The date, origin and early history of the Roman liturgy are
obscure. The first Christians at Rome were a Greek-speaking
community, and their liturgy must have been Greek, and is
possibly represented in the so-called Clementine liturgy. But
the date when such a state of things ceased, when and by whom
the present Latin liturgy was composed, whether it is an original
composition, or, as its structure seems to imply, a survival of
some intermediate form of liturgy—all these are questions
which are waiting for solution.
One MS. exists which has been claimed to represent the Roman liturgy as it existed in the time of Leo I., 440–461. It was discovered at Verona by Bianchini in 1735 and assigned by him to the 8th century and published under the title of Sacramentarium Leonianum; but this title was from the first conjectural, and is in the teeth of the internal evidence which the MS. itself affords. The question is discussed at some length by Muratori (Lit. Rom. Vet. tom. i. cap. i. col. 16). Assemani published it under the title of Sacramentarium Veronense in tom. vi. of his Codex Liturg. Eccles. Univ.
A MS. of the 7th or 8th century was found at Rome by Thomasius and published by him in 1680 under the title of Sacramentarium Gelasianum. But it was written in France and is certainly not a pure Gelasian codex; and although there is historical evidence of Pope Gelasius I. (492–496) having made some changes in the Roman liturgy, and although MSS. have been published by Gerbertus and others, claiming the title of Gelasian, we neither have nor are likely to have genuine and contemporary MS. evidence of the real state of the liturgy in that pope’s time. The most modern and the best edition of the Gelasian Sacramentary is that by H. A. Wilson (Oxford, 1894).
The larger number of MSS. of this group are copies of the Gregorian Sacramentary, that is to say, MSS. representing or purporting to represent, the state of Roman liturgy in the days of Pope Gregory the Great. But they cannot be accepted as certain evidence for the following reasons: not one of them was written earlier than the 9th century, not one of them was written in Italy, but every one north of the Alps; every one contains internal evidence of a post-Gregorian date in the shape of masses for the repose or for the intercession of St Gregory and in various other ways.
The Roman liturgy seems to have been introduced into England in the 7th, into France in the 9th and into Spain in the 11th century, though no doubt it was known in both France and Spain to some extent before these dates. In France certain features of the service and certain points in the ritual of the ancient national liturgy became interwoven with its text and formed those many varying medieval Gallican Uses which are associated with the names of different French sees.
The chief distinguishing characteristics of the Roman rite are these: (a) the position of the great intercession for quick and dead within the canon, the commemoration of the living being placed just before and the commemoration of the departed just after the words of institution; (b) the absence of an “Epiklesis” or invocation of the Holy Ghost upon the elements; (c) the position of the “Pax” or “Kiss of Peace after the consecration” and before the communion, whereas in other liturgies it occurs at a much earlier point in the service.
Liturgies of the British Islands.
Period I. The Celtic Church.—Until recently almost nothing was known of the character of the liturgical service of the Celtic church which existed in these islands before the Anglo-Saxon Conquest, and continued to exist in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall for considerable though varying periods of time after that event. But in recent times a good deal of light has been thrown on the subject, partly by the publication or republication of the few genuine works of Patrick, Columba, Columbanus, Adamnan and other Celtic saints; partly by the discovery of liturgical remains in the Scottish Book of Deer and in the Irish Books of Dimma and Mulling and the Stowe Missal, &c.; partly by the publication of medieval Irish compilations, such as the Lebar Brecc, Liber Hymnorum, Martyrology of Oengus, &c., which contain ecclesiastical kalendars, legends, treatises, &c., of considerable but very varying antiquity. The evidence collected from these sources is sufficient to prove that the liturgy of the Celtic church was of the Gallican type. In central England the churches, with everything belonging to them, were destroyed by the heathen invaders at the close of the 5th century; but the Celtic church in the remoter parts of England, as well as in the neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland, retained its independence for centuries afterwards.
An examination of its few extant service-books and fragments of service-books yields the following evidence of the Gallican origin and character of the Celtic liturgy: (a) the presence of collects and anthems which occur in the Gallican or Mozarabic but not in the Roman liturgy; (b) various formulae of thanksgiving after communion; (c) frequent biddings or addresses to the people in the form of Gallican Praefationes; (d) the Gallican form of consecration, being a prayer called “Post-Sanctus” leading up to the words of institution; (e) the complicated rite of “fraction” or “the breaking of bread,” as described in the Irish treatise at the end of the Stowe Missal, finds its only counterpart in the elaborate ceremonial of the Mozarabic church; (f) the presence of the Gallican ceremonial of Pedilavium or “Washing of feet” in the earliest Irish baptismal office.
For a further description of these and other features which are characteristic of or peculiar to the Celtic liturgy the reader is referred to F. E. Warren’s Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church (Oxford, 1881).
Period II. The Anglo-Saxon Church.—We find ourselves here on firmer ground, and can speak with certainty as to the nature of the liturgy of the English church after the beginning of the 7th century. Information is drawn from liturgical allusions in the extant canons of numerous councils, from the voluminous writings of Bede, Alcuin and many other ecclesiastical authors of the Anglo-Saxon period, and above all from a considerable number of service-books written in England before the Norman Conquest. Three of these books are missals of more or less completeness: (1) the Leofric Missal, a composite 10th- to 11th-century MS. presented to the cathedral of Exeter by Leofric, the first bishop of that see (1046–1072), now in the Bodleian library at Oxford; edited by F. E. Warren (Oxford, 1883); (2) the missal of Robert of Jumièges, archbishop of Canterbury (1051–1052), written probably at Winchester and presented by Archbishop Robert to his old monastery of Jumièges in the neighbourhood of Rouen, in the public library of which it now lies; edited by H. A. Wilson (London, 1896); (3) the Red Book of Derby, a MS. missal of the second half of the 11th century, now in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
A perusal of these volumes proves what we should have expected a priori, that the Roman liturgy was in use in the Anglo-Saxon church. This was the case from the very first. That church owed its foundation to a Roman pontiff, and to Roman missionaries, who brought, as we are told by Bede, their native liturgical codices with them (Hist. Eccles. lib. ii. cap. 28). Accordingly, when we speak of an Anglo-Saxon missal, we mean a Roman missal only exhibiting one or more of the following features, which would differentiate it from an Italian missal of the same century. (a) Rubrics and other entries of a miscellaneous character written in the vernacular language of the country. (b) The commemoration of national or local saints in the kalendar, in the canon of the mass and in the litanies which occur for use on Easter Even and in the baptismal offices. (c) The presence of a few special masses in honour of those local saints, together with a certain number of collects of a necessarily local character, for the rulers of the country, for its natural produce, &c. (d) The addition of certain peculiarities of liturgical structure and arrangement interpolated into the otherwise purely Roman service from an extraneous source. There are two noteworthy examples of this in Anglo-Saxon service-books. Every Sunday and festival and almost every votive mass has its proper preface, although the number of such prefaces in the Gregorian sacramentary of the same period had been reduced to eight. There was a large but not quite equal number of triple episcopal benedictions to be pronounced by the bishop after the Lord’s Prayer and before the communion. This custom must either have been perpetuated from the old Celtic liturgy or directly derived from a Gallican source.
Period III. Anglo-Norman Church.—The influx of numerous foreigners, especially from Normandy and Lorraine, which
