[November 8
ST <;::YBI, OR CUBY
century setting out the articles of one of these stone-mason gilds is preserved in MS. Royal XVII. A. I at the British Museum. It has a section headed Ars quatuor coronatorum, beginning: Pray we now to God almyght And to hys moder Mary bryght ;
and it then goes on to tell briefly the story " of these martyres fowre, that in thys craft were of gret honoure ". It is stated that those who want to know more about them may findIn the legent of sanctorum [i.e. the book Legenda Sanctorum] The names of quatuor coronatorum. Their fest wol be, withoute nay, After Alle Halwen the eyght day.
The English Freemasons of modern times have in a sense clung to the tradition, and the most scholarly organ of the craft in this country has for many years past been published under the name Ars Quatuor Coronatorum. Bede refers to a church at Canterbury dedicated in honour of the Four Crowned Martyrs so early as c. 620. Any detailed discussion of the problems outlined above would be out of place here. In the Acta Sanctorum, November, vol. iii, Delehaye in 1910 devoted thirty-six folio pages to the question, editing the text of the passio of the Pannonian group, written, it is believed, by a certain Porphyry, and also the tenth-century recension of the same, due to one Peter of Naples. The Depositio martyrum of the fourth century, confirmed by the Leonine and other sacramentaries, leaves no doubt that this group of martyrs was honoured in Rome at an early date, and Delehaye, in the Analecta Bollandiana, vol. xxxii (1913), pp. 63-71, as well as in his Les passions des martyrs . . . (1921), pp. 328-344, his Etude sur If legendier romain (1936), pp. 65-73, and the CMH., pp. 590-591, adheres firmly to the view that there was only one group of martyrs, the stone-masons of Pannonia, whose relics were brought to Rome and interred in the catacomb on the Via Labicana. Other theories, however, have been propounded, notably by Mgr Duchesne in Melanges d'archeologie et d'histoire, vol. xxxi (1911), pp. 231-246; by P. Franchi de' Cavalieri in Studi e Testi, vol. xxiv (1912), pp. 57-66; and J. P. Kirsch in the Historisches Jahrbuch, vol. xxxviii (1917), pp路72-97路
ST CYBI,
OR
CUBY,
ABBOT
(SIXTH CENTURY)
OF the numerous Celtic saints whose feasts occur this month Cybi was probably one of the most important, but information about him is dependent chiefly on a very unreliable Latin vita of the thirteenth century and whatever can be gleaned from the evidence of place-names and local traditions. He was born in Cornwall, we are told, the son of Selyf (" St Levan "), and two old churches in his native county are dedicated in his honour, at Duloe, near Liskeard, and at Cuby, in Tregony. The life says he learned to read at seven, and twenty years later, after the common imaginary pilgrimage to Jerusalem, became a disciple of St Hilary, by whom he was made bishop at Poitiers. This is chronologically impossible. Cybi is supposed to have left Cornwall because he would not consent to be king there, and gone into what is now Monmouthshire; there is a place there called Llangibby, on the Usk. Then, by way of St David's Menevia, he visited Ireland and spent four years on Aranmore with St Enda. He had to leave there because of a dispute with another monk, called Fintan the Priest, about a straying cow, and he went to the south of Meath where he founded a church. But Fintan followed
295