“Attraho peccantes, justos rogo, pungo vagantes, Officio triplici servio pontifici.”
It remains only to notice that the Pope uses neither pastoral staff nor crozier, nor is it delivered to him at his consecration, if at his election he be only a simple priest. It is said, however, that he should carry one in the diocese of Treves because St. Peter gave his own to the first bishop of that place, where it is preserved as a famous relic. This tradition is mentioned by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Et ideo in diœcesi Treverensi papa baculum portat, et non in aliis.”
An engraving is given ([p. 90]) of the head of a pastoral staff, rather more than five inches in height, not only unusual and remarkable in style but probably of English work. This was preserved in the Meyrick collection and is carved from bone. The outside of the upright part and the volute are decorated with pierced work, now slightly mutilated. Inside the volute, which terminates with the open mouth of a serpent, is a man in a grotesque position, his feet within the serpent’s jaws. A rich interlaced scroll decorates both sides of the head of the staff.
It is perhaps not to be wondered at that a Tau should be, as we know it is, amongst the most rare of ornaments or utensils in ivory which have been preserved. The early and total disuse of them would have naturally led to their destruction and loss, sometimes wilful, sometimes accidental. But that the pastoral staff (that is, the head of it) should be of almost equal rarity is less easily to be explained. Few collections possess a good example; still fewer more than one. Nevertheless, in England alone pastoral staffs must have been almost without number at the beginning of the sixteenth century; and although many were probably of metal, silver or copper enamelled and having some intrinsic value, yet an equal or perhaps greater number were of ivory. Not merely bishops but the heads of religious houses, abbots and abbesses, carried them as official tokens of their rank and dignity. We find frequent mention of them in the old inventories. For example, at St. Paul’s, in 1295; “Item, baculus cum cambuca eburnea, continente agnum.” “Item, baculus de peciis eburneis, et summitate crystallina,” etc. “Cambuca” is a word often used in the middle ages for the staff itself; derived, perhaps, from κάμπτω, I bend.
Yet numerous as they must once have been, the heads of English pastoral staffs are now among the rarest of ivory carvings. It is true that no. 298 at South Kensington can, with some kind of probability, be attributed to an English artist and may have been used in England; but no other in that collection can be referred to. The almost complete destruction in England of all ecclesiastical ornaments—books, vestments, reliquaries, and the like—in the middle of the sixteenth century will account for the extreme rarity of them in this country. But it is very difficult to explain the reason why so few should still be found in France, or Germany, or Italy. The bishop’s pastoral staff, again, has not dropped out of use like the pax or the flabellum.
There are examples of the pax in the South Kensington collection, nos. 246 and 247. It was used in the middle ages at high mass and sometimes at low mass also, for sending the kiss of peace from the celebrant, first to the deacon and subdeacon or to the acolyte, afterwards to the people. With regard to the custom in England, provincial and diocesan statutes repeat again and again the obligation upon parishes to provide the pax, “osculatorium” or “asser ad pacem,” equally with the proper vestments or books or other furniture of the altar. The rubrics of the Sarum missal—the use most largely observed in England before the reign of queen Elizabeth—direct the priest, immediately after the Agnus Dei, to kiss the outside rim of the chalice in which was the Sacred Blood, and then to give the pax to the deacon who delivered it in regular order to the ministers and choristers in the sanctuary.
Everything connected with the correct text of the plays of Shakespeare is of the highest interest to every Englishman; and will serve, it is hoped, as some excuse for a few words by way of remark upon a passage where he alludes to a pax. The unfortunate Bardolph came to an untimely end on account of it:
“Fortune is Bardolph’s foe, and frowns on him: For he hath stolen a pax: and hang’d must’a be. ——Exeter hath given the doom of death, For pax of little price.” Henry V., act iii., sc. 5.