vestments on the person of a Percy in Beverley minster, make it, at least according to present custom, singular. Several chasubles here so noteworthy for their gorgeousness, have their fellows equal in splendour, elsewhere; but in this museum are a few articles which till now we might have sought for in vain throughout Christendom in any other private or public collection.
Such liturgical boxes as those two—No. 5958, p. 112, and No. 8327, p. 193—are of the kind known of old as the "capsella cum serico decenter ornata"—a little box beseemingly fitted up with silk—of the mediæval writers; or the "capsula corporalium—the box in which are kept the corporals or square pieces of fine linen, a fine mediæval specimen of which is here, No. 8329, p. 195, of the rubrics which, to this day, require its employment for a particular service, during holy week. Like its use the name of this appliance is very old, and both are spoken of in those ancient "Ordines Romani," in the first of which, drawn up now more than a thousand years ago, it is directed: "tunc duo acolythi tenentes capsas cum Sanctis apertas, &c.;"[1] and again, in another "Ordo," written out some little time before A.D. 1143, a part of the rubric for Good Friday requires the Pope to go barefoot during the procession in which a cardinal carries the Host consecrated the day before, and preserved in the corporals' chest or box: "discalceatus (papa) pergit cum processione. . . . Quidam cardinalis honorifice portat corpus Domini præteriti diei conservatum, in capsula corpolarium."[2] About the mass of the presanctified, before the beginning of which this procession took as it yet takes place, we have said a few words at pp. 112, 113. What is meant by the word "corporal," we have explained, p. 194. Here in England, such small wooden boxes covered with silks and velvets richly embroidered, were once employed for the same liturgical uses. The Exeter inventories specify them thus: "unum repositorium ligneum pro corporalibus co-opertum cum saccis de serico;"[3] "tria corporalia in casa lignea co-operta cum panno serico, operata cum diversis armis."[4]
Good Friday brings to mind a religious practice followed wherever the Greek ritual is observed, and the appliance for which, No. 8278, p. 170, we have there spoken of at such length as to save us here any further notice of this interesting kind of frontal, upon which is shown our dead Lord lying stretched out upon the sindon or winding-sheet. Of the Cyrillian character in which the Greek sentences upon it are written, we
