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of that of Alexander: in another edition, however, the Bull of Alexander is given in full, whilst the Bull of Adrian is omitted. We may well leave our opponents to settle this matter with the conflicting editors of the Bullarium. They, probably like Baronius, merely copied the Bull of Adrian from Matthew Paris, and erred in doing so. Labbè, in his magnificent edition of the Councils, also publishes Adrian's Bull, but then he expressly tells us that it is copied from the work of Matthew Paris.

We have thus, as far as the limits of this article will allow, examined in detail the various arguments which support the genuineness of the supposed Bull, and now it only remains for us to conclude that there are no sufficient grounds for accepting that document as the genuine work of Pope Adrian.

Indeed the Irish nation at all times, as if instinctively, shrunk from accepting it as genuine, and unhesitatingly pronounced it an Anglo-Norman forgery. We have already seen how even Giraldus Cambrensis refers to the doubts which had arisen regarding the Bull of Pope Alexander; but we have at hand still more conclusive evidence that Adrian's Bull was universally rejected by our people. There is, happily, preserved in the Barberini archives, Rome, a MS. of the fourteenth century containing a series of official papers connected with the Pontificate of John XXII., and amongst them is a letter from the Lord Justiciary and the Royal Council of Ireland, forwarded to Rome under the Royal Seal, and presented to His Holiness by William of Nottingham, Canon and Precentor1 of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, about the year 1325. In this important, but hitherto unnoticed document, the Irish are accused of very many crimes, among which is insidiously introduced the rejection of the supposed Bulls: “Moreover, they assert that the King of England under false pretences and by false Bulls obtained the dominion of Ireland, and this opinion is commonly held by them." "Asserentes etiam Dominum Regem. Angliae ex falsa suggestione et ex falsis Bullis terram Hiberniae in dominium impetrasse ac communiter hoc tenentes." This national tradition was preserved unbroken throughout the turmoil of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and on the revival of our historical literature in the beginning of the seventeenth century, was registered in the pages of Lynch, Stephen White, and other writers.

It will be well also, whilst forming our judgment regarding this supposed Bull of Adrian, to hold in mind the disturbed state of society, especially in Italy, at the time to which it refers. At the present day it would be no easy matter indeed for such a forgery to survive more than a few weeks. But at

1 Cotton, in Fasti Ecc. Hib., gives his name as Precentor in 1323 to 1327.

the close of the twelfth century it was far otherwise. Owing to the constant revolutions and disturbances that then prevailed, the Pontiff was oftentimes obliged to fly from city to city; frequently his papers were seized and burned, and he himself detained as a hostage or a prisoner by his enemies. Hence it is that several forged Bulls, examples of which are given in Cambrensis Eversus, date from these times. More than one of the grants made to the Norman families are now believed to rest on such forgeries; and that the Anglo-Norman adventurers in Ireland were not strangers to such deeds of darkness, appears from the fact that a matrix for forging the Papal Seal of such Bulls, now preserved in the R.I. Academy, was found a few years ago in the ruins of one of the earliest Anglo-Norman monasteries founded by De Courcy.

The circumstances of the publication of the Bull by Henry were surely not calculated to disarm suspicion. Our opponents do not even pretend that it was made known in Ireland till the year 1175, and hence, though publicly granted with solemn investiture, as John of Salisbury's testimony would imply, and though its record was deposited in the public archives of the kingdom, this Bull, so vital to the interests of the Irish Church, should have remained dormant for twenty years, unnoticed in Rome, unnoticed by Henry's courtiers, still more, unnoticed by the Irish Bishops, and I will add, unnoticed by the Continental Sovereigns so jealous of the power and preponderance of the English Monarch. For such suppositions there is indeed no parallel in the whole history of investitures.

It is seldom, too, that the hand of the impostor may not be detected in some at least of the minor details of the spurious document. In the present instance more than one ancient MS. preserves the concluding formula of the Bull: "Datum Romae," dated from Rome. Now, this simple formula would suffice of itself to prove the whole Bull to be a forgery. Before the news of the election of Pope Adrian to the Chair of St. Peter could reach England, that Pontiff was obliged to seek for safety in flight from his capital. Rome was in revolt, and Arnold of Brescia sought to renew there a spectre of the old Pagan Republic. John of Salisbury, in his Polycraticus, faithfully attests that on his arrival in Italy, the Papal Court was held not in Rome but in Beneventum: it was in this city he presented to Pope Adrian the congratulations of Henry II., and he mentions his sojourn there during the three months that he remained in Italy. This is further confirmed by the Italian chronicles. Baronius saw the inconsistency of the formula, Datum Romae, with the date 1155, and hence, in his Annals, he entered Adrian's Bull under the year 1159;

but if this date be correct, surely then that Bull could not have been brought to Henry by John of Salisbury, and the passage of the Metalogicus referring to it, must at once be admitted a forgery. Other historians have been equally puzzled to find a year for this supposed Bull. For instance, O'Halloran, in his History of Ireland, whilst admitting that the Irish people always regarded the Bull as a forgery, refers its date to the year 1167, that is, eight years after the death of Pope Adrian IV.

There is only one other reflection with which I wish to detain the reader. The condition of our country, and the relations between Ireland and the English King, which are set forth in the supposed Bull, are precisely those of the year 1172; but it would have required more than a prophetic vision to have anticipated them in 1155. In 1155 Ireland was not in a state of turmoil or verging towards barbarism: on the contrary, it was rapidly progressing and renewing its claim to religious and moral pre-eminence. I will add, that Pope Adrian, who had studied under Irish masters, knew well this flourishing condition of our country. In 1172, however, a sad change had come over our island. Four years of continual warfare, and the ravages of the Anglo-Norman filibusterers, since their first landing in 1168, had well nigh reduced Ireland to a state of barbarism, and the authentic letters of Alexander III., in 1172, faithfully describe its most deplorable condition. Moreover, an expedition of Henry to Ireland, which would not be an invasion, and yet would merit the homage of the Irish princes, was simply an impossibility in 1155. But owing to the special circumstances of the kingdom, such in reality was the expedition of Henry in 1172. He set out for Ireland not avowedly to invade and conquer it, but to curb the insolence and to punish the deeds of pillage of his own Norman freebooters. Hence, during his stay in Ireland he fought no battle and made no conquest; his first measures of severity were directed against some of the most lawless of the early Norman adventurers, and this more than anything else reconciled the native princes to his military display. In return he received from a majority of the Irish chieftains the empty title of Ard-righ, or "Head Sovereign," which did not suppose any conquest on his part, and did not involve any surrender of their own hereditary rights. Such a state of things could not have been imagined in 1155; and yet it is one which is implied in the spurious Bull of the much maligned Pontiff, Adrian the Fourth.

P. F. M.

65

LOUISE LATEAU.-PART I.

A VISIT TO THE HAMLET OF BOIS D'HAINE IN THE SUMMER OF 1872.

"Opera autem Dei revelare et confiteri honorificum est."-TOBIAS xii. 7.

THE village of Manage, on the borders of the great Belgian

coal-field, is close to a busy railway station, and scarcely more than an hour's distance south from the gay city of Brussels. Late in the afternoon of a sultry day, in the month of August last, I reached this unattractive, noisy, place; and spent a somewhat uncomfortable night, disturbed as I was, ever and anon, by the heavy rumbling of the coal waggons, and the shrill whistling of the engines. I was up betimes in the morning, and set out from the village inn soon after five o'clock, to make my way to the hamlet of Bois d'Haine, which, as I was told, was distant about twenty minutes' walk. After following the high road for not quite half a mile, I met some peasants going to their work; and asking my way, they showed me a path to the right, which led along through pleasant meadows and corn-fields, straight to the door of the Curé's house at Bois d'Haine.

This little hamlet, embosomed in the undulations of a rich and smiling country, is the very ideal of picturesque beauty and primitive simplicity. There are no streets, no rows of houses; but a couple of hundred rustic cottages are scattered about, amid shady orchards and fragrant gardens. The inhabitants, chiefly devoted to agriculture, have most of the comforts, without any of the luxuries, of life. There is little wealth amongst them, and but scanty learning: they are ignorant or heedless of modern improvements: and, free from ambition and from care, they pass their lives in humble, contented, obscurity.

But it was not to admire picturesque scenery, or rustic simplicity of manners, that I had come to the hamlet of Bois d'Haine. The story had gone about that, near to this tranquil and secluded spot, a peasant girl, by name Louise Lateau, had for four years borne on her hands and feet and side, the stigmas of our Lord's Passion; that from these stigmas, blood flowed copiously on the Friday of each successive week, while, at the same time, around her head, was developed a coronet of bleeding points, representing the crown of thorns. Further, it was said, that every Friday, for several hours together, she was rapt in an ecstasy, during which she became completely insensible to all material objects, and wholly absorbed in the contemplation of the Divine Passion, the various scenes of

VOL. IX.

5

which were vividly present to her mind, as in a vision. This story I had read, from time to time, variously told, in newspapers and magazines, and now I was come to the place itself, in the hope that I might be able to see, with my own eyes, so striking and wonderful a prodigy.

It was exactly a quarter to six o'clock when I reached the Curé's house. The outer door was opened directly I pulled the bell, and I found him walking in his garden. He told me it was not allowed to every one to see Louise, but only to very few, and that none were admitted except on a written application, made some weeks beforehand." After a little conversation, however, he kindly agreed to relax the rule in my favour; and, as this was Friday, he proposed I should come down to his house between twelve and one o'clock, when I might go with him to see her in her ecstasy.

In the meantime we had reached the little church where he was about to say Mass. Three or four priests were already there, who had come, like myself, from a distance, to see the Ecstatica. I found, on inquiry, they were now going direct to her house, to give her Holy Communion. It is her uniform practice to receive Communion daily. On all other days she comes to the church, like the rest of the faithful. But on Fridays she cannot come, on account of the bleeding: and so, by a special privilege, the Blessed Sacrament is carried to her house. I asked the Curé's permission to accompany the procession; and we set out just as the bell for six o'clock Mass had ceased to toll.

The Sacristan of the church went first, bearing a lighted torch enclosed within an ornamental lantern. Next, in soutane and surplice, and stole, followed the priest, who carried the Blessed Sacrament. Then came three other priests and myself. We took a path through the fields, the same by which I had come to the hamlet, half an hour before. As we wound our way along, the sun burst out through a thin veil of cloud that hung in the eastern sky, the dew glistened on the grass, and a light wind rustled through the ears of corn. Emerging, after a few minutes, from the path, we came on a sort of bridle road, and passed some scattered houses. There were peasant children playing in the way: there were busy housewives sweeping out their houses: there were listless idlers attracted to the doorsteps, to see the procession go by: and all knelt down to adore the Blessed Sacrament as it passed.

Then we came to a level crossing on the railway—a branch line from Manage, which penetrates into the heart of the coal country. A long train of coal waggons was coming up, and we had to wait for a minute or two. The engine-driver and

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