, plausibly, a different genre. 

And the same conventions, apparently, reached down the scale of social dignitas. The rooms and gardens of first-century palaces were full of such 'furniture'. And levitas replaced dignitas. Old women, habitually drunk, clutch an amphora. Nymphs, fauns, and hermaphrodites struggle to accomplish or to escape rape. Two boys are fighting over a game of knucklebones ... originally, this was deemed to be a boy eating another boy's leg! Also in the Townley Collection, before most of it was stashed away in cupboards by the BM Trustees, a young fisherboy sported an extensive membrum virile ... before English propriety modified him. Another fisherman was "a clinical study of old age", but he would accompany well the Old Market Woman in the NY Met ("her delicate , diaphanous chiton and elaborate sandals imply a hertaira fallen upon hard times"). Most of these pieces of fun were mass-produced for wealthy Romans, for their homes and gardens: that is why the last few centuries have unearthed so many products of the same pattern-books. Pan, it appears, was a mighty if tumescent educator: he is so often see teaching a boy to play the pipes while simultaneously grooming him.

Even the gods of Olympus manifest a jocose facade: on Delos, a smiling Aphrodite wards off Pan with the worn sole of a sandal. Realism has displaced divine maiestas: the great Apollo who slew the monstrous Python becomes a sinuous youth regarding ... a tiny lizard climbing up a tree trunk. And this prioritising of the ordinary, the every-day, extends to the animal world: two dogs courting' were among Townley's acquisitions; a fine dog, usually categorised as a "Molossian Hound", sits beside the lake at Petworth and is to be found elsewhere.

Precisely the same movements can be detected in literature. Aristophanes is displaced by Menander and the Roman writers o f domestic 'New Comedy'. Homer gives way to Callimachus: long epics with heroic heroes metamorphose into short epyllia, so that the title (Aktaia) of Callimachus' "little epic" is a describer of its heroine, a peasant woman called Hecale. She entertains Theseus, and we read a detailed account of the homely peasant meal ... and the homely home. In Latin, Ovid was to employ the same generic tropes in his Philemon and Baucis. 

D'you know: I have often wondered whether the lack of hospitium in the reception offered to the Holy Family in the Lucan Infancy narrative alludes to the same literary tradition: after all, Acts 14 intersects neatly with Ovid's Metamorphoses.

How many swallows ...

 To be concluded with our Lady of Loreto.

THE ANGEL OF GREAT COUNSEL

On a high and lofty peak in Kerkyra, there is a monastery ... much, I fear, restored. But it still has the encouraging dedication of ho Hypselos Pantokrator ["the lofty ... high up ... Ruler of All"].

It was, apparently, founded in the fourteenth century.

In the vaulted ceiling, to the West of the Ikonostasis, there is painting of ho tes Megales Boules Angelos; words which the bi-lingual guide-book helpfully translates into English as ... er ... "the Angel of the Grate Will" (I'm not making this up).

I think I discern here what our Roman Rite's Third Mass of Christmass ... what we term the Missa in Die ... calls, in its Introit, vocabitur nomen eius magni consilii Angelus [LXX kaleitai to onoma autou Megales Boules Angelos]. This Third Mass is the great dogmatic statement of what, on that Day, we are celebrating, with its majestic readings from Hebrews and the Gospel According to S John. 

The image on Corfu shows our Blessed Lord. He has 'angelic' wings; he is raising his right hand in [Byzantine] blessing while his left hand holds a globe; in his halo are the letters making ho on [the One who Is]; at the top is written ho tes Megales Boules Angelos. 

I am reminded here of the majestic words of our Canon of the Mass, where we beseech Almighty God jube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime Altare tuum,  in conspectu divinae majestatis tuae. I have long regarded this Angelus as being our Lord Himself. 

Jungmann reminds us that so did Ivo of Chartres (d 1116); Honorius Augustodunensis (early twelfth century); Alger of Liege; Sicard of Cremona (1155-1215) ..."and others" ...

These words in the heart of our authentic Western Eucharistic Prayer are one of the elements that make it, both among the ancient rites of Christendom and the horrible novel inventions of the 1960s, so distinctive. This prayer, like the reference to the Sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham, mentioned just before, makes a mighty link with what Jungmann calls "the concept of of the continuity of the history of grace" ... which is why Abraham's sacrifice was one of the favourite subjects of ancient Christian iconography. 

I feel an interest in this parallelism between the Corfiot mural and the authentic teaching of our Canon. Perhaps somebody with more knowledge than I sadly have of the Byzantine side of this Tradition could supply information or comments?

POOR OLD IRELAND!

The Magdalene Laundries ... the treatment of Fallen Women ... what a cruel and depraved island Ireland was! Poor old De Valera ... Poor od Archbishop McQuaid ... what a corrupt, hate-filled society they ran!! Apologies ... Compensation ... but what good is all that? It is not much better than words.

The Times recently published a review of a new book. The Reviewer asked: "How surprised would you be to discover that a comparable system operated in Britain during the 20th century?A system that has not been acknowledged or apologised for, let alone compensated for?"

The book is The Undesirables The Law that locked away a a Generation, by Sarah Wise. It does for Britain what so many 'revelatory' books have done for Ireland. The British law concerned was not repealed until 1959.

Alice O'Keeffe, the Times Reviewer, enables us, in more ways than the merely statistical and legal, to understand the social arrangements in Britain and Ireland in their contexts. The origins of the British 1913 Mental Deficiecy Act Act "lay in the Eugenics movement of the ealy 20th century. Alarmed by the poverty in the slums of Britain's big cities, this group of keen social Darwinists decided that the best solution would be to prevent the poor from breeding ... As the eugenicist George Mudge put it: 'The stunted individuals are not the product of the one-room tenement, but the one-roomed tenement is an expression of [their] inherent incapacity'.

"The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 and found a sympathetic ear in Winston Churchill, who once wrote that 'the improvement of the British breed is my aim in life'. Influenced by an American book called The Sterilisation of Degenerates, Churchill, when he was home secretatary in the Asquith government, advocated a simple surgical operation ... The working-class Labour MP Will Crooks observed that such people 'are almost like human vermin. They crawl about ... polluting and corrupting everything they touch.' ...

"As Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society observed: 'Many far-sighted men and women in both England and America have been working earnestly towards something very like wht Hitler has now made compulsory' ..." 

What thoroughly wicked old men De Valera and Churchill were to have lived in a culture different from ours!

And how about all those Metropolitan Archbishops, McQuaid in Dublin and, in England, Fisher and his successors? I spent nearly half a century in the ministry of the Church of England, and I know all about the phrase "Giving a man another chance". And my own ministry was overshadowed by a bishop called Peter Ball; because he was an alumnus of the College I worked in, he used to hang around it inviting the (male) students to "Give a year to Jesus". Another of his phrases was "Be strong for Jesus." This meant "Let me whip you." 

It was ... literally ... decades before he was finally convicted and locked up. "Cover ups", indeed!

POOR OLD ENGLAND!

Palm Sunday

 I have something to put before you. But before I do so: Thank You for your Good Wishes. Pancreatic Cancer is not the best daily companion, but your prayers and good wishes really do help.

Presumably, it is not wicked to canvas views on liturgical changes. We had a lot of those between about 1910 and 1970; and, it seemed, we never stopped talking about the subject, like IV Formers discussing Girls (or Boys). But, strangely, we seem now to be within what one of my doctors calls stasis. And 1970-2024 seems a long time to be static, as well as silent, especially compared with those decades of incessant, officially encouraged change, which I have lived through!

I think Palm Sunday is the least successful of the liturgical confections devised for the post-Conciliar Holy Week.

This is because of the disparate sources out of which it was put together. 

(1) We had the assurances of fashionable Experts that the Essence of Palm Sunday was the Procession with the dramatic use of palm leaves ... everything else was to bow down before that, as if it were the Mikado's Daughter-in-law Elect. 

(2) We had the earlier lectionary choices made with Holy Week and Passiontide as the guiding principle, centred upon the Matthaean Passion Narrative, in mind. 

(3) And we had the old, Western, popular notion that those leaves, so neatly folded by those nice foreign ladies, would be sacramentals powerful to keep safe homes in which they were on view. Quicunque ex ea receperint, accipiant sibi protectionem animae et corporis : fiatque tibi, Domine, nostrae salutis remedium, tuae gratiae sacramentum ... omni adversitate effugata ... and vide the similar sentiments in all the old five prayers of blessing. 

I never have felt that all these elements have worked comfortably together.

Might we be better off with just two main options: (1) a joyful, popular celebration based upon the Lord's entry into Jerusalem and the use in Procession of the palm leaves; and (2) a celebration closer to the spirit of Holy Week, centred on the proclamation of the Matthaean Passion Narrative.

Reconsideration of Palm Sunday would, of course, be accompanied by the suppression of all those successive rites of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, leaving just the pre-Pacellian formulae for that Day, and the couple of new choices.

I think a lot of people could be happier.

Ave Crux ...

Well, Easter ... the paschalia festa ... are now peracta; the ancient collect of today, Low Sunday, makes that explicitly clear. But, for our strange Novus Ordo brethren, this same ancient collect is now attached instead ... believe it or not ... to the Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter ... so, presumably, they regard that Saturday as end of their Easter Octave. Seems a funny business to me, but I'm sure that they, poor poppets, understand their own massively peculiar rite better than I do. Anyway, this is not my real subject for today.

As we leave the Easter Octave behind, we have some unfinished business. Lady Day, the Annunciation of our Blessed Lady, needed to be moved out of Holy Week, the Maior Hebdomada, so we celebrate it tomorrow, Monday. It is therefore next Tuesday that restores the normal rhythms of the season. And, as I peer into my 1874 Breviary, in my survey of the liturgical sources and habits which fed the piety of S John Henry Newman, Fr Faber and those heroic early Oratorians, Wiseman and Manning and Ullathorne and so many ...

... there I find this rubric: "Afterwards, there is the Commemoration of the Cross, which happens daily at Lauds and Vespers, up to the Ascension ... other Commemorations, of S Mary, S Joseph, of the Apostles, of Peace are not said in the Easter Season."

Is it strange to commemorate the Cross during Eastertide? 

I think not. The risen Saviour who comes to greet us is the Crucified One bearing in his limbs the marks of his love. The Feast of the Inventio Sanctae Crucis will beautifully emphasise this; but, with an early Easter this year, May 3 seems a long way off! 

Easter certainly does not cancel out the Crucifixion or diminish the splendour of its Five Wounds; it exhibits them to us as glorious and salvific ... and draws each of us into their wonder.

At Lauds the Commemoration was: 

Antiphon: Crucifixus surrexit a mortuis, et redemit nos, alleluia, alleluia.

V Dicite in nationibus , alleluia. R Quia Dominus regnavit a ligno, alleluia.

Deus, qui pro nobis Filium tuum crucis patibulum subire voluisti, ut inimici a nobis expelleres potestatem: concede nobis famulis tuis; ut resurrectionis gratiam consequamur. Per eumdem. 

At Vespers, the antiphon was Crucem sanctam subiit, qui infernum confregit, accinctus est potentia, surrexit die tertia, alleluia. The V, R and Collect the same as at Lauds

That Johannine Crux!! (6)

In the Resurrexio Domini, we find that it distressed Mary of Magdala that she could not 'see' Jesus (rak na'n guela). But after a little dramatic teasing, the Gardner, 'Ortolanus', "demonstrabit latus eius ad Mariam Magdalenam et dicit ..."

"Maria, myr ov Pym Woly!/ Crys my the wyr the thasserghy ... " Mary, See my Five Wounds! Believe that I have truly risen again]. ..."

As with S Thomas, the sight of the Wounds is found convincing. And the Magdalen desires immediate engagement. "A ker arluth eth yn grous pren./ thy'm ny thogouth amme the'ethpen./ Me a'th pysse a lauasos/ lemmmyn amme vn wyth the'th tros." [ O dear Lord who went on to the cross-beam, it is not becoming for me to kiss your head. I would beg you to allow me now to kiss just your foot"] But the Hortolanus is inexorable; and inexorable in Latin: Mulier, noli me tangere. After the Latinity, he repeats its meaning  in Cornish: "A vynynryth na tuche vy nes."

 In "Celtic" languages, the forms of words change in response to grammar and to adjacent letters. One commentator observes pym-woly cryst should  really ... correctly ... be fymp goli. My instinct is that the words were so regularly used as a stand-alone phrase that they assumed this unadjusted form. It is, of course, an allusion to the powerful devotion to the Lord's Wounds; on my study wall I have good photographic representation of the 'Norfolk' Banner of the Five Wounds. Be gracious, Lord, to the souls of those slaughtered in the 1549 Western Rebellion, and in the Northern 'Pilgrimages' during the 'reigns' of Henry and Elizabeth Tudor.

Amma, you will have gathered, is Cornish for kiss. D'you think it might be onomatopoeic? In a day or two, I hope to make some remarks about English kissing habits, which seem to have differed from those of mainland Europe.

"Mulier noli me tangere". I suspect the text presents this in Latin because it was, well, not unfamiliar. Does anyone recall seeing it in the context of late Medieval art?

In the Cornish version of the phrase, the Lord uses the term vynynryth. Why? vynyn is Cornish for Woman, and ryth, judging by the large number of compounds in the Breton Language which contain its parallel (reizh), appears to come from a root rect- or reg- [cf Latin??]. Rule and rectitude seem to be the story; my baby Breton Dictionary gives justice; equite; droit (ensemble des lois); sexe; genre (en grammaire); outillage. English renderings of the Cornish compound offer womankind.

 But why the word Vynynryth? By this point, Mary of James and Mary Salome have disappeared from the 'stage', leaving just the Magdalene alone with the Gardener. However, I have memories of Latin and Greek texts where a commentator, unable to solve a conundrum, has finally left it with the observation that the difficulty is metri causa. Perhaps we need a word with just this number of syllables. (The author has used the word only a few lines above.)

And we need to remember that in premodern societies people use names ... vocatives ... much less frequently than we do; our verbal interactions are soaked in the gross and promiscuous over-use of names. When I was last in hospital, I became much irritated by all those nurses and auxiliaries, who looked about fifteen-and-half years old, and who constantly shouted JOHN!!! !!! at me. Perhaps the Author of the Resurrexio Domini was preserving her name ... Maria ... from dramatic over-use.

My final point. 

Why will the Lord not permit the Magdalene to touch him? 

Perhaps we do not know enough to be sensitively awake to the social nuances of interactions between men and women in late medieval Cornwall. (Or, indeed, in First-century Palestine?) As I have just remarked, our society is deeply marked by incessant and emphatic verbal insincerities. Perhaps the word thogouth gives us a hint; "it is not fitting". And, a line or two later, "na na wra gruyth na fo the les ... [do not behave inappropriately]"

Some readers may be glad that, for the time being, this blog is done with the Medieval Cornish 'Ordinalia' texts.

The Ordinalia again (5) in Glass?

So, down in Cornwall, during the Middle Ages, they had religious plays, the Ordinalia, in the ancient Cornish language (some enthusiasts are currently trying to revive it; in fact, these dramas in Medieval Cornish have been the main basis of their 'revived' language ... oddly; suppose we spoke an English constructed upon the verses of Chaucer, without paying any attention to the fact that our Geoffrey had both chosen and arranged his words so as to fit his half-millennium-old-metrical scheme! And, Homer's Greek can never have been spoken as a vernacular by anyone.)

However, in the Resurrexio Domini [sic], the Lord (of course) appears first to his Immaculate Mother. 

Medieval Cornish, like Modern English, was an omnivorous language heavy with vocabulary, quotations, phrases, technicalities, expletives from other languages ... English; Latin borrowings going back to the Roman Occupation; contemporary Latin borrowings; French (another thing which the inventors of 'Modern Cornish' can't stand; rather as Herr Hitler did for the German language, their dictionaries constantly enjoin us not to use loan-words amply attested in the literature, but to stick to pure 'Celtic' roots).

And the Lord greets his Mother with the Latin phrase O salve Sancta Parens. This, of course, is the beginning of the Introit for Eastertide Masses of our Lady (and comes ultimately from Sedulius). The O needs to be in the Cornish text because the lines have to have seven syllables.

Throughout the manuscript, there are two scribal hands. Manus prima, is the slightly faded original. Rather darker, manus secunda adds some stage directions, changes some ts to ds, and, at one point, appears to have updated a joke by erasing three lines and writing some different Cornish placenames into the space thus made available ... making it, I suspect, topical to a different audience from that for which the manus prima had originally written out the play.

In the greeting O salve Sancta parens, it looks as if that erasing knife has again been at work underneath the first two words. Over that rasura, O salve is darkly inked in by manus secunda. Most probably, manus prima wrote Salve Sancta parens; manus secunda realised that a syllable extra was needed - made a botched job of supplying it - then scraped the area clean so as to make a neat fresh start.

You can look for yourselves at the manuscript without even travelling up to Oxford: search for Bodley 791 and scroll down to folio 61 verso.

But if you prefer glass pictures to written drama, go to Fairford Church in Gloucestershire. There you will see the Lord greeting His Mother Salve Sancta Parens. This window (Window 7; in two lights) is roughly contemporaneous with the Cornish text: "... probably due to Richard Fox, bishop of Durham and then of Winchester. The glass was made between 1500 and 1517 probably under the direction of the King's glazier, Barnard Flower, largely in his workshops at Westminster." Our Lady has her hands raised in amazement; the literature describes her as "coming from her bedroom in great joy".

At the highest cultural levels of early Tudor England, people were not ashamed of these "extra-textual" stories.