304 Mr. PETRIE'S Inquiry into the Origin and 



form and style of ornament, there is every reason to believe must be of cotem- 

 poraneous age with the Chapel. It is certain, at all events, that its age cannot be 

 many years later; and I may remark, that a perfectly similar head of a crozier, 

 which is preserved among the antiquities in the Museum of Cluny, is ascribed 

 by the learned author of " Les Arts au Moyen Age" to the commence- 

 ment of the twelfth century. The Cashel crozier, after having been in the 

 possession of the Cooper family, of Cashel, for a considerable period, passed 

 into my possession at the sale of the museum of the late Dr. Tuke, it having 

 been purchased by him at the sale of the library of the celebrated Joseph 

 Cooper Walker, author of the Memoirs of the Irish Bards, and other works, and 

 to whom it had been given by Mr. Austin Cooper. The question then naturally 

 arises, was Cormac Mac Carthy, the founder of this Chapel, a bishop as well as 

 a king, or, are we to reject the tradition, and adopt the alternate conclusion 

 that the monument must have been the tomb of some cotemporaneous bishop ? 

 As this is a question which has been already made a subject of interesting 

 controversy, it is greatly to be regretted that the only evidence that could 

 perhaps have settled it, namely, the inscription upon the tomb, should 

 be irrecoverably lost ; for, under existing circumstances, much may be said on 

 either side without leading to any satisfactory conclusion. It will be recol- 

 lected that in one of the passages already cited, that from the Annals of Innis- 

 fallen, at the year 1127, it is stated, that on his expulsion from the throne of 

 Castjel in 1127, Cormac was obliged to take refuge in Lismore, where he was 

 forced to receive a bachall, or crozier : but though there is nothing improbable 

 in the circumstance that a deposed prince, of his high character for piety, should 

 have received the episcopal rank to reconcile him to his fallen condition, the 

 statement in the Annals is not sufficient to establish that such was the fact, as 

 the word bachall is used in the Irish authorities not only to denote the crozier 

 of a bishop, abbot, or abbess, but also the penitential staff of a pilgrim. But 

 there is another historical evidence of much higher authority, because a cotem- 

 poraneous one, which would go far indeed to establish the fact that Cormac 

 had received an episcopal crozier, and enjoyed the dignity of a bishop, when he 

 was restored to his throne. This evidence is found in the last of the following 

 entries in a manuscript copy of the Gospels, written in Ireland, and now pre- 

 served amongst the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, n, 1802. 



