terbury and the Saints of Durham, we are not aware whether any notice has been taken of a passage in the compilation which on the strength of the superscription of a manuscript belonging to Sir Thomas Phillips, Dr. Giles publishes under the name of Philip of Liege. Whosesoever it may be, it is certainly not later than the generation next after that of St. Thomas, and it contains this anecdote. "When he raised from the earth to his shrine the blessed Cuthbert, the bishop beloved of God and venerable amongst men, and touched each of his limbs and his face and all the members of the saint which had suffered no corruption though six hundred years had passed, for he had lived a virgin from his childhood, famous for holiness and miracles, the king asked the archbishop how he presuined to touch all the members of so great a saint; on which the man of God replied 'Do not wonder, sire, at this, that with my consecrated hands I have touched him, for far higher is that sacrament which day by day I, as other priests, handle on the altar, the blessed body of Christ which is committed to three orders of priests, deacons, and subdeacons."* Roger Hoveden is the narrator of the following miracle. "One day the Archbishop was sitting at the table of Pope Alexander, when his domestic placed before him a bowl of water. The Pope reached for it and tasted it, and found it to be an excellent wine, and saying, I thought you drank water,' put it back before the Archbishop, when straightway the wine returned to its former taste of water." It is a pretty story, but we are afraid that it cannot stand, any more than Hoveden's story of St. Godric, for it is constantly mentioned that St. Thomas was not a water-drinker. "Being of a very chilly temperament, water did not agree with him, so that he never drank it, and but seldom beer, but he always took wine, though in great moderation and with all sobriety." The testimony of Garnier of Pont Sainte Maxence is to the same effect. "Le meillur vin useit que il poeit trover; * Anecdota Bedæ, &c. Ed. Giles. Caxton Soc., 1851, p. 234. † Hoveden ap., Savile, p. 520. Herb. de Bosham-Vita, Ed. Giles, vii. p. 70. § Ed. Hippeau, p. 136. So that Hoveden's miracle, we fear, must be classed with the legend of the carp, which we cannot help quoting in all its quaintuess, although it has been already published. "And anon after Saynt Thomas came to come (to Sens) on Saynt Marcus day at afternone. And whan his Cature shulde haue brought fysshe for his dyner, because it was fastynge day, he coude gette non for no money, and came and tolde his lorde Saynt Thomas so, and he bad hym by such as he coude gete, and than he bought flesshe and made it redy for theyr dyner, and Saynt Thomas was served wt a capon rosted and his menny with boylled mete and so it was that ye pope herde yt he was come and sent a cardynall to welcome hym, and he found hym at his dyner etynge flesshe, whiche anon retourned and tolde to the pope how he was not so perfyght a mā as he had supposed. For contrary to the rule of the churche he eteth thys day flesshe. The pope wold not believe hym but sent another cardynall whiche for more evydent toke the legge of the capon in his kerchyef and affermed the same. And opened his kerchyef before ye pope and he founde the legge tourned in to a fysshe called a carpe and when ye pope sawe it he sayde they were not trwe men to say suche thynges of this good bysshope, they sayde feythfully yt it was flesshe that he ete. And after this Saynt Thomas came to ye pope and dyd his reverence and obedience whome ye pope welcomed and after certayne comunycacions he demaunded hym what mete yt he had eten and sayde flesshe as ye have herd before bycause he coude fynde no fysshe and very nede copelled hym thereto, than ye pope understode of ye myracle that the capons legge was tourned in to a carpe of his goodness granted to hym and to all them of ye dyocise of Canterbury lycéce to ete flesshe ever after on Saynt Marcus day whan et falleth on a fysshe day and pdon all whiche is kepte and accustomed." * We wonder very much whether there was any such dispensation to eat meat on St. Mark's Day in the diocese of Canterbury, which served as the foundation of fact for this curious legend. It reminds us somewhat of the grave old narrator's account of how, on some great occasion, two fountains sprung up, one of wine and the other of water that of water remaineth unto this day." Was the sequel of the capon's leg being changed into a carp in the Cardinal's kerchief, "kept and accustomed?" If so, it is singular that our Catholic ancestors should have lost 66 *Morris's Life of St. Thomas, p. 376. We have restored the spelling of the "Lyfe of Saynt Thomas of Caunturbury" published by Rycharde Pynson. the tradition, for amongst ourselves, St. Mark has been a day of abstinence until very lately. By a Rescript of July 8, 1781, Pope Pius VI. abrogated the fast which, in consequence of an immemorial tradition, the English Catholics kept on all the Fridays of the year, with the exception of the Paschal Season. The Pope then refused to dispense with the abstinence on St. Mark's Day and the three Rogation Days, which the Vicars Apostolic had asked at the same time; but this was granted by Pope Pius VIII. by a Rescript dated May 29, 1830. In 1696, a life of St. Thomas was published at Lucca, by John Baptist Cola, della Congregazione della Madre di Dio. It consists in the main of a translation of that published in French by Beaulieu, in 1674, but it also contains, distinguished by italics, a few anecdotes collected from other sources by the translator. At page 179 he mentions the Italian families of whom he had heard as claiming descent from the banished relations of the saint. Of these he gives the first place to "F. Andrea Minerbetti," a Knight Commander of the Order of St. John at Florence, and then he enumerates the "Signori Becchetti' of Piacenza, Fabriano, Verona, of Sacca in Sicily, and of Berceto in the territory of Parma, to which latter place he attributes the possession of a precious relic of our saint. He then speaks of the "Signori Morselli" of Vigerano and Piacenza. In the former place this family rejoiced in the possession of a fountain which St. Thomas had caused to spring up miraculously on one of his journeys to Rome, which favour they recorded by engraving on the city insignia, which it was their privilege to carry in procession on St. Mark's day, the following verses, in which the Morselli celebrate their devotion to St. Mark and to St. Thomas of Canterbury. "Clarorumque tribus, Morsellorumque propago But by far the most interesting of all the narratives of this book, which we have not seen mentioned elsewhere, is the account of a vision of St. Catherine of Bologna. Iu VOL. XLIX.-No. XCVII. 2 order to devote herself to prayer this saint had deprived herself of her natural rest to such an extent that her spiritual daughters, fearing both for her mind and body, implored her to devote less time to this holy exercise. St. Catherine, after asking fervently for God's guidance, fell asleep and saw St. Thomas of Canterbury, to whom she was particularly devoted, appear to her in his pontifical vestments, and make a sign to her to observe what he should do. She noticed that he prayed for some time and then devoted a while to rest, and then returned again to prayer; and then, drawing near to St. Catherine, he gave his hand to her to kiss, on which she awoke and saw him and kissed his hand before he disappeared. The account of this the saint wrote in her Breviary "which is still amongst her relics at Bologna," with these words:-"Oratio pro Sancto Thomâ meo gloriosissimo Martyre, tam benignissimo, qui manus suas sanctissimas concessit mihi, et osculata sum illas in corde et corpore meo; ad laudem Dei et illius scripsi, et narravi hoc cum omni veritate." In both the lives of St. Catherine given by the Bollandists (March 9), this is narrated, with a slight variation in the words written by the Saint in her Breviary. "S. Thomas meus gloriosissimus et clementissimus Patronus, one says are the words used respecting our great English martyr by the wonderful virgin who now for four hundred years has dwelt incorrupt amongst her Poor Clares at Bologna. We now ask the reader to turn with us to the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, and to permit us to enter into an examination of the portion of it that relates to St. Thomas at greater length than we have hitherto done with any of our collection. It well deserves greater notice than has been taken of it. By Mr. Morris it has been dismissed in a single paragraph; Mr. Robertson, to the best of our recollection, makes no allusion to it whatever ;, and Lord Campbell mentions it with his usual inaccuracy. "One day, at a meeting of the clergy, some bishops affected to talk in highflown terms of their being independent of the royal authority; but the Chancellor, who was present, openly contradicted them, and, in a severe tone, reminded them that they were bound to the King by the same oath as men of the sword, to be true and faithful to the King, and truth and faith to bear of life and limb and earthly honour.' As this Battle controversy took place when St. Thomas was Chancellor, and as his only concern with it was his official position as Chancellor, it being a report of one of the earliest, if not the earliest, trial extant, it was well worthy of a fuller notice and greater attention from the historian and present holder of the Great Seal. It is a pity that, before Lord Campbell stereotyped his book and brought it to "as perfect a state as he could hope that it might ever attain," he did not correct some of the blunders in his life of St. Thomas. For instance, he tranquilly says, "There has been an unfounded supposition recently started that Becket was of the Norman race. His Saxon pedigree appears from all contemporary authorities." The precise reverse of this is the truth. Not a single contemporary writer calls him a Saxon, and Fitz-Stephen, to whom Lord Campbell makes frequent and lengthy reference, says that his father, Gilbert Becket, was from the village of Tierrie, in Normandy. Lord Campbell has chosen to follow Thierry, the historian of the Norman Conquest, and as he happened to have a crotchet on this point, he has misled his English disciple; but this is no excuse for Lord Campbell's wanton assertion respecting "all the contemporary authorities" whom he evidently had not consulted. Again he says, "Ffoliot, Bishop of London, publicly accused him of plunging a sword into the bosom of his mother, the Church" (p. 68.); at the time of the war in France, in which St. Thomas the Chancellor had led the King's army in person, while the fact was that Ffoliot was not Bishop of London until St. Thomas was Archbishop of Canterbury, and the accusation was brought by Ffoliot in a letter written, not at the time, as Lord Campbell misinforms his reader, but long afterwards when St. Thomas was in exile. But the most flagrant of his Lordship's blunders, to select only one more, is the extraordinary confusion he has made (p. 79, note q.) between John of Salisbury, the well-known scholar and friend of St. Thomas, and John of Oxford, Dean of Salisbury; and he has not only attributed to the good Christian the excommunication that fell upon the schismatic, but he has actually given as the cause that provoked the censure, a Lives of the Lord Chancellors of England, by John, Lord Campbell. Fourth Edition. London, 1856. Vol. i. p. 57, note. |