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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 June 2012
The ecclesiastical history of Britain is generally made to commence, after some conjectural hypotheses as to the original preaching of Christianity, with the celebrated conversion of a king named Lucius, in the latter part of the second century. The two writers on our ecclesiastical antiquities who have most claim to deference for learning, as one of them has for critical judgment, Usher and Stillingfleet, as well as those of a secondary, yet respectable character, such as Collier, unite in receiving this as an authentic fact. Yet some have always been found to doubt, among whom we may place Whitaker and Henry, as rather more peremptory than the rest; the former being certainly not over sceptical in matters of historical tradition. But Dr. Lingard and many others of our contemporaries, though under the necessity of moulding the story into a less questionable shape than it has come down to us, have not ventured to reject the whole as a fable, or to deny that a certain king during the reigns of the Antonines was the means of spreading the light of the Gospel over a part at least of our island, after having sought and received instruction at the hands of the Bishop of Rome.
page 310 note a Gibson translates, comitibus suis, by “their counts.” But I doubt whether this sense of the word is so ancient. The context of the passage leads me to think it should be rendered, “by his own companions,” those of Verus himself, to whose manner of life the historian had been just alluding.
page 318 note a The coincidence of this date with that mentioned by Bede for the accession of Antoninus Pius, with which he commences the chapter wherein he proceeds to relate the conversion of Lucius, renders it probable that the compilers of the Liber Landavensis took this from the Ecclesiastical History, mixing up what they found there with their own Welch records or traditions.
page 319 note a “Lucium ejusmodi extitisse non dubito; verum nec Britannum, nec Britannorum regem fuisse puto. Ipsum nomen, quod Romanum est, declarat potentem fuisse ex Romanis, qui tum in Britannia regnabant, virum.”
page 323 note a Roman names no more express personal qualities than our sur-names do at present; each may have done so in past ages, when they were first given.