to publications, &c., noted in those works. For the later bulls there is no such continuous book of reference, and I have not thought it necessary to make any extensive search, referring only to the more obvious and accessible publications. Those most often used are such of the papal registers as have been published, Rymer's Foedera, Bliss and Twemlow's Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, and J. S. Brewer's Letters and Papers … of the Reign of Henry VIII.
To make the list more useful for purposes of reference I have added indexes. The first of these is a classified list of the documents according to their form (privilege, letter, brief, &c). The subdivisions of the letters, which seemed necessary because of the great preponderance of that over any other form, are not, I fear, very satisfactory; but they will at least serve as a rough indication, and it is often useful, when dealing with a particular document, perhaps not very legible, to know what others of the same class are available. Thus, the last bull in the series, written as it is in the extraordinarily illegible script evolved by the papal chancery in the nineteenth century, could hardly have been read at all without the assistance of other mandates of the same kind.
The second index, of initia, requires no comment. The third contains: (a) the names of persons or bodies to whom bulls are addressed, (b) in the case of mandates and certain briefs, the names of the persons or bodies who are the subject of the letter, (c) in the case of a few bulls with no particular address and dealing with a quite general topic, the subject (e.g. in no. 221, the union with the Eastern Church; in 237, the abuse of the right of sanctuary).
In conclusion, I should like to express my thanks to Mr. Gilson and Mr. Herbert, Keeper and Assistant Keeper of Manuscripts, for much help in the preparation of the list, and to my colleague, Mr. Flower, for information regarding place-names in the bulls relating to Ireland and on several other matters.
Urban II (1088-99)[1]
- ↑ The earliest ostensibly original bulls in the Museum are Add. MS. 12117 c, a letter on lead to the city of Bologna from Gregory III, a.d. 738, and Add. Ch. 1538, a confirmation by Gregory VII to Cluny (Jaffé 4975, i. 616); but the first (see Jaffé 2244, i. 259) is an obvious forgery, and the second is a copy, apparently from the register of Cluny the copyist having accidentally skipped from 'ut ipsum monasterium' in this bull (Migne 148, col. 667) to 'imperatorum' in that which followed in the register (ibid., col. 668).
