Festival of St. Alban

Abstract

WITH regard to what is said concerning the date of this festival in the review of the “Life of St. Patrick” in NATURE of July 25 (p. 296), it is to be noted that there is really only one date for the festival. In the time of Bede (H. E., i., 7), as in the pre-Reformation calendars of the English Church, as well as in the Latin Prayer Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1560, the date is June 22. But when the festival reappeared in the English Prayer Book of 1662 it was placed on June 17, an obvious error which is supposed to have arisen from wrongly writing xvii. for xxii. In the Roman calendar the date is, of course, June 22.