10 Against disease, against hurts, against thunder, against fire.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
20 Every chaste disciple who was tortured for Christ,
Every meek, every gentle, every candid, every pure person,
Every confessor, every soldier, who happens to live under the sun, |293
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
31 May they protect me henceforth from the demons of the mist,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36 May I be under the hand of God in every danger."
But a fragment, without any title whatever, has come to light lately, which, in,some respects, bears a far closer resemblance to the Lorica of Gildas than any known before. It was published, with valuable comments, by Dr. V. H. Friedel in the Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, Band ii, I s., 64 ff. (1898), from a Leyden MS., under the title La Lorica de Leyde. This valuable piece of Celtic Latinity has, certainly, remarkable points of similarity when compared with our Lorica, chiefly in the detailed enumeration of parts of the human body expressed in very rude Latin terms, of the origin of which, and the meaning, in fact, it is extremely difficult to give account. Several of these are common to the two Hymns, and, as we shall note presently, to other fragments and writings acknowledged to be of Celtic origin and character. In addition to this, the style of invocation has a partial resemblance to that of Gildas. with a notable difference: there are the same invocations addressed to angelic hosts, patriarchs, confessors, apostles and martyrs, but the invocation of the Trinity, found in Gildas' Lorica and found in other Loricae, is wanting. I am strongly inclined to believe that the Leyden piece is not a Lorica in the true sense, that is as a prayer for protection; it repeats two petitions only, first, that the body in all its members be searched; secondly, that heavenly powers and saints cleanse the heart of him (or her, n.b. illam) who makes use of the prayer. There is here no idea that we connect with a Lorica. The direction, however, given in the first line for the recitation or reading of Psalm 101 (102 of the English or Welsh version) may imply that the Psalm itself is the Lorica, while the fragment is the prayer of a penitent. ...
[The remainder of the introduction was not available to place online owing to the absence of pp.294-5 from the photocopy used for the online edition.]
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