Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/309

 notwithstanding that, there is sufficient harmony amongst them to show that they incorporate the rules on which the episcopal jurisdiction pure and simple generally proceeded; they were a sort of customary church law for their own province. But over and above these there were the canons, or authorised church law, and of these also there was a series of important collections. I am unable to say how far the collection of Dionysius Exiguus was received in England and Ireland at first: but from the beginning of the Church History of United England, a series of new canons began to be added to the early collections: Theodore himself added the decisions of Roman and Byzantine councils to the resolutions of his own national synods: a great and important succession of Anglo-Saxon councils issued canons which were received with great respect in all the Western churches, as we know from S. Boniface's letters and the remains of the canons themselves. From Ireland likewise proceeded a great collection of canons—the famous Collatio Hibernica, which, beginning with the edicts of S. Patrick, went on to embody the results of ecclesiastical legislation in West and East, and, by the time of Dunstan, whose copy of it we possess in the Bodleian, had added by successive accretions all that was thought worth preserving even in the capitularies of the Frank kings. The Anglo-Saxon Church possessed no such comprehensive collection of its own; but abroad the codification of church law proceeded rapidly. I have seen in the National Library at Paris some invaluable MS. collections earlier than the date of the forged decretals; and the forged decretals themselves were probably not the work of one man or one generation. Not however to tread again this well-trodden path, pass on to the collectors of genuine or less suspected canons: of whom the most important is Burchard of Worms. He, at the beginning of the eleventh century, got together and arranged systematically all the materials he could find: borrowing authoritative determinations from the penitentials, the canons of councils, articles of the civil law as known to him by the Theodosian code, and the capitularies of the emperors. A century later, bishop Ivo of