Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their development and history

by Robert Alexander Stewart Macalister

Throughout the middle ages the gloves were richly embroidered and jewelled; often a large stone is to be seen on the back of each hand.

The gloves (chirothecae, or manicae) must be carefully distinguished from the manicae or brachialia, the sleeves of coarse cloth which the bishop used to draw over his arm to protect the apparels of his alb from the water when administering baptism by immersion.

As the hands are sometimes covered with gloves and sometimes bare, so good deeds should be sometimes hidden to prevent self-sufficiency, and sometimes revealed as an edifying example to those near us. So says Honorius of Autun; perhaps this is as satisfactory an exegesis as has ever been given of the gloves or any other vestment.

XV. The Episcopal Ring.—Although, as we have seen, the ring was recognised as one of the special marks of a bishop at the time of the fourth council of Toledo, and was regarded by St Isidore of Seville as a special article used in the investiture of a bishop, none of the liturgical writers of the earliest years of the mediaeval period notices it; not till we come to Honorius of Autun is any mention of it to be found. The reason of this is not far to seek, and has been given by Marriott. Rabanus, Amalarius, Ivo, and the rest, occupied themselves more or less with the supposed connexion between the liturgical and the Jewish vestments, and therefore, as they were not writing treatises dealing solely with Christian vestments, they omitted all mention of ornaments which had no direct bearing on the questions with which they were engaged. Hence, both the ring and pastoral staff suffered, as the most ingenious torturing could not extract anything in the Levitical rites analogous to these important insignia.

The evidence of the monuments is conclusive on two points. First, that the episcopal ring proper was only one of a large number of rings worn by the bishop, the others being probably purely ornamental and secular; second, that it was worn on the third finger of the right hand, and above the second joint of that finger, not being passed, as rings are now, down to the knuckle. It was usually kept in place with a plain guard ring.

The ring was always a circlet with a precious stone, never engraved, and it was large enough to pass over the gloved finger. The stone was usually a sapphire, sometimes an emerald or a ruby.

Although the ring is distinguishable, by its position on the right hand as well as by other circumstances, from the wedding-ring, Honorius of Autun (after referring to the ring placed on the finger of the Prodigal Son and the wedding ring of iron with an adamantine stone forged by 'a certain wise man called Prometheus') has been trapped into saying that the bishop wears a ring that he may declare himself the bridegroom of the church and may lay down his life for it, should necessity arise, as did Christ.

XVI. The Pastoral Staff.—We have briefly sketched the probable origin of the pastoral staff in the preceding chapter, and come now to discuss the forms it presented and the connexions in which it was used during the middle ages. As there is no department of the study of Ecclesiastical Vestments about which so much popular misconception exists, it will be necessary to enter into these details at considerable length.

As utterly unfounded as the common notions concerning 'low-side windows' and crossed-legged effigies is the idea that the differences in the positions of pastoral staves as represented in sculptured monuments have any meaning whatsoever, secret or personal. A pastoral staff remains a pastoral staff, and nothing more, whether it is on the right side of the bearer or on the left, and whether its crook is turned inwards or outwards.

Synonymous with 'pastoral staff' is the word crozier or crosier; but it is frequently ignorantly applied to a totally different object—the cross-staff borne before an archbishop. The statements which we so often see in works professing to treat on ecclesiological subjects as to the pastoral staff being crook-headed and borne by bishops, the crozier cross-headed, and borne (instead of the pastoral staff) by archbishops, are derived from a misunderstanding of the evidence of mediaeval monuments.[71] The truth is, that the pastoral staff, with which the crozier is identical, is borne by bishops and archbishops alike; but archbishops are distinguished from bishops by having a staff, with a cross or crucifix in its head, borne before them in addition. In many monuments, it is true, archbishops are represented as carrying the cross-staff, as, for instance, the brass of Archbishop Cranley in New College, Oxford; but it was obviously impossible in a monument of this kind to represent a cross-bearer preceding the archbishop, and the slight inaccuracy was, therefore, perpetrated of making the archbishop bear his own cross, thereby substantiating the evidence of the pall, that the person represented was of higher rank than that of a bishop. It was better managed at Mayence, where, in the monument of Albrecht von Brandenburg, 1545, figured above (p. 101), the figure is represented as bearing both the crozier and the cross-staff, one in each hand; and at Bamberg, in the cathedral of which city is a brass to Bishop Lambert von Brunn[72] (1399), wherein he is represented holding the crozier in his left hand, the cross-staff in his right.