5958.
Box for keeping the linen corporals used at mass, in the vestry. It is covered with fine linen, of a creamy brown tint, embroidered with crimson silk and gold. Inside it is lined, in part green, on the lid crimson, where a very rude print of the Crucifixion, daubed with colour, has been let in. German, 17th century. 8½ inches by 7½ inches, 1¾ inches deep.
Such boxes seem to have been much used, at one time, throughout Germany, for keeping, after service, the blessed pieces of square fine linen called corporals, and upon which, at mass, the host and chalice are placed.
Before being employed all the year round as the daily repository for laying up the corporals after the morning’s masses, this sacred appliance, overlaid with such rich embroidery, and fitly ornamented with the illumination of the Crucifixion inside its lid, would seem to have been originally made and especially set aside for an use assigned it by those ancient rubrics, which we have noticed in our Introduction, § 5. As such, it is, like No. 8327 further on, a great liturgical rarity, now seldom to be found anywhere, and merits a place among other such curious objects which give a value to this collection.
At the mass on Maundy Thursday, besides the host received by the officiating priest, another host is and always has been consecrated by him for the morrow’s (Good Friday’s) celebration; and because no consecration of the Holy Eucharist, either in the Latin or in the Greek part of the Church, ever did nor does take place on Good Friday, the service on that day is by the West called the “Mass of the Pre-sanctified,” by the East, “Λειτουργία τῶν προηγιασμενῶν.”
Folded up in a corporal (a square piece of fine linen), the additional host consecrated on Maunday Thursday was put into this receptacle or “capsula corporalium” of the old rubrics, and afterwards carried in solemn procession to its temporary resting-place, known in England as the sepulchre, and there, amid many lights, flowers, and costly hangings of silk and palls of gold and silver tissue, was watched by the people the rest of that afternoon, and all the following night, till the morning of the next day, when, with another solemn procession, it was borne back to the high altar for the Good Friday’s celebration.