honour, signified in judging. The underlying idea is the same as that in Geoffrey’s Sententiæ Exceptæ, and is probably the germ of Geoffrey’s more elaborate discourse. But the elaborations found in Geoffrey and in the Ancren Riwle are not found in Bernard’s Sermon on the birthday of St. Benedict. Nothing is there said of shame and suffering as the two side-pieces of the ladder, in which the other virtues are then inserted as rungs. Again, Bernard says simply, Ecce quies sessionis et honor judicii, where Geoffrey and the Ancren Riwle agree upon the wording, In sedibus quies imperturbata, in judicio dignitatis [or honoris] eminentia commendatur.
Some student well versed in St. Bernard’s works and Bernardine literature may be able to point to some earlier channel than Geoffrey of Auxerre, through which these ideas and phrases may have reached the author of the Ancren Riwle; but until it is found, I feel that there are serious chronological difficulties in supposing that the Ancren Riwle, in anything like the form in which it has come down to us, was written for the three girls, Emma, Gunilda and Christina.
But since the Rule has demonstrably undergone three adaptations (the revision of about 1230, the Latin adaptation of about 1300, and the fourteenth-century English adaptation preserved in MS. Pepys 2498), nothing could be more likely than that it had undergone yet another adaptation. Such adaptation might well have taken place in the century between the year (1127–1135) when Emma, Gunilda and Christina withdrew from the world, and the years following 1230, to which the manuscripts of the oldest form of the text belong. There is nothing therefore to prevent those who wish, from believing in what the Germans would call an Ur-Ancren-Riwle, which is now lost, but which may have been written for the three Kilburn recluses by Godwin their “master,” and have been revised by a student of the works of Bernard and Aelred into the form in which we find it in the Cottonian manuscripts, Nero and Titus. This is pure hypothesis, but something may still turn up to verify it. As Miss Allen says:
Verification sufficient to convince the doubter may come from any quarter, and in view of the wide implications it is desirable that the hypothesis should be given the widest possible publicity, in the hope of gaining the widest possible co-operation.
The present writer can only hope that evidence may be found
