among the manumissions of
serfs in the Bodmin Gospels (10th century). They were printed by Whitley
Stokes in the _Revue celtique_, i. 232. Next comes the Cottonian
Vocabulary, which seems to follow a similar Anglo-Saxon collection and
is contained in a 12th-century MS. at the British Museum. It consists of
seven pages and the words are classified under various headings, such as
heaven and earth, different parts of the human body, birds, beasts,
fishes, trees, herbs, ecclesiastical and liturgical terms. At the end we
find a number of adjectives. This vocabulary was printed by Zeuss[2], p.
1065, and again in alphabetical order by Norris in the _Ordinalia_. The
language of this document is termed Old Cornish, although the forms it
contains correspond to those of Mid. Welsh and Mid. Breton.

The first piece of connected Cornish which we know consists of a poem,
or portion of a play(?), of forty-one lines discovered by Jenner in the
British Museum. This fragment was probably written about 1400 and deals
with the subject of marriage (edited by W. Stokes in the _Revue
celtique_, iv. 258). A little later is the _Poem of Mount Calvary_ or
_the Passion_, of which five MSS. are in existence. The poem has been
twice printed, first by Davies Gilbert with English translation by John
Keigwin (1826), and again by W. Stokes for the London Philological
Society in 1862. It consists of 259 stanzas of eight lines of seven
syllables apiece, and contains a versified narrative of the events of
the Passion made up from the Gospels and apocryphal sources, notably the
Gospel of Nicodemus. But the bulk of Cornish literature is made up of
plays, and in this connexion it may be noted that there still exist in
the west of Cornwall the remains of a number of open-air amphitheatres,
locally called _plan an guari_, where the plays seem to have been acted.
The earliest representatives of this kind of literature in Cornwall form
a trilogy going under the name of _Ordinalia_, of which three MSS. are
known, one a 15th-century Oxford MS. from which the two others are
copied. The _Ordinalia_ were published by Edwin Norris under the title
of _The Ancient Cornish Drama_ (Oxford, 1859). The first play is called
_Origo Mundi_ and deals with events from the Old Testament down to the
building of Solomon's temple. The second play, the _Passio Domini_, goes
on without interruption into the third, the _Resurrectio Domini_, which
embraces the Harrowing of Hell, the Res