Two Corrections

Abstract

I

The Abbess of Syon has very courteously called my attention to an error in my article on Fontevraud, at page 34. The last sentence of the middle paragraph should read:

The order of the Most Holy Saviour (Brigittines) was founded in Sweden in 1370; it professed the Rule of St Augustine, but with its own Constitutions; it comprised in each house nuns, to the number of sixty, monks, not to exceed seventeen, and eight lay brothers.

H. F. CHETTLE.

II

‘With respect to the reliquaries I leave you to follow your own judgment; but as the relicts (sic) can no longer be exposed, I should be inclined to consider it useless to be at any expense about their cases.’—Such is the conclusion of a letter of Fr Ralph Ainsworth, Provincial of Canterbury, to Fr Anselm Lorymer, Procurator of the same province, dated 28th July, 1813. It is plainly an answer to a letter of Fr Lorymer's in which he had asked the Provincial's leave to spend some money in having cases made for certain reliquaries with their relics. These were, in all reasonable probability, some of the objects which were found early last century in a box at the distillery of Mr Marmaduke Langdale in Holborn (see an article in the Downside Review for October 1934, on ‘Relics and Plate from the Rosary Chapel’). The interest of the above extract is that it puts the opening of the box and discovery of its contents considerably earlier than had previously been conjectured; for there is no contemporary written evidence as to when and under what circumstances that took place. Fr Alphonsus Morrall gives the story on the testimony of persons living at the time, but without a precise date; he conjectured ‘about 1822’, probably because in or before 1823 Fr Lorymer had the reliquary of the piece of the Holy Cross made into a monstrance which he sent to Downside for the opening of the Old Chapel in July of that year. It was a reasonable guess; but it now appears that Mr Langdale's box, which contained relics and plate from the seventeenth-century Chapel of the Rosary in London, was opened at least nine years earlier. It is a pity that Fr Lorymer's letter cannot be traced either at Downside or at Ampleforth (to which house Fr Ainsworth belonged), for it is not unlikely that it gave some particulars as to the time and circumstances of this interesting discovery. All that is now known of the matter, with identification of some of the contents of the box, may be found in the article referred to above. It may be added, however, that the Mr Sidney mentioned in one of Fr Lorymer's letters (p. 600) is now identified from old letters with William Sidney, who was at Acton Burnell from 1799 to 1801, first as a commensalis and then as a novice. He left owing to ill health, but remained on friendly terms with the Benedictines. Fr Lorymer says that Sidney ‘met with some account of a relick of the Holy Cross which I think must be the one you have’ (i.e. at Downside). It is possible that he was the author of the article in the Catholic Miscellany for 1824 (though Dr Oliver gives the author as Fr Lorymer himself), for the account there given, from Panzani, of a relic of the Holy Cross found in the Tower of London, is evidently the same as that ‘met with’ by Mr Sidney: it is really quoted word for word from Dodd's History in, p. 41. But that relic is certainly not the one from Langdale's box sent to Downside by Fr Lorymer, for this latter was believed in Weldon's time to have belonged to Queen Mary and to have been rescued from her chapel by Abbot Feckenham after her death.

R.H.C.