New Norcia Irish Prayer Book

John Howard’s Prayer Book

© Professor Neil McLeod, Murdoch University, based on his article 'John Howard's Prayer Book', New Norcia Studies 13 (2005) 90-94.

A few years ago I was quietly looking through the fascinating material in the New Norcia Museum and Art Gallery when I noticed something small but astonishing in one corner of a large display cabinet. It was a book, opened to show that its contents were hand-written. The surprising thing was that it was written in the Irish language (i.e. ‘Irish Gaelic’). More intriguing still, the script seemed to me to be very old.

The book turned out to be ‘John Howard’s Prayer Book’. It is a book of prayers containing the major Catholic prayers together with a series of other prayers to be used at various points of the Mass. It may well be the oldest Irish language manuscript in Australia.

The Scribe

The first two leaves of the book are missing. This is a shame. They may have held the title of the book and some details of its owner. (On the other hand, they may well have been blank. As we shall see, the scribe left room at the front of the book so that he could add a table of contents once his work was finished. It is possible that these first two pages were never written on and were subsequently torn out by a later owner to provide notepaper.)

Fortunately, the scribe who wrote the book identifies himself in a note at the bottom of page 10. The note reads: air na sgríobha le seághⁿ úa húmhair, ‘the result of scribings by Seághan Úa h-Úmhair’. This name is a variant spelling of Seán Ó h-Iomhair. It would have been regularly ‘Anglicised’ as John Howard. This explains why we find inside the front of the present cover the words ‘John Howard’s Prayer Book’ (added much more recently in a fairly modern cursive script).

There was a scribe called Seághan Ua h-Úghbhair (another variant spelling) writing in Co. Cork in 1817, but his handwriting is different, so he is not our man.¹ (There is still the possibility that the two scribes might be related.)

Úa h-Úmhair is unlikely to have produced the book for his own use. It is possible that he was a trained scribe. Certainly his hand-writing looks well-tutored. The letters are clearly and boldly formed, using multiple pen strokes. (The letter ‘e’, for example, is produced using three separate strokes of the pen.) He also uses a large array of scribal abbreviations (more on these later).

Cataloguing Details and Date of Writing

There is no record of when the book was first acquired by the Benedictine Community. The monastery’s book collection underwent a major organisation in 1975. At that time, Úa h-Úmhair’s book was added to the Museum’s collection by Father Anscar McPhee, and given the registration number M75 985. According to the registration sheet prepared for the manuscript, it was found in an old book storeroom above the Abbot’s office, and certain unnamed speakers of Gaelic had suggested that it might be from the late 18th or early 19th century. On the basis of the figures ‘747’ which partly survive on the inside cover, a guess was made that it might date to 1747. (These figures occur at the far right of the fourth line of some writing which someone has almost entirely erased. I found the numbers to be very difficult to make out, and I would be hesitant about confirming the reading.)

This would make the book thirty-one years older than the earliest Irish manuscript previously noticed in Australia. (The latter is a manuscript written in 1778, which is housed in the Veech Library of the Catholic Institute of Sydney. It contains prayers, biblical extracts and a catechism.²)

The production of manuscript prayer-books in Irish was, of course, a venerable practice. It also continued well into the modern era. While Protestant works printed in Scots Gaelic and Irish were published in Scotland and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the political realities made it far more problematic to publish Catholic texts. The first Catholic text in Irish was printed overseas, in Antwerp in 1611.³ Manuscript prayer-books continued to be needed and produced well into the 19th century.

One such prayer-book was produced in 1833 by Dáibhí de Barra of Cork for his nephew. This book also made its way out to Australia and is currently housed in the State Library of Victoria.⁴ (It is clear that de Barra’s book got regular use during Mass. While the opening pages of individual prayers show little sign of use, the pages containing the prayers for use during the Mass are quite grubby.)

There are no watermarks on the paper of Úa h-Úmhair’s book. So we can not look there for confirmation of the suggested date of writing. The language looks fairly old. But any attempt to date it precisely to the mid-18th century would be fraught with difficulty. Úa h-Úmhair was merely copying a work that had been around for a very long time. Úa h-Úmhair’s particular exemplar would have been copied from an earlier book, and so on. As each scribe copied out his work he would tend to modernise the forms he found there, but some quite old forms could occasionally survive this cumulative copying.

An interesting example of this process is provided by Úa h-Úmhair’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.⁵ In the New Norcia manuscript this spans two pages. Now, Úa h-Úmhair follows the common practice of repeating the last word of one page as the first word of the next. In this case, we turn the page in the middle of the Irish for ‘give us this day our daily bread’. The last word on page 1 is laothúil (‘daily’), and at the top of page 2 we have the same word in a different spelling: laetheamhail. The first spelling of this word is close to the standard modern spelling (laethúil), while laetheamhail is a respectable medieval form. However, for Úa h-Úmhair these were probably little more than variant spellings. Any attempt to date the New Norcia manuscript on the basis of its language will need to focus on the most modern forms found in it.

Contents

As it now stands, the book opens with a table of contents. This lists the prayers contained in the book and the page at which each of them begins. The table of contents is in the same handwriting as the rest of the book, but (naturally enough) it was added after the prayers themselves had been completed. There appears to have been a delay between the completion of the main work and the addition of the table of contents, as there is a slight change in the colour of the ink used. (The ink in the book is light blue throughout, with a couple of small corrections added later in a light black ink. These corrections are in the same handwriting.⁶)

The table of contents opens with the statement clarr an leabhair so mar leannas ‘the contents of this book are as follows’. This is followed by a list of the various prayers in the book, with their corresponding page numbers. In front of the first such page number is the word páige, an adaptation of English ‘page’.

The items and page numbers are as follows. (I have added my translation in parentheses.)

1 paidir an tiagarna (The Lord’s Prayer)

2 fáilte an aingiol (The angel’s greeting [i.e. the Hail Mary])

4 cré na n-apstol (The Apostles’ Creed)

6 an fhaoisidín geanaráilte (The general confession)

11 úrnaighthe roimh na gníomhartha (Prayers before the Acts)

12 gníomh Croídhbhrúighe (Act of Contrition)

13 Gníomh Creidimh (Act of Faith)

16 Gníomh dóchais (Act of Hope)

18 Gníomh Carthanacht (Act of Charity)

20 úrnaighthe roimh an aifrionn (Prayers before the Mass)

35 urnaighthe eile roimh an aithfrionn (Other prayers before the Mass)

The second page of the table of contents is as follows.

39 úrnaighthe an aithfrionn (Prayers of the Mass)

76 urnaighthe tar éis an aithfrionn (Prayers after the Mass)

78 ⁷ liodáin Íosa (Litany of Jesus)

91 liodáin Mhuire (Litany of Mary)

103 úrrnaighthe eile (Other prayers)

106 urnaighthe chum na Máighdinne Muire t’aingiol caoimhdeachta & chum do dhídionóir (Prayers to the Virgin Mary, your guardian angel and to your protector)

116 ollmhughadh don bháis (Preparing for death)

125 alltúgadh roimh biagh (Grace before a meal)

125 tar éis bíghe ([Grace] after a meal)

Scribal Abbreviations

Medieval scribes developed a sophisticated system of abbreviations. This enabled them to fit more words to the page, and in part its purpose may have been to make more economic use of expensive materials such as vellum. However, I suspect the main reason was that it reduced the labour involved in transcription.

These abbreviations were of various kinds. Particular words were represented by contracted forms (just as we use ‘etc’ for ‘et cetera’ or Mr for ‘Mister’). Certain letters were represented by special marks added over the top of other letters. Sometimes whole syllables were simply indicated by an arbitrary dash (a ‘suspension stroke’) because it was assumed no difficulty would be caused by failing to write the word out in full. All of these devices were used by Úa h-Úmhair, and a good number of them are illustrated on the second page of the table of contents.

Suspension Strokes. These traditionally take the form of a horizontal line written in place of the letters which have been omitted. Úa h-Úmhair uses a horizontal line with a dot above it. His suspension strokes often stand for a single vowel. There is a suspension stroke at the end of the first word in line 9 (ollmhughadh).

Lenition. At the start of the first line (ignoring the headword páige) we have the word úrnaighthe (‘prayers’). Notice that gh is written as g with a dot over it, and th as a dotted t. This is the standard way of writing ‘lenited’ (i.e. aspirated) letters in Irish manuscripts. (See also the use of ‘dotted’ forms for ch and dh in line 8, and of mh, gh and bh in line 9.)

Úa h-Úmhair’s use of a dotted line for suspension strokes creates a problem for him where the omitted syllable was also lenited. Medieval scribes indicated this lenition by putting a dot over the suspension stroke. But Úa h-Úmhair has already done that. Úa h-Úmhair’s system requires him to write the h out in full, and then attach the suspension stroke to it. Thus in line 9, the first word is ollmhughadh. Notice how the final three letters, adh, are written as an h followed by a suspension stroke.

The n-stoke. At the end of the first line we have the word aithfrionn (‘Mass’). Notice that the double n is written as a single n with a horizontal stroke above it. This stroke is the standard scribal abbreviation for ‘following n’. (It occurs again in Máighdinne at the end of line 6.)

‘And’. At the beginning of the eighth line you will see Úa h-Úmhair’s version of the contraction ‘&’ (based on Latin et ‘and’). Úa h-Úmhair uses this throughout his book. This is interesting, as the standard Irish contraction for ‘and’ is quite different. (It looks like the number 7, but it extends below the line rather than above it.)

Compendia. The word at the end of the fifth line is eile (‘other’). On the first page of the table of contents, this appears as the standard scribal contraction: ee. Here on the second page the contraction has been modified somewhat. Here we have two symbols, each a compendium of two letters: an e with an i tagged onto it, and an l combined with an e. Úa h-Úmhair uses these compendia frequently in his prayer-book. The seventh line ends with the word caoimhdeachta. Notice the standard compendia for ao and ea. Notice in that word also the standard contraction for cht, which takes the form of an Irish s with a line over the top. This contraction has an interesting history. It started out life as the contraction for Latin sed ‘but’ (hence the s). It was then used for the Irish word for ‘but’, which is acht. Eventually it was used generally for the letters (a)cht wherever they occurred!

Elsewhere in the book, considerable use is also made of standard contractions for the letter combinations ‘ar’, and ‘air’ (an a with a bar through the right descender, with a superscript i where appropriate) and for (an f with a line above it).

Superscript letters. Vowels are written above other letters to indicate that the vowel is to be followed by an r. When consonants are written in this superscript position it means that they are to be read as being preceded by an a. Thus the medieval scribes wrote gac(h) ‘every’ as a g with a c above it. Úa h-Úmhair modifies this particular medieval contraction by writing the c after the g; but it is still raised in the air by a dot which is placed under it (and there is a dot over it as well to indicate the following h). Readers with Scottish surnames beginning in Mac- or Mc- may spot something significant here. The ancient contraction for mac ‘son’ shows the same evolution. It starts off life as an m with a c written above it, but in time the c is written after the m, though still in a raised position. (Unfortunately in this electronic age the c has now hit rock bottom.) My surname, McLeod, is merely a variant way of writing MacLeod. It is not really a variant spelling at all. (This explains why Mac- and Mc- are arranged alphabetically in the phonebook as if they both contain an a. That is because they do.)

Other Contractions. Úa h-Úmhair frequently writes the word Críost (Christ) as the cipher xpt with a long horizontal stroke over the top of the p.⁸ Another standard contraction used by Úa h-Úmhair is a symbol that stood for the letters con whenever they occurred at the beginning of a word. The traditional medieval contraction takes the form of a back-to-front c. Úa h-Úmhair, on the other hand, uses a capital C (facing the conventional way), with a small curl at the upper end.⁹ For final -as in any word he uses a symbol which looks something like a modern handwritten ‘g’. This is an interesting departure from the traditional medieval symbol, which is more like the numeral 3 (but extends below the line rather than above it).¹⁰

The Holy Song

The ‘Litany of Mary’ opens with an Irish version of the oldest known prayer to the Virgin, which dates to at least the third century AD.¹¹ In the New Norcia manuscript it is called An Naomh Abhrán, ‘The Holy Song’. Úa h-Úmhair’s version is quite different to those I have seen in other Irish sources.¹² Here is the text of the New Norcia version, followed by my literal translation:

Triallamuid chum do dhionnaightheoireacht a naoimh maithir Dé. Ná tarcusnaig ár n-úrnaighthe a n-ár riachtainisibh acht saor sinn on uile contabhairt a mháighdion bheannaighthe ró-ghlórmar. Bíoch mar sin.

We journey to your protection, O holy mother of God. Do not scorn our prayers in our necessities but save us from all danger, O blessed maiden most glorious. May it be so.

The early prayers in Úa h-Úmhair’s prayer book end with the word amen, but from page 34 we find instead the words bíoch (= bíodh) mar sin, literally, ‘let it be like that’.

Pagination and mode of writing

Following the table of contents the pages are numbered, so that the first page after the table of contents is page number 1. The pagination continues in sequence until page 125 at which point the writing stops and the second half of the book is left blank. It seems unlikely that Úa h-Úmhair intended to write anything further in the book. (The large number of blank pages at the end are probably a result of him using a somewhat over-large notebook for the work he had in mind.) At any rate, once he had finished his transcription, he added his table of contents at the front. This is positioned immediately before the opening pages of transcription. Had he intended to add more at a later date he would probably have left room to expand the table of contents.

The pages have not been ruled. 50% of the pages have 12 or 13 lines of writing, and 80% of the pages fall within the range of 11-14 lines. The first 19 pages are more generously spaced (with an average of 10.5 lines per page). From page 40 to 73, the pages are more closely written (with 23 of the pages falling within the range of 14-17 lines). Thereafter the book eases back to around 11-12 lines per page. The writing throughout is in a very legible, confident minuscule script, with only very occasional use of majuscule script (i.e. ‘capital letters’, for example in the first two letters of the heading on page 20: URnaighthe roimh an aithfrionn).

Physical Details and Re-covering

The cover measures 14.2 × 9.5 cm and the book is 2 cm thick. The pages inside are 13.5 × 9 cm. The book is in poor condition and water-stained throughout but very legible.

It has a cover of cloth over card, which is now only partially attached. But this is not the original cover. The pages have been trimmed at some stage (presumably when the book was rebound in this new cover). There is almost no loss of writing as a result of the trimming, but the bottom half of the letters in the words bíoch mar sin at the bottom of page 47 have been cut off, as has the top of the page number on page 65.

The book itself originally consisted of 8 quires, each of 8 sheets (= 16 leaves = 32 pages), giving a total of 128 leaves or 256 pages. Of these, 20 pages have been lost. The first two leaves are missing from the first quire (with the result that the corresponding leaves from those sheets are now loose). The seventh leaf has also been torn from the sixth quire, and the first leaf from the seventh quire. The final quire is missing six leaves, five of which were torn from the end of the book, and one is missing from the first half of the quire (probably simply falling free as a result of the loss of the corresponding leaf - there was a further such loose leaf at the beginning of the quire when I inspected it).¹³

Conclusion

This fascinating book is a treasure of which New Norcia can be proud. It is an important part of the long history of the Irish scribal tradition, and a very significant part of the history of Irish language materials in Australia.

Notes

© Professor Neil McLeod, Murdoch University