Welsh Journals

most likely they were intended to be fixed over the altars of chapels served by the members. I remind my audience that the statement with regard to the symbolization of the Head of the Baptist in a Dish is found in the York Breviary only it is, therefore, very natural to imagine it refers to a local cult, a cult of St. John's Head, peculiar to York-why, we cannot tell, nor do we know when it arose. What seems quite certain is that there the intro- duction and development of the Corpus Christi devotion (the Feast of Corpus Christi was instituted by Pope Urbain IV., in 1264) provided the authorities of York with an agency for the propagation of their special cult, and the dispersion all over England of the tablets commemorating it. I mentioned a little while ago that one of the tablets is still to be seen as far south as St. Michael's Mount, Cornwall. Here is another fact of great interest, a con- nection between the arms of the town of Penzance and the annual Corpus Christi fair, Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Cornwall is not a county where Catholic tradition might be expected to survive, on the contrary it is the stronghold of Protestanism of a peculiarly acute type, Bible Christians, Plymouth Brethren, etc., flourish there yet the date of the annual fair has not varied within the memory of man, and when and why it was so fixed no one seems able to explain, but the arms of the town are St. John's Head on a Dish It is just possible the date of the fair was fixed with a view to perpetuating the symbolic identification of the two one would naturally expect such an annual Feast to be held on a date directly con- nected with the patron Saint, Aug. 29, the Feast of the Decollation; was that possibly the original date, and was it afterwards transferred to Corpus Christi (Thursday after Trinity Sunday) ? Cornwall is a long way from Yorkshire, and judging from the date of the tablets found in the South, such a chance could hardly have been earlier than the XVth century, yet in spite of the influence of