Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/377

362 was building the Temple he wanted a beam for a roof-tree. The Lignum Domini was cut down, but it could not be got to fit into its place, so was rejected (like the keystone of the arch in another legend). For a while it lay about in the Temple, and a certain Maximilla, described in the early English form of the story as ‘meretrix,’ happening to sit upon it, found her clothes set on fire and in her fright prophesied that Christ should come and should die on this Tree; for which the Jews beat her to death. The beam was buried, and there came in the place the healing pool of Bethesda, but later it was taken up and put as a bridge over the Brook Cedron, and when Christ came on earth and was to be crucified the Jews took it and made of it the Cross whereon He died on Calvary. Then it was buried near the Holy Grave, until St. Helen, the mother of Constantino, discovered it on the 3rd of May, 328. It remained in Jerusalem until Chosroes, King of Persia, plundered the Holy Places in 614 and carried it off, but the Emperor Heraclius recovered it on the 14th of September, 615, since which time it has been mostly in Christian hands, the largest and most important piece of it being one of the four great relics under the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Of course, the whole story does not come in these dramas, and there are some variants, which I shall point out later, but it forms a sort of connecting link.

The date of these plays is probably late in the fourteenth or early in the fifteenth century. The oldest MS. in the Bodleian Library is of the latter date. From internal evidence, such as the mention of a number of places in the neighbourhood, their place of origin would seem to be Glasney College, a college of secular canons, founded in 1265, adjoining the town of Penryn. The college was suppressed by Edward VI., and very few remains of it now exist, but it was once a place of considerable importance.

These dramas were edited and translated by Dr. Edwin Norris in 1859, but about 1700 they had been copied for Dr. Edward Lhuyd, and translated by that remarkable old