Until lately the editors of Shakspeare printed pyx on the emendation (so-called) of Theobald. Johnson, who approved the new reading, informs us in his note upon the place that the two words “signified the same thing.” As far as Bardolph was concerned it mattered not; he had “conveyed” a sacred thing and, as Holinshed tells us, the king would not move on till the thief was hanged.
The quartos of 1600 and 1608 (and also the three folios) read pax: “he hath stolne a packs;” “a packs of pettie price,” in both editions. Shakspeare very well knew that a pax exposed or left carelessly on an altar was much more likely to be stolen than a pyx, which would be taken infinitely greater care of and locked up in the tabernacle. Even Dr. Johnson was ignorant upon some subjects; and the way in which editors “emend” their authors is something marvellous. When Shakspeare lived, and when the quartos were printed, people had not forgotten the distinction between the pax and the pyx; and many even could still remember when that now mysterious thing, the pax, had been brought down to them in the services of the Church from the altar.
The introduction of the pax instead of the old practice of mutual salutation was not until about the thirteenth century. The earliest mention in England occurs in a council held at York, a.d. 1250, under archbishop Walter Gray, where it is called “osculatorium.” A like order was made in the province of Canterbury, at the council of Merton, 1305, directing every parish to provide “tabulas pacis ad osculatorium.” Several figures of the pax are given in works relating to the subject; and we find it almost always represented as part of the furniture of an altar in the woodcut which often precedes the service for advent sunday, in the printed editions of the Salisbury missal from about 1500 to 1557. Le Brun has an interesting disquisition on the pax: and he tells us in a note that in its turn it also fell into disuse, because of quarrels about precedency which were occasioned among the people. Le Brun is borne out by Chaucer who, in the Parson’s Tale, speaking of the proud man explains that “also he awaited to sit, or els to go above him in the waie, or kisse paxe, or be encenced before his neighbour, etc.”
Occasionally, paxes in ivory have inscriptions upon them. One of the three in the Liverpool museum has the appropriate prayer, “Da pacem Domine in diebus nostris.” Two exhibited at Norwich in 1847 had legends. On one, the Annunciation, “Ave Maria;” on the other, the Nativity with the shepherds, “Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax, etc.”
Notices of the pax are common in monastic and church inventories. In the Rites of Durham abbey we are told that they possessed “a marvelous faire booke, which had the epistles and gospels in it, the which booke had on the outside of the coveringe the picture of our Saviour Christ all of silver—which booke did serve for the paxe in the masse.” A book which an abbot of Glastonbury gave to his church there probably answered the same purpose; and other then existing examples might be referred to. “Unum textum argenteum et auratum cum crucifixo, Maria, et Johanne, splendidus emalatum.” A mediæval English pax made of wood does not now, probably, exist: but there is a curious entry in the inventory of church goods belonging to the parish of St. Peter Cheap, in the year 1431; “item iij lyttel pax breds of tre.” Many such wooden paxes are mentioned as having been burnt in the diocese of Lincoln in 1566 by the royal commissioners: “a paxe of wood” at Baston, another at Dunsbie, another at Haconbie.
We have a remarkable illustration of the late use of the pax in England in one of the injunctions issued by the king’s visitors to the clergy within the deanery of Doncaster, in the first year of Edward the sixth, and printed by Burnet in his Records: “The clerk was ordered at the proper time to bring down the pax, and standing without the church door to say these words aloud to the people. This is a token of joyful peace which is betwixt God and men’s conscience, etc.” The “church door” here means the door in the screen which in those days divided the chancel from the body of the church. As in Chaucer, where he says of the wife of Bath
“Husbands at the church door had she had five.”
In England before the change of religion in the fifteenth century the marriage ceremony was performed outside the chancel, sometimes at the great door of the church itself; and then all proceeded towards the sanctuary for mass and communion.
One of the most beautiful as well as one of the most rare objects in the South Kensington collection is part of the handle of an ecclesiastical fan, or flabellum. It is, probably, one half of a handle; and another half, so nearly alike that it is a question whether it does or does not belong to the same handle, is in the British museum. The fan is still used in the Catholic Church in the east, where the purpose and benefit of it in order to keep off flies from the sacred vessels, or on account of the heat, are obvious. But in the west, except perhaps for part of the year in Italy, the fan was a kind of fashion and, having no symbolism, an unmeaning introduction from the oriental rite. The various churches of France and England had dropped the use of it before the sixteenth century; but we have plenty of evidence that the fan was commonly adopted in the thirteenth and the twelfth. Illuminations in two of the manuscripts in the public library at Rouen are very clear in this matter. One represents the deacon raising the flabellum, a circular fan with a long handle, over the head of the priest standing at the altar. In the other, the deacon is in the act of waving the fan, holding it by a short handle, over the head of a bishop who is elevating the Host.
A very curious flabellum, supposed to be of the ninth century, is described by Du Sommerard; it had long been preserved in the abbey of Tournus, south of Chalons, and was said to be in the possession of M. Carraud about twenty years ago. The fan of queen Theodolinda, of purple vellum with ivory handle, given by her to the cathedral of Monza is still preserved there. Other examples are, perhaps, still existing; two or three are mentioned by writers of the last century.