therefore enjoins them for the future to see that the plate, cloths, and vestments, be kept bright, clean, anci in decent order: and, what must surprise the reader, adds—that he expects for the future that the sacrist should provide for the sacrament good wine, pure and unadulterated; and not, as had often been the practice, that which was sour, and tending to decay:—he says farther, that it seems quite preposterous to omit in sacred matters that attention to decent cleanliness, the neglect of which would disgrace a common convivial meeting.*
Item 33rd says that, though the relics of saints, the plate, holy vestments, and books of religious houses, are forbidden by canonical institutes to be pledged or lent out upon pawn; yet, as the visitor finds this to be the case in his several visitations, he therefore strictly enjoins the prior forthwith to recall those pledges, and to restore them to the convent; and orders that all the papers and title-deeds thereto belonging should be safely deposited, and kept under three locks and keys.
In the course of the “Visitatio Notabilis” the constitutions of Legate Ottobonus are frequently referred to. Ottobonus was afterwards Pope Adrian V., and died in 1276. His constitutions are in “Lyndewood’s Provinciale,” and were drawn up in the 52nd of Henry III.
In the “Visitatio Notabilis” the usual punishment is fasting on bread and beer; and in cases of repeated delinquency on bread and water. On these occasions quarta feria, et sexta feria, are mentioned often, and are to be understood of the days of the week numerically on which such punishment is to be inflicted.
twice met with similar circumstances attending the sacrament at two churches belonging to two obscure villages. In the first he found the inside of the chalice covered with birds’ dung; and in the other the communion-cloth soiled with cabbage and the greasy drippings of a gammon of bacon. The good dame at the great farm-house, who was to furnish the cloth, being a notable woman, thought it best to save her clean linen, and so sent a foul cloth that had covered her own table for two or three Sundays before.
* ——ne turpe toral, ne sordida mappa
Corruget nares: ne non et cantharus, et lanx
Ostendat tibi te.”
