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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2012
Having for some time been collecting evidence on the use of these terms, I think it may be acceptable to our Society to have the results brought before them in a systematic form, and the more so, because we find what I cannot but regard as mistakes on the subject, not only made but defended, in quarters where we should least of all expect anything of the kind. I think I am able to show conclusively that, except during the last half-century, the terms “pastoral staff” and “crosier” have all but invariably been applied to the same thing, namely a bishop's crook, and that the term “crosier” was scarcely ever applied to an archbishop's cross until about 1826. About ten years later, the new nomenclature all at once manifested extraordinary vitality, and was regarded by Anglican ecclesiologists as strictly “correct.” We find it even in the writings of Blore, M. H. Bloxam, J. H. Parker, the younger Pugin, Dr. Hook, Webb, Haines, Boutell, Browne of York, Lee, Blunt, Shipley, Marriott, Mackenzie Walcott, Mrs. Jameson, and Fairholt, also in several dictionaries, though not in that of Skeat. Roman Catholic writers of the old school, unaffected by the Anglican eccelsiological revival, such as Bishop Milner, used the terms in the old English way.
page 709 note a See particularly Archaeologia, li. 351–381Google Scholar.
page 709 note b In the latest editions of Hook's Church Dictionary and of Blunt's Annotated Book of Common Prayer, the term “crosier” is used in the ancient and proper way. See below, section 5.
page 709 note a At first sight this word would certainly seem to mean crook, but I have not been able to find another example of “crocer ” in any sense other than that of croce-bearer or cross-bearer, which is probably its meaning here. Wyclif may have introduced it by way of a fling at bishops having “crocers ” to bear their “croces ” for them instead of bearing them in their own hands.
page 715 note a I find that this conclusion, at which I arrived independently, is in accordance with that of Wedgwood (Etymological Dictionary, 1872, s.v.). “Hence OE. crocer or crosier was properly the bearer of the bishop's staff, but the term was subsequently applied to the staff itself.”
page 727 note a I say nothing of Cocker and Rees, for I have not been able to find a single quotation in which their use of the term is followed earlier than 1826. As to Browne, see note on page 21. Nor can we infer anything to the point from rhetorical passages such as that quoted by Johnson from Bacon's Essays; “Anselmus and Thomas Becket, who, with their crosiers, did almost try it with the king's sword,” or this from Freeman, N. C. ii. 217; “Lanfranc … the ruler whose crozier completed the conquest which the ducal sword only began.” In passages like these, “crozier ” stands for ecclesiastical power simply. Cf. Section 5, 1647, 1808. The quotation from Blore may be taken for what it is worth. He elsewhere uses the word of the pastoral staff of a bishop. See section 5, 1826. There is a quotation from the funeral certificate of Archbishop Frewen at the College of Arms, in Hierurgia Anglicana, p. 85, which greatly puzzled me for some time, stating that Robert Challoner, blue-mantle, “carried the crosier and pastoral staff” (1664). Thinking there must be some mistake, I at once wrote to the college to ask if it was correctly copied. The only reply I received was to effect that if I wished I could have a correct copy, the fee for which would be three guineas. And there the matter rested for a while. Our Assistant-Secretary Mr. St. John Hope has, however had an obliging note from Mr. G. W. Marshall, Rouge Croix, explaining that the words “crosier and pastoral staff,” appear to mean one article and not two, and that under the shield of arms the “article ” is drawn, “a crosier with a cross where the crook joins the stick.” So that in this case description and “article ” are alike due to the vagaries of some eccentric herald of the seventeenth century.
page 728 note a In the cover of the part issued in 1838, Browne describes a two-barred cross as a “crosier;” but in 1839 he calls the same “a Pope's processional cross.” In 1862 he has adopted the common errors. See Section 6, 1862.
page 730 note a ib. Note.—It is a common error to suppose the cross of an archbishop to be the equivalent of the crook or crozier of an ordinary bishop.
page 731 note a Dr. Husenbeth corrects the error in his Life of Bishop Milner, p. 165.