LITURGIES OF THE BRITISH ISLES 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 con quest, 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, Ad amnan and other Celtic saints ; partly by the discovery of liturg ical remains in the Scottish Book of Deer and in the Irish Books of Dimma and Mulling and the Stowe Missal, etc. ; partly by the publication of mediaeval Irish compilations, such as the Lebar Brecc, Liber Hymnorum, Martyrology of Oengus, etc., which con tain ecclesiastical kalendars, legends, treatises, etc., of consider able 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 in vaders at the close of the 5th century; but the Celtic church in the remoter parts of England, as well as in the neighbouring king doms of Scotland and Ireland, retained its independence for cen turies 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 thanks giving of ter 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 "frac tion" 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 Pedilaviuni or "Washing of feet" in the earliest Irish baptismal office. (See F. E. Warren, Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, 1880 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: (I) the Leofric Missal, a composite loth- to II th 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 Jumieges, archbishop of Canterbury (1051-1052), written probably at Winchester and presented by Archbishop Robert to his old monastery of Jumieges in the neighbourhood of Rouen, in the public library of which it now lies; edited by H. A. Wilson (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.
The Anglo-Saxon church owed its foundation to a Roman pon tiff, 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.