Page:A handbook of the Cornish language; Chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature.djvu/44

Rh Many of the words in it were incorporated by Dr. John Davies in his Welsh Dictionary, as coming from what he calls the Liber Landavensis, and a quotation from the Life of St. Cadoc in the same MS. is spoken of in Camden's Britannia as coming from the Book of Llandaff. The MS. evidently bore that name for a time. It is probable, from certain mistakes in it, that the vocabulary is a copy of an earlier one, in which the letters ƿ and þ of the Saxon alphabet were used.

Of about the same date as this manuscript was a composition in Cornish, of which the original is lost, except a few words. This was a Prophecy of Merlin, which only exists in a translation into Latin hexameters by John of Cornwall, who in his notes gives a few words of the original, which are certainly Cornish. Like many of the so-called Merlin prophecies, this relates to the struggle between Stephen and the Empress Matilda, but it contains local Cornish allusions of great interest. The only known MS. is one of the fourteenth century, in the Vatican.

3. The single sentence, In Polsethow ywhylyr anethow, in the Cartulary of Glasney College. If the writer of the history of the foundation of the college is correct, this prophecy, "In Polsethow [the Pool of Arrows, the old name of Glasney] shall be seen habitations," is older than the foundation in 1265. It is therefore the oldest known complete sentence of Cornish, and is interesting as containing the inflected passive whylyr. There is an abstract of the cartulary, by Mr. J. A. C. Vincent, in the 1879 volume of the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, and this sentence is given there, with an explanatory note by the late Mr. W. C. Borlase. The original belongs to Mr. Jonathan Rashleigh of Menabilly.

4. On the back of a charter in the British Museum (Add. Charter 19,491) the present writer discovered in 1877 a fragment of forty-one lines of Cornish verse.