Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/43

 CHAPTER II

THE LITERATURE AND OTHER REMAINS OF CORNISH

following is a list, in order of date, of the known remains of Cornish from the earliest times to the end of the eighteenth century. There may be others of very early date, which have been hitherto classified as old Welsh or Breton, such as the Lament for Geraint, King of Devon, generally attributed to Llywarch Hen, and certain glosses in Latin MSS.

1. The Manumissions in the Bodmin Gospels (Add. MS. 9381, in the British Museum). The MS. is of the tenth century, and belonged to St. Petrock's Priory of Black Canons, originally Benedictine, at Bodmin. At the beginning and end are manumissions of serfs from whose names about two hundred Cornish words may be gathered. These have been printed in the Revue Celtique (vol. i. p. 332), with notes by Dr. Whitley Stokes.

2. The Cottonian Vocabulary (Cott. MS. Vesp. A. xiv., in the British Museum). This forms part of a MS. of the end of the twelfth century, and consists of about seven pages, preceded by a calendar containing many Celtic names, and followed by lives of Welsh and Cornish saints. The words are classified under various headings, such as heaven and earth, different parts of the human body, birds, beasts, fishes, trees, herbs, ecclesiastical and liturgical terms, and at the end occur a number of adjectives. It has been printed by Zeuss in his Grammatica Celtica, by Dr. Norris with the Ordinalia, and has been incorporated into Canon Williams's Cornish Lexicon. 24