Wood does not appear to have perceived either this difficulty, or a second which this treatise is calculated to excite. He places the Supper of the Lorde at the head of the numerous productions of Robert Crowley, as if its authorship was perfectly ascertained. But Crowley must have been a precocious polemic if he wrote a theological treatise, like that answered by More, at least a year previously to his entering the university. The date of his admission at Oxford was 1534; he was elected Fellow of Magdalene in 1542; he printed the first edition of Piers Plowman in 1550; and was still Parson of St. Giles's, near Cripplegate, in 1588, i.e. fifty-five years after the publication of the Tract we are considering. (See Heylin's Hist. of the Reformation, ii. 186., E.H.S. ed.) Were there two writers named Robert Crowley? or was the Crowley a pupil or protégé of some early reformer, who caused his name to be affixed to a treatise for which he is not wholly responsible? I leave these queries for the elucidation of your bibliographical contributors.
If I have not already exceeded the limits allowable for such communications, I would also ask your readers to explain the allusion in the following passage from Crowley's tract:
"And know right well, that the more they steare thys sacramente the broder shal theyr lyes be spreade, the more shall theyr falsehoode appeare, and the more gloriously shall the truthe triumph: as it is to se thys daye by longe contencion in thys same and other like articles, which the papists have so long abused, and howe more his lyes utter the truthe every day more and more. For had he not come begynge for the clergy from purgatory, wyth his 'supplicacion of soules,' and Rastal and Rochester had they not so wyselye played theyr partes, purgatory paradventure had served them yet another yere; neyther had it so sone haue bene quenched, nor the poor soule and proctoure there ben wyth his bloudye byshoppe christen catte so farre coniured into his owne Utopia with a sachel about his necke to gather for the proud prystes in Synagoga papistica."
The Rastell here mentioned was doubtless he whom More (Works, p. 355.) calls his "brother" (i.e. his sister's husband), joining him with Rochester (i.e. Bp. Fisher), as in this passage, on account of his great zeal in checking the progress of the earlier Reformation; but what is the allusion in the phrase "with his bloudye bishoppe christen catte," &c., I am unable to divine. Neither in the Supplicacion of Soules, nor in the reply to the "nameles heretike," have I discovered the slightest clue to its meaning.
C.H.
St. Catherine's Hall, Cambridge.
[It would seem from a Query from the Rev. Henry Walter, in No. 7. p. 109., on the subject of the name "Christen Cat," where the forgoing passage is quoted from Day's edition of Tyndale's Works, that this tract was by Tyndale, and not by Crowley.]
WHAT IS A CHAPEL?
What is the most approved derivation of the word Chapel?—Capella, from the goat-skin covering of what was at first a movable tabernacle? capa, a cape worn by capellanus, the chaplain? capsa, a chest for sacred relics? kaba Eli (Heb.), the house of God? or what other and better etymon?