404 Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. 



sumptuous cumdach was made for the MS. by Flann, King of Ireland (d. 916), 

 with an inscription addressed to Columh Chille. And the whole appearance 

 of the page itself, with the Columba entry followed, at a respectful distance, 

 by another entry, an invocation of this '' Columba scriptor " — all this in a 

 MS. of Durrow — shows us that the tradition of King Flann's time was also 

 the tradition of at least two centuries earlier. To a palaeographer the page 

 tells its own tale. Tlie significance of the 'pYiT&s.e frater mi "my brother" 

 in the second entry does not seem to have been generally recognized. This 

 is not the mode of addressing any reader.' It is clearly an address to 

 Columba. And no ordinary scribe could use the phrase with decorum. If 

 this second entry actually comes (as seems to be agreed) from the hand of 

 the scribe of the MS., then the MS. must have been penned by some high 

 dignitary, presumably by the abbot of the monastery himself. Just as 

 Dorbbene, abbot of lona, wrote with his own hand a MS. of Adamnan's Life 

 of St. Columba, the founder of loua (the MS. is now at Schaflliausen), so our 

 MS. would seem to have been transcribed by an abbot of Durrow (if the MS. 

 was written there) from an original written by tlie hand of the founder of 

 Durrow. 



Mediaeval Latin subscriptions have, as everyone who has handled many 

 MSS. knows, not merely a phraseology, but also a form of their own ; and any 

 departure from the normal form throws light on the history of the MS. The 

 mention of the time in which tlie scribe performed his task is unusual, at 

 least until the period of the professional scribe, who was paid either by time 

 or by the piece. It implies that St. Columba had achieved a remarkable feat 

 in completing tlie transcription within^ twelve days. The scribe of (nearly 

 the whole of) the Book of Armagh, Ferdomnach, writes at the close of 

 St. Matthew's Gospel : explicit .... scriptum. atque finitum in feria Mattel 

 (with a full stop' after "scriptum"), but does not state when he began 



' The stock phrases are : tu qukumqiie leges, or qui legis{-it), or lector(-res), or merely 

 ora(-ate), or the like. 



- Infra would be better Latin than per. It would probably be too fanciful to ascribe 

 the use of per for intra, and of eraiigelium (as in the subscription of the MacRegol 

 Gospels, etc.) for evnngelia to the exigencies of a rhyming couplet: 

 qui hoc scripsi mihimet evangelium 

 per duodecim dierum .spatium ; 



although such couplets often terminate a subscription, e.g. : 

 qui legit, oret pro scriptore, 

 sic (or si) Deum habeat protectore(m). 



' So correct "Hermath.," xviii, 45. My deduction, that the Book of Durrow itself might 

 have been the book written in twelve days, was made under the idea that in the Columba 

 entry the symbol nfi " nostri" was changed from fii by the re-tracer of the entry, and 

 that the second entry was by a later hand. 



