Llyfr Offeren Llanbadarn Fawr
Llyfr Offeren Llanbadarn Fawr / The Llanbadarn Fawr Missal
The Llanbadarn Fawr Missal has been held in the National Library since 1920. Its Latin title short-title is Missale ad usum Sarum. This volume, almost five hundred years old, may be the oldest printed book with definite Aberystwyth connections that survives in Aberystwyth. It was printed in Paris in 1531 by Francois Regnault. Nothing has been published about the Llanbadarn missal except a brief but valuable article by a great, almost forgotten Welsh ecclesiologist, the Reverend Silas Harris of Lampeter. He drew attention to the volume in the 1952 number of Ceredigion, dealing only with the additions made by an unknown Llanbadarn cleric, which show clearly that the book was once used in Llanbadarn Fawr church.
By 1549 all Latin books of worship had been thrown out of churches in Wales and England, and almost all were destroyed. This one was saved, we have no idea by whom. The book’s story is a mystery after 1550 until the late 19th century, when this pencil note, which may be difficult for you to read, shows that it had been given to the Reverend G.A. Littledale, vicar of Chipping Norton, by his mother. How did she come by it? I leave that to a genealogist. This note is in the hand of a great bibliographer, Falconer Madan, at the Bodleian Library at the turn of the 20th century; Littledale must have taken the book to Oxford to show him. His description shows that he recognised its Llanbadarn provenance. So when the Church in Wales was established, Mr Littledale or a succeeding owner gave the book to the new Church in 1920, and it was immediately deposited at the National Library. The man responsible for that wise act was surely Mr Frank Morgan, general secretary of the Representative Body, who as a medieval historian by degree would have well appreciated the missal’s value. Alas, no record seems to survive of its arrival at the National Library other than a catalogue card, which must have been made some years after the book came to the Library.
It's not surprising that Llanbadarn should have possessed such an expensive book. Llanbadarn was a major church in Wales, and I believe it to have been a royal re-foundation by Henry III, which explains the building’s magnificent size. However this new beginning was marred by the fact that the Crown took possession of the tithes of this, one of the richest parishes in Wales, and used the money to pay government ministers, reserving a pittance for the vicar. From the royal ministers the income passed in 1359 to the abbey of Vale Royal, after the Reformation to the Crown, then from the Crown to Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, a Catholic, and then to the Chichester family of Arlington in Devon, also Catholics. The living was a vicarage, not a rectory, and could not maintain an establishment worthy of its dignity on its vastly diminished income.
Our book would have arrived here soon after it was printed in 1531, for use as an altar book, as its size shows, but it was used for less than twenty years. In 1549 the Catholic order of worship was replaced by the first Book of Common Prayer of the newly established Anglican Church, and in 1550 the use of Latin in the churches was forbidden. The vast majority of copies of the Sarum Usage were destroyed in Wales and England, but the Llanbadarn Missal was saved from destruction by an unknown traditionalist, may he be blest. So there is no title page, but a carpet page survives introducing the Mass. The symbols of the four evangelists are in the four corners of the page; at the very bottom is the Last Supper, and there are other biblical scenes in the panels, not all of which I can identify. The main scene shows the altar with three priests celebrating and other attendants, including at least one bishop.
In our missal several pages of the calendar of saints’ days are missing. Fortunately March survives, and it’s easy to see the printed names of David, Chad, and of Perpetua and Felicity on March 6th. You can also see that there are handwritten interpolations. These are for saints revered in Wales and especially in St David’s diocese. Saint Guistilianus figures in Rhygyfarch’s life of David, for March 2, David’s mother Non on March 3, St Kirian on March 5, St Rhian on March 9. There is an entry for Caradog on April 13; his shrine is still in St David’s cathedral. The calendar has three added entries for Padarn. These are his festival day of April 17, his translation of May 21 and to the dedication of his church on July 15th. It would be good to see these three dates promoted in the future in Llanbadarn Fawr. These added entries are certainly enough to prove the close association of the Missal with Llanbadarn Fawr. That word ‘translation’ almost certainly refers to the movement of a Padarn relic or the consecration of a reliquary – perhaps for his staff Cyrwen, or a relic from Brittany, where Padarn was a considerable figure as patron of the cathedral of Vannes.
Silas Harris didn’t extend his article much beyond the calendar entries, but there’s a good deal more use of pen-and-ink in this printed book, and that of two kinds. The first kind is the deletions. By 1543 Henry VIII, still believing himself a Catholic, had assumed headship of the Church in England and Wales, displacing the Pope, a title the very use of which was was therefore anathema. Archbishop Cranmer decreed the deletion of every usage of the word Pope in all books of worship. So going through the volume, we see the striking-through of the word Papa even when used of otherwise respectable saints such as Clement and. Sylvester. In the Sotheby copy, so the sale catalogue tells us, ‘the start of the Canon of the Mass has been amended. Instead of praying for "papa nostro" (our Pope) it was amended to read "una cum famulo tuo rege nostro Henrico" (together with your servant, our king Henry). This page is missing in the Llanbadarn volume.
Cranmer also commanded the deletions of any reference to saints other than those named in the Bible or in the early Fathers of the Church. Fortunately this did not mean the deletion of the Celtic saints already named. Instead it was aimed at one saint, the enormously popular Thomas Becket, Thomas of Canterbury, the martyr of 1170. His name stuck in the craw of Henry VIII; had not Becket been a traitor to Henry II his king? For example, since St Thomas was the particular patron of the City of London, the City’s institutions went through great contortions to eliminate the name of Thonas. For example, St Thomas’s Gate at the Tower of London had to become Traitor’s Gate, since St Thomas had been denounced as a traitor. So in both the Sotheby and Llanbadarn volumes the prayers and readings for St Thomas of Canterbury were struck through. This was at a time when the Llanbadarn volume could only have been in use for a decade.
So we turn to the second class of pen-and-ink additions in he volume – the added marginalia and graffiti of several kinds. Some of these are scrappy notes, often simply the occasional addition of a personal name, probably later than 1550. Thus we have one John Jenkin and one Lewis ap David, both in a 17th Century hand, while the thrice-repeated name of John David is dated 1723. These names do not necessarily amount to claims of ownership, but at least two do: This one reads John Pryse est vero possessor huius libri 1659; was he one of the Pryses of Gogerddan? Another, less literate,was ‘James W[williams] the honor [sic] of this book’. Also ‘John Jones biau y llyfr yma’.
Two marginalia written by a Llanbadarn priest are of special interest. One is a prayer for Henricus octavus, Henry VIII. king and head of the Church of England and for his queen. Henry had been declared supreme head of the Church in November 1534, so this prayer was probably copied into the book at the beginning of 1535. His wife and queen at the time was Anne Boleyn, but you can see that the name Anna has been crossed out and Jana – Jane Seymour – written above Anna. So that alteration belongs to 1536 or 37, after which both poor Anne and poor Jane were dead.
The missal includes an extraneous text, the Dictamen of St Augustine on the priestly life, written in a kind of metrical Latin prose. Beside it is a note by a Llanbadarn priest which says in Latin ‘It was not Augustine who wrote this ‘dictamen’ but, more recently, Alexander of Paris, a writer not very well skilled in the Latin language though a devout man nevertheless.’ The note suggests a goodly level of learning by the unknown priest who wrote it.
It must already be clear that the Llanbadarn Missal isn’t simply a printed book – it’s a manuscript as well. Unfortunately books like this fall between two stools; they need to be described as ‘mixed texts’. This is even more obvious when we look at the last two pages. They were simply blank flyleaves when the book originally came to Llanbadarn, but they have been covered in writing, some of which seems totally illegible and some accessible. I think, for what its worth, that these additions in various hands were made in the 16th or early 17th century after the book had been saved from the bonfire. The most interesting feature is this long list of names of Welsh men, but I can’t make out any heading which might explain who they were.
Penultimately, a reminder of where this wonderful book was once cherished. Although the basic fabric of the church has altered little since 1531, its whole appearance would have been a painful sight to the priests of 1531. No roodscreen and roodloft, bare paint and secular memorials instead of wall-paintings. So much much lost, so much altered. But cheer up, Gerald. This book is far from being the greatest treasure in the National Library. It pales when compared to that wonderful Catholic manuscript, the Penpont Antiphonal, another treasure not nearly so well known as it should be. But in local terms, Aberystwyth and Llanbadarn terms. this book is a witness to a period when politics were in even greater turmoil than they are today, bringing the threat of violent death to most eminent people.
Gerald Morgan