Appendix A - The Anglo-Saxon Vocabulary of Metalworking

Summary

The following word-lists owe a great debt to three sources: the great Anglo- Saxon dictionary by Bosworth and Toller; A Thesaurus of Old English; and the microfiche and on-line versions of the Old English Dictionary based in Toronto, although other sources were consulted too, acknowledged in chapters 7 and 8 and below. Bold in these lists means that the term is found only in poetry; italics that it is found only in glosses. Where glosses have provided one or more Latin equivalents, these have also been included. Modern English versions of the same words where they have kept anything of the original meanings have also been listed; there are a few still used by craftsmen which have fallen out of the general vocabulary: these are added to the modern English gloss where known to the authors, but there are probably more.

The Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of metalworking has to be teased out from various sources, most of them belonging to the latest part of the period. It may have been the case that at least one manuscript of Mappae Clavicula was known in pre-Conquest England (chapter 1), but no Anglo-Saxon manuscript of that date actually survives. There is therefore no document of which the principal concern is to describe a metalworking process, or provide a recipe (of a solder, for example). We can show that a vocabulary for some of the materials, tools, techniques and workers exists, but not very often how this was used in the work situation. The majority of terms come from poetry, homilies and saints’ lives, where they are sometimes used descriptively, but too briefly to provide a real commentary on an object’s structure, or the real skills of a famous smith, and where, especially in the homiletic literature, they may also be derivative from earlier, non-Anglo- Saxon sources. Glosses are another major source, and they are valuable where they are not the only source for a technical term, in giving a Latin equivalent which may have a history of its own. There is in Old English a rich vocabulary for processes such as heating, melting, mixing, thinning and thickening, all of which would be required for certain metalworking processes, but in general they are found in relation to the preparation of food or medicines.