[304] Ibid.
[305] English Works, p. 408.
[306] The full title of this book is: Pupilla oculi omnibus presbyteris precipue Anglicanis necessaria. It is clear from the letter that W. Bretton had already had other works printed in the same way, and it is known that amongst those works were copies of Lynwode’s Provinciale (1505), Psalterium et Hymni (1506), Horæ, &c. (1506), Speculum Spiritualium, and Hampole, De Emendatione Vitæ (1510), (cf. Ames, Ed. Herbert, iii. p. 16). Pepwell the London publisher, at “the sign of the Holy Trinity,” was the same who published many books printed abroad, and had dealings with Bishops Stokesley and Tunstall.
[307] For further information upon popular religious instruction in England, see an essay upon the teaching in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in my The old English Bible, and other Essays. The Rev. J. Fisher, in his tract on The Private Devotions of the Welsh (1898), speaking of the vernacular prayer-books, says, “they continued to be published down to the end of Henry’s reign, and, in a modified form, even at a later date. Besides these prymers and the oral instruction in the principal formulæ of the Church, the scriptorium of the monastery was not behind in supplying, especially the poor, with horn-books, on which were, as a rule, written in the vulgar tongue the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the Hail Mary.” In 1546 appeared a prymer in Welsh in which, amongst other things, the seven capital or deadly sins and their opposite virtues are given and analysed. This book, consequently, besides being a prayer-book afforded popular instruction to the people using it. The prymers in Welsh, we are told, were usually called “Matins’ Books,” and continued to be published long after the change of religion. A copy published in 1618 is called the fifth edition, and copies of it are recorded under the years 1633 and 1783. “It is rather a curious fact,” writes Mr. Fisher, “that nearly all the Welsh manuals of devotion and instruction, of any size, published in the second half of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century, were the productions of Welsh Roman Catholics, and published on the Continent. In Dr. Gruffydd Roberts’s Welsh Grammar, published at Milan in 1567, will be found poetical versions of the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Ten Commandments and the Seven Sacraments. This work was followed by the Athravaeth Gristnogavl, a short catechism of religious doctrine, translated or compiled by Morys Clynog, the first Rector of the English College in Rome. It was published at Milan in 1568, and contains the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Ten Commandments, &c., in Welsh, with expositions.”
The above, with the prayer-books of 1567, 1586, 1599, were all the works of religious instruction and devotion (private and public) that appeared in Welsh down to the end of the sixteenth century. I might add that there is in the Earl of Macclesfield’s collection a large folio volume of Miscellanea (Shirburn MS. 113, D. 30), written between 1540 and 1560, which contains a prymer occupying several pages. There is also in the Swansea Public Library a Welsh-Latin MS. of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, written in different hands and in the South Walian dialect, which forms a manual of Roman Catholic devotion, containing in Welsh devotions for Mass, the usual meditations and prayers for various occasions, instructions, &c.
With the seventeenth century there is a good crop of manuals of devotion and instruction, such as the catechisms of Dr. Rosier Smith (1609-1611) and Father John Salisbury (1618 tacito nomine), both Welsh Roman Catholics (pp. 24-26).
[308] A Werke for Housholders. London, R. Redman, 1537, sig. A. 8.
[309] Ibid., sig. B. i.
[310] Ibid., sig. C. 8.
[311] Ibid., sig. D. 5.