The kalendar * The kalendar of the Book of Common Prayer It is proposed to examine the Kalendar at the com- The Kalendar. mencement of the Book of Common Prayer with the view of ascertaining if possible, by the consideration of its history and contents, on what principle its list of holy-days was compiled. We preface such an inquiry by a brief statement of its contents, an account of the changes through which it passed, and a description of certain other little-known reformed Kalendars of the English Church in the sixteenth century. Exclusive of Sundays, and of movable feasts, such as Easter Monday and Tuesday, Ascension Day, etc., and of movable fasts, such as Ash Wednesday, Ember Days, etc., there are ninety holy-days now marked in the Kalendar of the Book of Common Prayer. Twenty-four of these are red-letter holy-days, commemorating some person or event mentioned in the New Testament; sixtysix are black-letter holy-days, commemorating some subordinate person or event connected with the New Testament, or some person of a later date than the period covered by the New Testament. The history of the changes in the Kalendar is as follows:-The red-letter holy-days have remained unchanged in number since the Prayer-book of 1549, with this one exception, that St. Barnabas was omitted in 1552 only. This omission is generally accounted for as a The Kalendar. printer's error, a very common and a very easy way of explaining a difficulty, but not always the right one. St. Barnabas never had quite a secure position in the English Church Kalendar. He, and he alone, of the red-letter saints is omitted from the Kalendar of the Leofric Missal, the earliest complete altar service-book of the English Church. He is also omitted from another tenth-century Anglo-Saxon MS. Kalendar (Junius MS. 27), now in the Bodleian Library. An Act of Parliament in 1552 (5 and 6 Edw. VI., c. 3) orders all our present red-letter festivals to be kept as holy-days except those of St. Barnabas and the Conversion of St. Paul. The name of St. Barnabas is likewise absent from the ancient Martyrologies or Kalendars which pass under the names of Jerome and Bede. Florus of Lyons, who enlarged the Martyrology of Bede in the latter part of the eighth century, seems first to have introduced the name of St. Barnabas into Western Kalendars. One is tempted to think that these omissions of his name may be due to a prejudice against it in connection with his quarrel with St. Paul, as recorded in Acts xv. 36-41. The changes in the list of black-letter holy-days are more numerous. There was only one such holy-day in the first Prayerbook of 1549-viz. St. Mary Magdalen (July 22). There were four in the next Prayer-book of 1552, and likewise in the Prayer-book of 1559, viz. : St. George (April 23). Lammas (August 1). St. Lawrence (August 10). St. Clement (Nov. 23).1 Two years later, in 1561, a Commission was appointed in connection with this subject, and the result of their labours was to add to the Kalendar all the black-letter holy-days which now appear there, with the exception of one which was added in 1604 and of two which were added at the last revision in 1661-2. These were 1 These successive changes are not quite correctly stated by Dean Hook in his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, ix. 305. 1. St. Enurchus, Sept. 7 (1604). 2. The Venerable Bede, May 27 (1662). 3. St. Alban, June 17 (1662). One Gallican, one English, and one British saint. The Kalendar. The Commission consisted of four members-1. The Archbishop of Canterbury (Parker); 2. The Bishop of London (Grindal); 3. Dr. William Bill, the Queen's Almoner; 4. Mr. Walter Haddon, one of the Masters of Requests. The last named was the editor, under Royal authority, of a Latin version of the Prayer-book in 1560, which, among other variations, assigned a saint's day to almost every day in the Kalendar. The exact number of holy-days in it was 303,-62 days out of 365 being left blank. They were drawn from ancient sources, but not exclusively either from the Roman or the Sarum Kalendar. At this point it will be well to refer to and to briefly describe certain other Kalendars which were projected in the sixteenth century, under the impulse of the Reformation movement, although it must be admitted that they throw little light, if any, upon the principle on which our present Kalendar was drawn up. Two draft Kalendars exist in MS., drawn up by Cranmer quite late in the reign of Henry VIII., or quite early in the reign of Edward VI. They seem never to have got further than the pigeon-holes of the Archbishop's study, and never received authorization for public use. They have been recently discovered by Messrs. Gasquet and Bishop among the Royal MSS. in the British Museum, and have been printed by them in extenso, as well as described in their recent and interesting work, entitled Edward VI. and the Book of Common Prayer.1 In the earlier of the two Kalendars the total number of holy-days is reduced to 58. The list is marked, first, by a preponderance of the saints of Holy Scripture (30); 1 London, 1890, pp. 32-4; 388-94. The press mark of the MS. is Reg. 7, The Kalendar. and, secondly, by a comparative preponderance of Eastern over Western saints, there being 17 of the former as against II of the latter. Among the latter there are, strange to say, no English saints or saints connected with England except St. Gregory the Great. The Eastern list is swelled by the importation of the more important early Greek fathers. The Scriptural list includes in addition to the usual red-letter festivals SS. Titus (January 4), Timothy (January 22), Benjamin (February 21). We must notice among the unusual additions to this Kalendar SS. Philias et Philoromus' (February 3), and SS. Petrus, Dorotheus, etc. (July 2). Neither of the commemorations occurred in any of the ordinary Western Kalendars. The former was evidently borrowed by Cranmer from the reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignon, the latter from the Greek Menoa. Cranmer's second MS. Kalendar contains all the commemorations of his first Kalendar with four exceptions, for which it is not easy to account-viz. SS. Babilas (January 24), Petrus et Dorotheus (July 2), Polycarp (October 6), Barbara (December 4). But at the same time the number of holy-days is raised to 162 by the addition of 48 more commemorations, chiefly of Western saints, including, as specially connected with England, St. Edward, king and martyr (March 18), St. George (April 23), St. Augustine of Canterbury (May 26), St. Alban (June 22), St. Edmund, king and martyr (November 20), and by the enormous importation of 60 additional names from the pages of Holy Scripture. This includes the chief saints and heroes of both the canonical and apocryphal books of the Old Testament, and of such persons mentioned in the New Testament as the poor widow (vidua paupercula), February 10, the woman of Canaan (Chananea), May 16, the woman with the issue of blood (Amorrousa), June 4, etc. Patriarchs and prophets are invoked in various mediæval Litanies, and are commemorated in mediæval Kalendars and Martyrologies, as well as in some of the |