PRIMER
425
PRIMER
morning hour which consecrates all the work of the
day. Its institution has made the liturgical day more
regular and symmetrical. Prime, until then without
an office, received its psalmody like Terce, Sext, None,
Vespers. With Complin and Lauds, the liturgical day
reached the sacred septenary, "septies in die laudem
dixi tibi". While for the night office there was the
text: "media nocte surgebam ad confitendum tibi".
Peluccia, Tfie Polity of the Christian Church, 204 sq.; MaR- TiQNY. Diet, des Antiquites chretiennes, 538; Zaccaria, Onomasti- con, 105; Thomasi, Opera, ed. Vezzosi, VII, 22; Martene, De antiquis Ecclesix ritibus, lib. IV, c. viii; t. III. p. 19-23; Idem. De antiquis Monachorum ritibus, lib. I, c. iv, t. IV, p. 16; Baumer- BlBON, Histoire du Briviaire, t. I, pp. 145, 240, 259, 361, 364. 374; Pargoire, Prime et Complines in La Revue d^ histoire ei de Littera~ ture. III (1898), 281-88; Diet, d' Areheologie et de Liturgie, I, 198; II, 1245, 1302, 1306: Neale and Littledale, A Commentary on the Psalms, I (London, 1884), 7, 18; for the Symbol of St. Atha- nasius cf. Athanaslan Creed, t. I, p. 33 aq.; and Diet, de thiol, cathol., 9. V. .ithanase.
F. Cabbol.
Primer, The, the common English name for a book of devotions which from the thirteenth to the six- teenth century was the ordinary prayer-book used by the laity. The contents of these books varied greatly, but they possessed certain common elements which practically speaking are never absent. The most im- portant feature, judging by the position usually assigned to it as well as by the lavish use of miniatures and other forms of ornament with which it is asso- ciated, was the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In different liturgictil centres, for example, at Rome, Salisbury, York, or Paris, the constituents of this Little Office differed from each other in various details; for example, the Psalms recited at Prime "according to the use of York" were not the same as those appointed for the same hoiu- in the Sarum bre- viary and hence in the later printed editions of the Primer it is common to find upon the title-page or in the colophon a statement of the particular use fol- lowed, e.g., "HoriB secundum usum Romanum" or "secundum usum Sarum". Such designations how- ever qualify only the Little Office of the Blessed Vir- gin, and not the other contents of the volume. Next in importance, but not usually next in order, was the Office for the Dead, or rather Vespers, followed by Matins and Lauds. These were commonly known as Placebo and Dirige (hence our English word "dirge"), from the antiphons with which the Vespers and the Matins respectively began. Three other constant elements are also invariably included in the Primer: the Fifteen Psalms (i.e., the Gradual Psalms, Ps. cxix-cxxxiii), the Seven Psalms (i.e., the Penitential Psalms), and the Litany of the Saints. As already stated, these invariable features of the Primer are sup- plemented in nearly all extant copies with a variety of other devotions of which a word will be said later on.
Origin of the Primer. — The question of the origin and primitive association of the invariable elements just specified has been of late thoroughly examined by Mr. Edmund Bishop (see introduction to the Early English Text Society's edition of the Primer, London, 1897), who has corrected the erroneous views pre- viously advanced by Henry Bradshaw and others. As Mr. Bishop has shown, the Primer was consti- tuted out of certain devotional accretions to the Di- vine Office itself which were invented first by the piety of individuals for the vise of monks in their mon- asteries, but which gradually spread and came to be regarded as an obligatory supplement to the office of the day. Of these accretions the Fifteen Psalms and the Seven Psalms were the earliest in point of time to establish themselves generally and permanently. Their adoption as part of the daily round of monastic devotion was probably largely due to the influence of St. Benedict of Aniane at the beginning of the ninth century. The "Vigiliaj Mortuorum", or Office for the Dead, was the next accretion to be generally
received. Of the cutsus or Little Office of the
Blessed Virgin we hear nothing until the time of Ber-
nerius of Verdun (c. 960) and of St. Udalric of Augs-
burg (c. 971); but this form of devotion to Our Lady
spread rapidly. Two English manuscripts which con-
tain it date from before the Norman Conquest and
have been published in facsimile by the Henry Brad-
shaw Society. In these pro\dsion was probably made
only for the private recitation of the Office of the
Blessed Virgin, but after the ardent encouragement
given to this form of devotion by St. Peter Damian
in the middle of the tenth century many monastic
orders adopted it or retained it in preference to some
other devotional offices, e.g., those of All Saints and
of the Blessed Trinity, which had found favour a little
earlier. By the second half of the fourteenth century
a certain measure of uniformity had been attained
with regard to these devotional accretions both among
the monastic orders and in cathedral and collegiate
churches, so that we learn from Radulphus de Rivo
(c. 1360) that the daily recital of the Office of the
Blessed Virgin and of the Vigiliae Mortuorum were
then regarded as obligatory upon all ecclesiastics by
the general consent of nations, while by the laudable
practice of many, other particular offices were also
observed, such as the Penitential and Gradual psalms
and so forth. Throughout all this it would seem that
the sense that these things were accretions to the Di-
vine Office itself was not lost. Hence there was a
tendency to perform these devotions in private, and
for this purpose they were probably often collected
into a separate book. Moreover, since these devo-
tions, imlike the Di\'ine Office, were invariable, they
could be learned and practised with comparative ease
by those who had little pretensions to scholarship.
There was always a tendency in the laity to copy the
exercises of piety which prevailed among the monastic
orders. To take part in the full Divine Office of the
Church, which changed from day to day, was beyond
their reach, but by rendering themselves familiar with
the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, they were enabled
both to make their own something of that burden of
prayer which the monks actually performed, and also
to imitate that sevenfold consecration of the day,
which no doubt seemed to them the most distinctive
feature in the monastic life. Hence it came to pass,
no doubt, that the collection of these accretions to the
Office, gathered into one small volume, became the
favourite prayer-book of the laity, whilst copyists
naturally supplemented these more strictly liturgical
forms of prayer by the addition of many private de-
votions, often in the vernacular. For it must be re-
membered that the Psalms, the Officium B. M. V., the
Vigiliae Mortuorum, etc., were recited by the laity as
well as by the clergy in Latin. True, a number of manu-
script primers of the fifteenth century are in existence,
in which the whole contents have been translated into
English, but these are comparatively rare exceptions.
On the other hand, out of over a hundred editions of
the Primer printed for the English book-trade before
the breach with Rome in 1.533, not one is known to
contain the Office or the Psalms in English.
Primers for Children. — The origin of the name "primer" is still obscure. The earliest instance yet discovered of the use of the word is in a Latin will of 1323, where it e\'idently means a prayer-book. Prob- abilities favour the view (see "The Month ", February, 1911, pp. 1.50-63) that it was called "primer" because the more elaborate forms developed out of a book con- taining the invariable elements already specified, pre- ceded by the alphabet, the Pater nosier, Ave Maria, Creed, etc., which compilation was used as a first reading book for children. This will not seem strange when we remember that children in the Middle Ages learned to read not in English but in Latin, and that almost every child that learned to read learned with the more or less definite purpose of becoming a clerk.
