Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/781

Rh   GOLDEN BULL (Latin, ) is, in general, the designation of any charter decorated with a golden seal or bulla, either from the intrinsic importance of its contents, or from the rank and dignity of the bestower or the recipi- ent. The custom of thus giving distinction to certain docu- ments is said to be of Byzantine origin, though if this be the case it is somewhat strange that the word employed as an equivalent for golden bull in Byzantine Greek should be the hybrid vacrdBovlton (qf. Codinus Curopalates, 6 né-yas key/006,717; StaTdTTfl. n1 nape. To?) Bounlte’w; droo‘reltltdpeva rpoa'roi'ypa-ra Kai, vao'oﬁovlklta 7rpd§ 1'6 ‘Pﬁyus, Eonlk-ravas, Kai Tomipxovc; and Anna Comnena, Alex-tad, lib. iii., 8L6. vacroBovltL’ov A6701); lib. viii., vao'dﬁovltov ltd-yov). In Germany a Golden Bull is mentioned under the reign of Henry I. in Chroniea Cassia, ii. 31, and the oldest German example, if it be genuine, dates from. At ﬁrst the golden seal was formed after the type of a solid coin, but at a later date, while the golden surface presented to the eye was greatly increased, the seal was really com— posed of two thin metal plates ﬁlled in with wax. The number of golden bulls issued by the imperial chancery must have been very large; the town of Frankfort, for example, still preserves no fewer than eight. But the name has become practically restricted to a few documents of un- usual political importance, the golden bull of the Empire, the golden hull of Brabant, the golden bull of Hungary, and the golden hull of Milan—and of these the ﬁrst is un- doubtedly the 0‘oldcn bull par excellence. It was drawn up under the direction of the emperor Charles IV., and it was formally ratiﬁed in ,—the ﬁrst twenty-three chapters by the diet of Nuremberg (10th January), and the remaining seven by the diet of Metz (25th December). The actual redaction has been assigned to Bartolus de Saxoferrato, to Rudolf of Friedberg the im- perial secretary, and even to the emperor himself; but there is no distinct authority for any of the three hypotheses as opposed to the others. A brief statement of the general purpose of its enactments has already been given at of the. The exordium is a strangely rhetorical lamentation over the miseries of division, and more especially of a kingdom divided against itself ; and the body of the document gives a survey of the duties, privileges, and relations of the various dignitaries of the empire, the emperor, the electors ecclesiastical and secular, the electoral plenipotentiaries, and the ofﬁcers of the court. As might almost be expected, a large place is given to rules of ceremony and etiquette. At ﬁrst the document was known simply as the Lex Carolina ; but by and by the name of the Book with the Golden Bull came into use, and the present elliptical title was sufﬁciently established by to be officially employed in a charter by King Sigismund. The original autograph was committed to the care of the electoral prince of Mainz, as chancellor-in-chief of the empire, and it was preserved in the imperial archives at Mainz till 1789. Ofﬁcial transcripts were probany furnished to each of the seven electors at the time of the promulgation, and before long many of the other members of the empire secured copies for themselves. The transcript which belonged to the elector of Treves is preserved in the state archives at Stuttgart, that of the elector of Cologne in the court library at Darmstadt, and that of the elector of Bohemia in the imperial archives at Vienna. Berlin, Munich, and Dresden also boast the possession of an electoral transcript; and the town of Kitzingen has a con- temporary copy in its municipal archives. There appears, however, to be good reason to doubt the genuineness of most of these so-called original transcripts. But perhaps the best known example is that of Frankfort-on-the-Main, which was procured from the imperial chancery in , and is adorned with a golden seal like the original. Not only was it regularly quoted as the indubitable authority in regard to the election of the emperors in Frankfort itself, but it was from time to time ofﬁcially consulted by members of the empire.

1em  GOLDEN-EYE, a name indiscriminately given in many parts of Britain to two very distinct species of Ducks, from the rich yellow colour of their irides. The commonest of them—the Anasfulz'g-ula of Linnaeus and Fultgula cristata of most modern ornithologists—is, however, usually called by English writers the Tufted Duck, while “ Golden-eye” is reserved in books for the A. elangula and A. glanez'on of Linnaeus, who did not know that the birds he so named were but examples of the same species, differing only in age or sex ; and to this day many fowlers perpetuate a like mistake, deeming the “ Morillon,” which is the female or young male, distinct from the “ Golden-eye ” or “Rattle- wings ” (as from its noisy ﬂight they oftener call it), which is the adult male. This species belongs to the group known as Diving Ducks, and is the type of the very well-marked genus ('lang-ula of later systematists, which, among other differences, has the posterior end of the sternum prolonged