Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/284

274 fingers, "[I extol] the perfection of God"; in passing the second, "Praise be to God"; in passing the third, "There is no Deity but God," repeating these formulae in the same order to the last bead. Should the first formula fall to the last bead, the answer is affirmative and favourable; if to the second, indifferent; but if to the last it is negative.

Christian. The introduction of the rosary among Christians has been attributed to various people, among them being St. Aybert de Crespin, Peter the Hermit, and St. Dominic. There has been a fairly widely accepted theory that the rosary was introduced into Europe at the time of the Crusades, having been imitated from Muhammadans. But later research seems to show that, though it is possible that such a means of counting prayers may have become more popular at this period, an earlier date should be assigned for its use in Western Europe. It is stated by Wilham of Malmesbury that the Lady Godiva of Coventry, wife of Count Leofric, bequeathed to the monastery which she founded "a circlet of gems which she had threaded on a string, in order that by fingering them one by one as she successively recited her prayers she might not fall short of the exact number." Lady Godiva died before 1070, so that some mnemonic device seems to have been in use prior to the preaching of the Crusades. The case of the Egyptian abbot, Paul, who died in 341, is related by Sozomen (c. 400-450) in his Ecclesiastical History, where it is stated that the saint daily recited 300 prayers, keeping count by means of pebbles in his cloak, dropping one of them at the end of each prayer. Here is a much earlier and more primitive method of record-keeping, which looks as if the rosary may have evolved independently in some centres, and had not been taken over from others in an already developed form.

By the thirteenth century the making of paternosters,