NO. 1667. CO/.LECTKtX OF ROSARIHS^CASWOWICZ. 353 



fidels." But both the practice of often repeating prayers and the 

 employment of some device for recording the number of repetitions 

 can be traced to a much earlier date, so that St. Dominic can only 

 be considered as the originator and propagator of the present form 

 of the rosary and the method of devotion (150 aves and 15 pater 

 nosters). Thus Sozomenus (about 400-450) relates in his ecclesias- 

 tical history (book vi, chapter 29) that the Egyptian abbot Paul, 

 who died in 341, recited daily 300 prayers which he counted by peb- 

 bles gathered in his cloak, dropping one as he finished each of the 

 prayers. The same means for reckoning prayers is related to have 

 been used by St. Godoric, an English saint who died in 1172. The 

 first undoubted mention of the use of a string of beads for counting 

 prayers is that of Lady Godiva, wife of Leofric, in the eleventh cen- 

 tury, who, when dying, bequeathed to the monastery of Coventry, 

 which was founded by her, " a circlet of gems, which she had threaded 

 on a string, in order that by fingering them one by one, as she succes- 

 sively recited her prayers, she might not fall short of the exact num- 

 ber." ^ The practice of repeating the same prayer a number of times, 

 often amounting to more than a hundred, must have spontaneously 

 led to the adoption of some contrivance for keeping an accurate rec- 

 ord. It Avould seem, therefore, that though the Buddhist and Mo- 

 hammedan varieties of bead chaplets preceded the Christian in order 

 of time, there is not necessarily a causal connection between them. 



As regards the arrangement of the chaplet into 50 or 150 beads, 

 divided into decades, the total number of 150 corresponds, as men- 

 tioned above, to the number of Psalms. For the recital of a certain 

 number of pater nosters, which was originally the prayer repeated on 

 the chaplet, as its designation, pater noster beads, in nearh^ all Euro- 

 pean languages proves, was a substitute for the Psalms for those 

 monks who had not sufficient education to learn them in Latin. Just 

 as the Psalms were divided into fifties, so that the recitation of 50 

 or two fifties or three fifties was a common form of devotion, it was 

 natural that 50 paters, or twice or thrice 50, should be enjoined on 

 those who could not read. And as many still used the fingers to 

 count with it was natural to subdivide the beads into tenths. 



" In his encyclical of September 2, 1883, Leo XIII attributes to the power of 

 the devotion of the rosary the suppression of the Albigense heresy in the 

 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the victory of the Christians over the Turks 

 in the naval battle at Lepanto, near the Echinades Islands, on October 7, 1571, 

 as also in the battle at Temesvar in Panonia and at Corfu in 171G. After the 

 victory of John of Austria over the Turkish fleet at Lepanto Pius V established 

 the festival of "Our Lady of Victory," which Gregory XIII (1572-1582) two 

 years later changed to the feast of the rosary, which since then has been ob- 

 served on the first Sunday of October as the anniversary of the battle at 

 Lepanto. 



^ William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglicorum, book iv, chapter 2, 

 edition of 1596. 



Proc, N. M. vol. xxxvi — 09 23 



