Lawlok — The Cathach of St. Columba. 399 



script, partly because specimens of unformed script are, in the case of the 

 older Mss., not so easy to find. When the neat, clear, and convenient 

 minuscule of the ninth and tenth centuries became universal, the non- 

 calligraphic productions of the early copyists were transcribed in the new type, 

 and the originals were destroyed. In most quarters only those which had 

 some revered associations would escape destruction — an Evangel of St. John 

 penned by St. Moling' (d. 696 A.D.); a Gospels text owned, if not actually 

 written,^ by St. Boniface (680-755), and — shall we add? — a Psalter traced by 

 St. Columba's own hand. It is mainly the calligraphic specimens of the pre- 

 Carolingian ages which have survived. And if one of these should happen to 

 exhibit here and there, where a scribe was pressed for room or for time, a less 

 calligraphic type, such a page has not been selected for photography, since 

 editors (and subscribers, too) preferred to ignore these departures from the 

 normal form. This tended, I think, somewhat to warp the judgement of 

 palaeographers. It made them prone to believe that only regular uncial and 



1 Thanks to Dr. Lawlor's researches, it has been possible to make certain that the 

 fourth Gospel in the Book of Mulling was actually written by the Saint himself, and thus 

 to gain a landmark for the early pointed minuscule of Ireland. Now that so many 

 photographs of the earliest Irish minuscule of Bobbio (founded in the year 614) have 

 been published (in Cipolla's " Codici Bobbiesi," vol. i, and those of Vienna 16 in the 

 " Monumenta Palaeographica Vindobonensia "), anyone can assure himself that the script 

 of this Gospel (if not also of the other three) is of a very early type. 



2 In my " Early Irish Minuscule Script" it is stated (p. 5) that the tradition that 

 Boniface himself wrote the volume cannot be true, since the writer's name, Cadmug (an 

 Irish word, literally " battle-slave"), appears at the end ("Cadmug scripsit," written 

 as if part of the text), and there are Irish glosses by the scribe's hand here and 

 there throughout the voliime. But experts (in ZCP, viii, 174) now declare these 

 glosses to have been transcribed unintelligently (i.e., not by an Irishman) from the 

 original. Boniface was born at Crediton, and passed his noviciate at Adescancastre 

 (= Exeter ?), both places in a district where Cornish, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon elements 

 commingled. If he made a transcript from an Irish friend's MS. during his noviciate, its 

 use of the un-Irish abbreviation-symbols v (with suprascript apostrophe) " ut" and quo 

 " quoniam " (see my " Notae Latinae," pp. 2C7, 321) is explained ; and it is conceivable 

 that Boniface included his friend's subscription in his transcript as a souvenir. There is 

 a great contrast between the cursive scrawl of the Boniface Gospels and the neat Anglo- 

 Saxon minuscule of the (probably) Boniface marginalia in the uncial Codex Fuldensis of 

 the New Testament (and, I would add, in the Cassel Hegesippus). But Boniface's writing 

 would be improved by his subsequent education at Nutshalling (between Winchester and 

 Southampton) under the famous scribe, Abbot Wynbert. Besides, the cursive suitable 

 for a pocket-copy of the Gospels would have to be replaced by the neatest possible script 

 for marginalia in so valu.able a MS. as the Codex Fuldensis (or the Cassel sis.). One of 

 the Irish glosses has been transcribed in a late form {sodain for sodin), just as in a Ms, 

 (Paris, B. N. lat. 7530) of Bede's Orthography, written at Monte Cassino between 779 

 and 797, the German gloss forbotan "forbidden" of the Fulda (?) original has been 

 miscopied by the Italian scribe in the form forhoten, a form much later, I am told, than 

 the eighth century. 



