Welsh Journals

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to account for the form of the borrowings from Latin into British. Gratwick will have none of it. He reduces Jackson's arguments to two substantial ones. One, that concerning the 'bv confusion', was (he shows convincingly) based on unsound conclusions of classical philologists. The second, crucial in that the whole borrowed vocabulary is involved, asserted that the British borrowings were taken from a Latin in which the Classical quantity system survived. Gratwick finds that in most cases the British forms are equally compatible with a borrowing from Classical Latin and with a late borrowing. Moreover, he holds Jackson's argument to be vitiated by our uncertainty about the date of borrowings and by a failure to allow the possibility of loans earlier than the time of Agricola (Gratwick suggests that some might even be B.C.); he points out the tendency of loans to fossilize traits of the original language. Dr. Gratwick is a Latinist without claims to being a Celtic scholar. His style is breezy, some will say gratuitously polemical. Jackson's view has never really been called into question. Into the Celtic saloon bar swaggers an aggressive stranger and many eyes will be on what happens next. Dr. Wendy Davies contributes 'Clerics as rulers: some implications of the terminology of ecclesiastical authority in early medieval Ireland'. She looks at the Irish sources of the sixth-eighth centuries and, making all allowance for echoes of scriptural analogy, finds indications that clerics indeed assumed temporal powers cognate with those of kings, that the Church aimed 'to create an alternative society', even that 'some Irish clerics took the biblical notion of the kingdom of heaven literally'. That royal and ecclesiastical powers often merged, she makes quite clear. At times she presses too hard; note 68 covers a retreat from some forward positions. Dr. Davies notes that there are instances in Welsh ecclesiastical contexts of the Irish use of princeps. This is her only explicit reference to the British Church. The editor gallantly explains in his preface what her article about early medieval Ireland is doing in his book about early medieval Britain. There was of course much in common. Dr. Michael Lapidge and Dr. R. I. Page both write about 'The study of Latin texts in late Anglo-Saxon England', Lapidge on the evidence of Latin glosses, Page on that of Anglo-Saxon. Lapidge examines select passages from Latin poets who are well represented in surviving English manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries. His main conclusion is a simple one: that most of the Latin glosses are not ad hoc notes made in Anglo-Saxon school rooms; rather, they are part of a scholarly apparatus transmitted with the text. In so far as their origin can be determined, it is Continental. In two cases Dr. Lapidge is able to show derivation from Carolingian commentaries. One of the most important manuscripts discussed by Lapidge, in that it contains several strata of glosses, is Cambridge U.L. Ff. 4.42, the Juvencus manuscript famous in Wales because of the early englynion in its margins. He urges a detailed study of 'this rich source of information about Welsh and Anglo-Saxon scholarly method'. Welsh scholarship is indeed badly deprived in having no published corpus of the vernacular glosses, let alone the Latin glosses in Welsh manuscripts. Dr. Page's paper will be germane to any such project. It is in effect a plea for a more sympathetic method