In the dramatic confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh that preceded the Israelites' departure from Egypt, Pharaoh's magicians played a prominent role: they turned their rods into serpents, if only to have them devoured by Moses's serpent, and then matched the first two plagues brought down on the Egyptians before failing to perform the third (Ex. VII. 11–VIII. 19). Although not named here or elsewhere in the Old Testament, they were identified in II Timothy III.8 as ' ιανν⋯ς and ιαμβρ⋯ς (the Latin forms are usually ‘Iannes’ or ‘Iamnes’ and ‘Mambres’) in a remark that suggests that a considerable tradition had already arisen concerning them: ‘Now just as jannes and Mambres resisted Moses, so these also resist the truth, men corrupted in mind, reprobate concerning the faith.’ Two fragmentary Greek papyri (Pap. Vindob. G 29456 verso, in the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; and Pap. XVI, in the Chester Beatty Library and Gallery of Oriental Art, Dublin), dated to the third and fourth centuries respectively, confirm the existence of at least one early apocryphon about the brothers. The problem of interpreting these fragments, however, is complicated by a bewildering array of references to the two in various languages, which results from both the importance of Exodus to Jews and Christians, and the connection of the brothers to magic. Albert Pietersma and R. Theodore Lutz note that ‘the precise relationship between the loose traditions and the written composition’ is ‘not yet entirely clear’.

In the period from Alfred's reign to the Norman Conquest scribes and artists in southern England once more achieved a high standard in bookmaking, comparable to the brilliant tradition which had been established in both the north and the south in the eighth century. Some codices survive which are rough in execution, written on poorly prepared membrane by unskilled hands, but the majority – by no means chiefly service books produced for ecclesiastical and royal patrons – demonstrate that by the end of the tenth century a large number of scribes understood the techniques of careful preparation of membranes and inks, had mastered the letter-forms of two scripts, Caroline minuscule and Anglo-Saxon square minuscule, and were disciplined to follow consistently a hierarchy of scripts for the openings of texts and major divisions, chapter titles, incipits and explicits. What remains must be only a fragment of the production of Benedictine monks and nuns, secular clerks and lay scribes. But however incomplete and unbalanced the evidence, the over-all level of accomplishment cannot be doubted.

To offer a solution to Riddle 57 must seem to many like a fool rushing swiftly in where others have swallowed gnats – and raindrops, hailstones, thunderclouds, musical notes, bees and more. Yet for a long time I have been convinced that everyone else had got it wrong, and that the answer could only be ‘swifts’. On further investigation, it turned out that some scholars, indeed, had had the same idea – it was Moritz Trautmann's final solution, and Cyril Brett thought of swifts but rejected them in favour of starlings – and that it was only (as it were) half-right. However, it still seems worthwhile attempting to demonstrate that, at least on the literal level, swifts are the only possible answer. I shall therefore dissect Riddle 57, discussing the identity of its subject under four headings: appearance, locomotion, habitat and call. Though initially ignoring the riddle's last half-line, I shall not forget it.

A great weight of authority supports the view that Bede was averse to pagan rhetoric and had never read anything of its formative literature. I have briefly questioned this opinion elsewhere, and should like now to investigate it more fully. The evidence, of Bede's biblical commentaries in particular, suggests first, that his attitude toward Roman rhetoric was ambivalent, as was that of Augustine and Cicero; secondly, that his knowledge of it reached into the theory of invention; and finally, that he had access to Cicero's De inventione.

The chapters in Bede's De temporum ratione begin with an etymology for the name of the subject to be examined. Sources and analogues for some have not hitherto been identified. This article shows that some of these etymologies of words for the divisions of time come ultimately, though perhaps not directly, from bk XI of Virgil the Grammarian's Epitomae. These accounts of the origins of calendrical and cosmological terms wound their way through early western computistical works and eventually into Bede's De temporum ratione. The article identifies examples of Virgil's influence on anonymous early medieval biblical commentaries and discusses their significance as pointers towards their place of composition.

The Ordinance concerning the Dunsæte sets out regulations for dealings between the English and Welsh in some part of the frontier between these two peoples. The text is widely assumed to be from the second quarter of the tenth century, but this article argues for a late-tenth- or eleventh-century date. The Ordinance envisages trade and prescribes procedures to settle disputes: it thus reveals cordial contacts between those dwelling along the frontier. This offers an alternative perspective to the focus on kings and conflicts found in many modern accounts of relations between the English and Welsh in the early medieval period.

In this, my third article on the sources of Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, the fourteenth-century Icelandic saga of Edward the Confessor, I hope to cover all the material that I have not dealt with previously. In my first article, on the hagiographical sources, I suggested that the saga writer used two specific texts, a service book containing the lections for St Edward's day and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. In my second one, on the saga's version of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium, I showed that this account was very closely related to the one in the anonymous and unpublished Chronicon Laudunensis. Here I wish to show the full extent of the saga's debt to CL. In doing this I also need to show how the saga writer used Scandinavian sources, a range of material that he acknowledges when he refers us to what is said í æfi Noregskonunga. The specific saga which he has utilized most fully is that of Harald Hardrada, Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar. Since he was compiling JS in the fourteenth century, HS would have been available to him in a number of recensions. Extant ones include the early-thirteenth-century Msk and Fsk, both of which may have been utilized by Snorri Sturluson in Hkr later in that century. Some of the later manuscripts of Hkr, such as Eirspennill, include interpolations and there are compilations, such as the fourteenth-century Hulda, which combine material from Msk and Hkr. The evidence indicates that the compiler of JS knew HS in more than one of these redactions.

The village recluse, avowed to remain in his or her cell, was a feature of the later medieval landscape, but in what circumstances did recluses and the notion of a distinct reclusive vocation emerge? Examining the earliest recluses identifiable, this article contends that reclusion as such, though not without precedent, gained popularity in England in the third quarter of the eleventh century and acquired a terminology (already current on the Continent) in its last third as an expression of the ascetic movement within the emerging parish.

In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

The process through which glossaries came into being can sometimes still be seen and studied in surviving manuscripts, and in such cases it provides a valuable index to the way in which Latin texts were studied in medieval schools. This is the case with an unprinted glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i. The glossary is mainly made up of words taken from bk III of the Bella Parisiacae urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a work which was widely studied in English schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all because of its unusual vocabulary. We know that Abbo drew the unusual vocabulary in his poem from pre-existing glossaries such as the Liber glossarum and the Scholica graecarum glossarum; but he also took from these works the interlinear glosses which he provided for the difficult words in bk III of his poem, and these in turn are found, with little variation, in all of the manuscripts which preserve the poem. Now under the rubric ‘Incipiunt glossae diversae’ in Cotton Domitian i are collected some two hundred lemmata from bk III of the poem, followed in each case by one or more glosses; on examination these glosses are found to be identical with those which accompany the text in other manuscripts. The glossary in Domitian i thus provides a working model of how a glossary was compiled, and is a further witness to the popularity of Abbo's poem in Anglo-Saxon England.

The study of Old English metre has a long and illustrious history, yet it seems fair to say that the work of many respected scholars over the past hundred years has not produced unanimity. One reason for this is that objective and unequivocal evidence about the metre of Old English poetry is very difficult to discover. That is, before evidence is considered, or even collected, a substantial amount of interpretation and analysis has usually taken place. In the following pages, however, I shall present some previously unnoticed and quite unequivocal evidence about Old English metre that does not depend upon any particular metrical theory or upon unsupported assumptions, but rather upon the uncontroversial and universally accepted fact that Old English poetry requires a minimum of two alliterating stresses, one in each verse (or half-line), and allows two alliterations on the same sound only in the a verse.

Milred, who was bishop of Worcester from 743 × 745 to 774 × 775, is almost as shadowy a figure in the history of Anglo-Latin literature today as he was in the sixteenth century when John Leland recorded in his Commentarii de Scriptoribus Britannicis: ‘invidiosa vetustas Milredi monumenta destruxit’. The only composition by Milred that has come to light, in a single ninth-century continental manuscript, is the letter of consolation that he sent to Lull of Mainz after St Boniface's martyrdom. Apart from its inherent interest, this letter, with its elegant use of Vergilian echoes, is a valuable indication of Milred's literary interests and aspirations. Better still, it ends with a tantalizing glimpse of the literary world in which Milred lived: a postscript in which he apologizes for failing to send a copy of the picture poems of Optatianus Porphyrius because Cuthbert, the archbishop of Canterbury, had failed to return them. It was perhaps this very copy of Porphyrius that served as the model for the decoration of the Codex Aureus (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, A. 135), which may have been produced at St Augustine's, Canterbury, during Cuthbert's time.

In the past few years a real advance has been made in the appreciation of Cynewulf's shortest signed poem, the Fates of the Apostles, extant in the Vercelli Book. For most of the century and more since this poem was first published critical opinion has been almost unanimously unfavourable about its literary merit and until recently scholarly attention has been limited mainly to textual and source investigations. Today, however, illuminating studies, such as those by James L. Boren and Constance B. Hieatt, have made us aware of the poem's subtleties of image and structure. In particular, now that we have begun to apprehend the depth of the poem's meaning, I believe that we can use this understanding to gain further insight into the thematic concerns of Cynewulf's other three signed poems. This can be achieved, I suggest, through recognizing how the basic theme of the Fates reappears as a motif linking Cynewulf's epilogues.

In a letter written to King Æthelred of Northumbria in or soon after 793, Alcuin bewails the appalling aftermath of the Viking attack on Lindisfarne. He writes, ‘vineam electam vulpes depredarunt, hereditas Domini data est populo non suo. Et ubi laus Domini, ibi ludus gentium. Festivitas sancta versa est in luctum.’1 Alcuin's horror at Viking merriment is shared by a great many other medieval historians in their accounts of the depredations of the Norsemen. Adam of Bremen, for instance, laments the Vikings' assault upon the Franks in 882, in which they made so bold as to attack King Charles III himself, and generally ‘made sport of our people‘.2 Florence of Worcester similarly deplores the brutality of Sveinn Forkbeard's men, who invaded East Mercia in 1013, all the while ‘revelling in acts of savagery‘.3 William of Malmesbury remarks on the ungentle sense of humour of Cnut the Great, who, after inviting Earl Uhtred of Northumbria to surrender himself into his custody, promptly had his hostage put to death, as William puts it, ‘with inhuman levity‘.4 In short, it is not unusual to find medieval chroniclers expressing their distaste for the evident pleasure invading Scandinavians occasionally derived from committing acts of atrocity.

The Old Testament translations in the compilation known as the Old English Hexateuch or Heptateuch are based on good Vulgate exemplars. That is to say, where variation can be demonstrated between the version associated with Jerome's late fourth-century revision and the pre-Hieronymian ‘Old Latin’ versions, the Old English translations can be shown to derive from exemplars carrying the former. The opening of Genesis–‘On angynne gesceop God heofonan 7 eorðan. seo eorðe soðlice was idel 7 æmti’–illustrates this general rule. Behind it is the Vulgate ‘in principio creauit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et uacua”, not a version with the characteristic ‘old’ readings, such as fecit for creauit and inuisibilis et inconpositas for inani et vacua. Indeed, much of the Old English translation, especially in Genesis, is sufficiently full and faithful for the identification of specific Vulgate variants in the exemplar text to be made with some confidence and for the influence on it of the important Carolingian revisions asssociated with Orléans and Tours to be demonstrated. There is, however, a small number of Old English readings throughout the Heptateuch for which Latin parallels in the thirty or so collated Vulgate manuscripts are unknown or hardly known. Instead, they appear to derive from models available in pre-Hieronymian texts. Uncertainty often surrounds their identification, owing to the complexities both of the translation process and the history of the Latin Bible. Understanding their origins involves consideration of the influence of patristic literature and the liturgy, as well as the availability of ‘contaminated’ exemplar texts.

Farað witodlice and Iærað ealle þeoda and fulligeaþ hig on naman fæder and suna and þæs halgan gastes, and lærað þæt hig healdon ealle þa ðing þe ic eow behead (Matt. XXVIII.19–20).

With these words at the end of the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus sends out his disciples to spread the words and deeds of the Lord to all peoples. With respect to the Anglo-Saxons, this order was impressively executed by the earliest translation of the Vulgate gospels into a vernacular, the West Saxon Gospels (WSG). This text, from the late tenth or early eleventh century, survives in four complete manuscripts (A, B, C, Cp) and two fragments (F, L) from the Old English period and two complete manuscripts from the late twelfth century (R and its copy H).

Starting with evidence from law-codes, this article traces how penance was increasingly integrated into later Anglo-Saxon legal culture, arguing that this process opened the way for ritualized acts of satisfaction to become a regular feature of contemporary dispute settlement. The rituals used in such contexts often borrowed symbols and concepts from the world of penance, with the central idea being that an offender who repented and humbled himself was worthy of pardon. A few detailed accounts of such settlements survive and to these we may add cases of restitution and political reconciliation, which witness a similar logic. Taken together, these suggest that the stark contrasts often drawn between English and continental (particularly German) disputing in these years are in need of some revision. Far from being ‘fiercely punitive’, later Anglo-Saxon justice was characterized by a complex mix of formalized punishments and more informal means of settlement, not unlike what is visible in the Ottonian Reich.

London, British Library, Harley 3271 is a composite manuscript designed for use in teaching Latin, and contains Ælfric's Grammar beside other pedagogical works. The book also contains a large number of miscellaneous items, and fourteen scribal hands. Many of the texts point to the usual interests of the Anglo-Saxon scholar in computus and prognostics, while others suggest an interest in the tradition of numerical notes. The items written by Scribe C, the only one whose stints are spread throughout the blank space of the composite volume, point to a combined interest in education, numbers and the Jewish people.

The enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

This article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, æppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem.