of the dead. The chief modern use of the word is for a building in which dead bodies awaiting burial may be temporarily kept, for the purpose of inquiry, identification, post-mortem examination, &c. But it has also been applied to many subjects connected with death and burial. In monastic institutions it was the duty of the almoner to send round to other monastic houses notice of the death of a member, asking for prayers for the soul of the dead. This notice was often beautifully illuminated. On being returned with the endorsement of the monastery to which it had been sent, it would be copied into the roll. Both the notice and the roll were known as a mortuarium, or mortuary (see Abbot F. H. Gasquet’s English Monastic Life, 1904). In the English Church a “mortuary” was in certain places a customary oblation or offering paid out of the estate of a deceased person to the church to which he belonged. An act of 1529 (21 Hen. VIII. c. 6) limited the amount to be paid in mortuaries, the highest being of the value of 10s. in estates above £40. Mortuaries, where customary, can only be enforced in the ecclesiastical courts. The custom has entirely died out, though claims have been made from time to time.
MORVAN, an elevated region forming the northern continuation of the central plateau of France, and extending over a
large part of the department of Nievre, and over portions of
those of Yonne, Côte-d’Or and Saône-et-Loire. Its area is a
little over 1000 sq. m. The average elevation is about 1600 ft.,
the culminating point the Bois-du-Roi, attaining 2959 ft. It
is traversed by the Yonne, which has its source on Mt Prénelay
(2789 ft)., by the Cure and by several affluents of the Arroux.
Geologically it consists chiefly of gneiss and granite. It contains
much good pasturage and is abundantly wooded, the exploitation
of its forests affording employment to large numbers of the
inhabitants.
MORVI, a native state of India, in Kathiawar, within the Gujarat division of Bombay. Area, 822 sq. m.; pop. (1901),
87,496, showing a decrease of 17% in the decade, due to famine;
estimated revenue, £48,000; tribute, £4000. The chief, whose
title is Thakur sahib, is a Jadeja rajput, of the same clan as
the rao of Cutch. The chief products are cotton and grain.
The town of Morvi is situated on the river Machhu, 22 m. from
the sea and 35 from Rajkot; pop. (1901) 17,820.
MORVILE, HUGH DE, one of the four English knights who perpetrated the murder of Becket. He appears in the service of Henry II. from 1158. His principal estate was at Burgh-on-Sands. After the archbishop’s murder Hugh and his associates at first took refuge in Knaresborough Castle; afterwards the king sent them to obtain absolution from the pope. The story runs that all four were enjoined to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but it is not known whether Hugh made his
expiation in this way. The date of his death is unknown, but
it was in or before 1202/3, when we find his English lands in
the hands of his two daughters as co-heiresses.
See Eyton’s Itinerary of Henry II.; Ramsay, Angevin England.
MORYSON, FYNES (1566–1630), English traveller and writer,
was the son of a Lincolnshire gentleman, Thomas Moryson,
member of parliament for Grimsby., After being educated at
Cambridge, where he gained a fellowship at Peterhouse, Fynes
Moryson spent many years in travel on the continent of Europe,
in Palestine, and in Asia Minor. In 1600 he became secretary
to Sir Charles Blount, lord-deputy of Ireland, in which country
his brother, Sir Richard Moryson, held an important government
appointment. In 1617 Moryson published an account of his
travels and of his experiences in Ireland, where he witnessed
O’Neill’s rebellion, in a voluminous work entitled An Itinerary.
He died on the 12th of February 1630. The Itinerary was
originally intended to consist of five parts; but only three were
printed, a fourth being preserved in manuscript in the library
of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (partially printed in 1903 in
Charles Hughes’s Shakespeare’s Europe). Another part of the
Itinerary was republished in 1735 with the title History of Ireland
1599–1603, with a short Narrative of the State of the Kingdom from
1169; and in 1890 Henry Morley included in the “Carisbrooke
Library” a volume, Ireland under Elizabeth and James I., described
by Spenser, Sir John Davies and Fynes Moryson. The
Itinerary is a work of great value to the historian as a truthful
picture of the social conditions prevailing in Europe at the
beginning of the 17th century.
MOSAIC (corresponding to Lat. opus musivum, from Gr. μουσεῖον, an artificial grotto often decorated with mosaics; the word is only found in the sense of mosaic in late Greek, which generally uses ψηφολόγημα), the fitting together of many, generally small, pieces of marble, opaque glass, coloured clays, or other substances, so as to form a pattern.
Ancient Mosaic.—The earliest existing specimens of mosaic belong to one of the less important branches of the art—namely, the ornamentation on a small scale of jewellery, ivory thrones, and other furniture, or more rarely of some elaborate architectural ornament. Most of this sort of mosaic resembles in execution what are called cloisonné enamels. In the Louvre and in the British Museum are preserved some very beautiful ivory carvings in low relief, some from Nineveh and others from Egypt, in which figures of deities, ornaments formed of the lotus and papyrus plants and royal cartouches are enriched by small pieces of glass. or lapis-lazuli and other gem-like stones, which are let into holes made in the ivory. Each minute piece is separated from the next by a thin wall or cloison of ivory, about as thick as cardboard, which thus forms a white outline and sets off the brilliance of the coloured stones.
Excavations at Tel-el-Yehudia in Lower Egypt have brought to light some mosaics on a larger scale, but treated in the same way. These are caps of columns, wall tiles, and other objects, either of white limestone or earthenware, in which designs, chiefly some forms of the papyrus, are formed by bits of glass or enamelled earthenware, let into a sinking in the tile or column. This form of mosaic was employed by the Greeks: the Erechtheum at Athens, built in the middle of the 5th century B.C., had the bases of some of its white marble columns ornamented with a plait-like design, in which pieces of coloured glass were inserted to emphasize the main lines of the pattern. Another, quite different, sort of mosaic was known to the Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. This is made entirely of glass and is extremely minute. The finest known specimen is in the British Museum: it is a small tablet about 38 in. square, apparently the bezel of a ring, on which is represented the sacred hawk—every feather on the bird’s wing being produced with a great number of colours and tints, each quite distinct, and so minute that a strong magnifying glass is required to distinguish its details.
The way in which this mosaic was produced is extremely ingenious. Numbers of long sticks of various-coloured glass were arranged in such a way that their ends produced the figure of the hawk; other sticks of blue glass were placed all round so as to form the ground. The whole bundle of sticks of glass when looked at endwise now presented the figure of the hawk with a blue background, immensely larger than it afterwards became. The bundle was then heated till the sticks melted together, and the whole thick rod, softened by fire, was drawn out to a greatly diminished thickness. A slice of the rod was then cut off and its faces polished—the design, much reduced in size, of course being equally visible at both sides of the slice; and thus the microscopic minuteness of the mosaic was produced with astonishing delicacy and refinement; many slices, each showing the same mosaic could be cut from the same rod.
Far more important was the use of mosaic on a large scale, either for pavements or for walls and vaulted ceilings. We are told by Pliny (H. N. xxxvi. 184) that the practice of decorating pavements “after the fashion of painting” was due to the Greeks, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of this statement, although no mosaic pavement discovered in Greece can be dated with certainty to a period preceding the Roman occupation. This is true even of the pavement in the temple of Zeus at Olympia (fig. 1; Olympia, Baudenkmäler, vol. ii. pl. cv.).
