In a recent paper Michel Margue and Jean Schroeder have drawn a vivid picture of the intellectual life of the diocese of Trier in the time of Archbishop Egbert (977-93). They portray it as ‘a colourful and busy world of small and greater personalities, who give the impression of being constantly under way: budding students, renowned teachers, talented copyists or recognised authors who do not cease moving from place to place for the purpose of education and knowledge and who do not keep to the rule of stabilitas loci’. One of the greater personalities to whom Margue and Schroeder have drawn attention is an Englishman, Abbot Leofsige of Mettlach (c. 988-c. 993).

A poem by a French monk named Herbert petitions Wulfgar Abbot of Abingdon for a gift of warm clothing. The poem, a mock epic employing alliteration and hermeneutic vocabulary, presents the seasons as warring deities. Using similar technique in the final eight lines of the poem, Wulfgar denies Herbert with a humourous response. This article contains an edition, translation, and analysis of the poem, along with brief biographies of the two authors. Another work by Herbert, a prosimetric letter requesting an allowance of fish, is edited and translated in an appendix.

Despite the popularity of The Seafarer within Old English scholarship, the poem's governing logic remains unclear, in large part because of the enduring mystery surrounding the poem's use of the compound expression forþon. This study will argue that the repeated use of forþon in The Seafarer reflects the anaphoric repetition of causatives in the Psalter. Moreover, through its repetition of forþon clauses, the poem invites the reader to approach the text using interpretive strategies commonly associated with the Psalms. Especially in the commentaries of Augustine, Cassiodorus and Origen, allegorical interpretation of the Psalms is linked to theories of subjectivity: different levels of the Psalms’ meaning often reflect different interpretations of the Psalms’ first- person speaker. Drawing on this link between biblical allegory and patristic theories of the self, The Seafarer uses the Old English Psalms as a backdrop against which to develop a specifically Anglo-Saxon model of Christian subjectivity and asceticism. In the layered complexity of its imagery, the poem offers more than vernacular glossing of originally Latin allegory: it creates allegorical figures within the medium of Old English. Implicitly, the poem makes claims for the medium of the vernacular, as well as for the model of subjectivity belonging to it, as a vehicle for reflection and contemplation.

In a series of sketches by Elizabeth Gaskell, which appeared in Charles Dickens's weekly periodical Household Words between 1851 and 1853, the small Cheshire town of Knutsford was immortalized under the name Cranford. Mrs Gaskell, who had spent most of her childhood in Knutsford, knew the town and its inhabitants intimately and she returned to it as the setting for some of her later works, in which she called it ‘Eccleston’, ‘Dunscombe’ and ‘Hollingford’. Each of these four fictional names is convincing enough as the name of a small provincial town. Three of the names, indeed, are borne by settlements elsewhere in England, and the fourth, ‘Hollingford’, is close enough in form to the genuine names Hollington and Hollingworth to be acceptable. On her marriage, Elizabeth Gaskell had moved from Knutsford to Manchester and she exploited this commercial city, too, as the setting for some of her works. Her first published novel, Mary Barton (1848), actually bore the subtitle ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, but in later works the city appears under the fictional names ‘Drumble’ and ‘Milton’. Milton is a name which occurs quite frequently in England, although never as the name of a large city. Drumble is an artificial name – presumably a portmanteau word containing the words drear and rumble, which antedates Lewis Carroll's first exploitation of this device in a handwritten version of the poem Jabberwocky from 1855. Elizabeth Gaskell is not the only author to have coined a fictional name for Manchester in the course of time. Charles Dickens referred to it as ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times (1854), for example, and Louis Golding as ‘Doomington’ in Magnolia Street (1931).

The discovery of the early-seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 and the examination and analysis of the ship's contents in the years following have provided archaeologists and historians with a number of fascinating artifacts which remain the subject of great interest and debate. One of these objects in particular has aroused both admiration and puzzlement, namely the whetstone sceptre. In form the sceptre is an ornate, four-sided, stone bar 22.8 ins. long. Though made from the material commonly used to sharpen knives and swords there is no sign that it was ever used for that purpose, the very gentle smoothing of its sharp edges being such as would result from normal handling. And, again, symbolically important as it would have been in its character as a whetstone, it is too elaborate and too cumbersome ever to have been used as one. The stone bar is 2 ins. wide in the middle, narrows slightly towards the ends and terminates in two roughly spherical knobs. Each of these knobs has a stubby conical projection, and the lower and longer knob is tipped with a small bronze saucer secured to it by a cage of thin bronze ribs and several strands of wire. This is the bottom of the sceptre and it is possible to visualize the saucer resting on the thigh or kneecap of a seated king.

The Benedictine abbey at Malmesbury in Wiltshire was one of that select group of English houses which could trace its history back to the golden age epitomized and chronicled by Bede. To Bede's older contemporary Aldhelm (ob. c. 709) belongs most of the credit for setting the recently founded community on its feet and for making it a by-word throughout the British Isles for the pursuit of divine and secular learning.2 During his abbacy Malmesbury eclipsed the reputations of the Irish schools and of Hadrian's Canterbury. At only one other point in its long history did the abbey attain a comparable reputation for learning, when it housed the monk William (c. 1095–1143), whose career, intellectual interests and writings were consciously modelled upon the examples of Bede and Aldhelm.

A runic text that has, as far as I know, attracted little attention lurks at the bottom right-hand corner of Tabella III of part 3 of Hickes's Thesaurus. It has thirteen graphs, labelled ' e Cod. Cottoniano, Otho C. 5.p. 41‘. The graphs are the Anglo-Saxon runes:

Transliterated: ‗conslruieius‘, followed by what appears to be the bindrune ‘, that is, the late additional rune calc bound with ur. The sigel-Tune ‘s’ is a comparatively rare form found occasionally in manuscripts, on coins and in inscriptions. The other runes are common English types.

The silver ring illustrated in pl. IIIg has had a somewhat chequered history over the past years. From some time before 1911, when it was first published, until 1930 the ring was preserved in the Moyse's Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. In 1930 it was on display at the exhibition of English medieval art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It subsequently disappeared from public view. In 1969 the Hon. Robert Erskine presented it to the Moyse's Hall Museum where it remains, acquisition number K. 132.

In 1910, Samuel Brandt published a description and photograph of a fragment of Justinus's Epitome of the Historiae Philippicae of Pompeius Trogus. The leaf, whose present location is unknown, belonged at that time to the collection of Ernst Fischer at Weinheim. Fischer dated its script, an Anglo-Saxon minuscule, to about AD 800, which, as Brandt observed, would mean that it antedated the earliest known manuscripts of the text, which are ninth-century. Although E. A. Lowe indicated in his Codices Latini Antiquiores that the fragment was lost, it has continued to attract scholarly attention. Professor Bernhard Bischoff suggested that the fragment could be identified with a copy of Justinus listed among the books of Gerward, palace librarian of Louis the Pious. This implied connection with the Carolingian court, taken together with Alcuin's naming of Justinus's work among the books described in the poem on York and his later association with the Carolingian court, has raised the possibility of an English origin for the Weinheim manuscript and therefore also for the earliest known branch of the text. As L.D. Reynolds remarked, ‘This fragment has a significance quite out of keeping with its size.’

The manuscripts which contain the Old English translation of the gospels have been little studied since Skeat's compendious editions of the last century, yet the interest and importance of these codices, no less than that of the texts they preserve, should not be underestimated. The vernacular translation of a biblical text stands as a monument to the confidence and competence of Anglo-Saxon monastic culture; the evidence of the surviving manuscripts can offer insights into the development and dissemination of this text. The following study examines two fragments from an otherwise lost manuscript of the West Saxon gospels, which are preserved as an endleaf and parchment reinforcements in the binding of a fourteenth-century Latin psalter now in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Beinecke 578. I shall first discuss the psalter and its accompanying texts in the attempt to localize the manuscript and its binding. I shall then turn to the West Saxon gospel fragments; after presenting a description and, for the first time, a complete transcription, I shall attempt to locate this text in the context of other Anglo-Saxon gospel manuscripts.

In Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, on pp. 102–7, there are instructions for the tasks of a reeve, followed by several long lists of necessary tools and appurtenances. The closing list is preceded by mention of some particular kinds of craftsmen – mylewerde, sutere, leadgotan, contains some sixty terms of tools and equipment and concludes with the entries sapbox, camb, yrfebinne, fodderhec, fyrgebeorh, meluhudern, ælhyde, ofnrace, mexscofle. From the entry ælhyde BT Suppl enters with a query , ‘an eel-skin’, and Hall enters ǣlhyd queryingly defined as ‘eel receptacle’, ‘eel-skin’. Perhaps ælhyde is not a compound and perhaps æl does not mean ‘eel’.

The new bibliography by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson of the entire body of publications on Old English literature provides the occasion for reviewing not so much the bibliography itself as the subject it covers. This article is, of course, not a brief history of Anglo-Saxon studies from the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII's reign to the 1970s. It is a highly selective exemplification of some of the changing aims and achievements of scholars when they went to the vernacular records in prose and verse that survive from Anglo-Saxon times.

Cynewulf's dependence on Gregory the Great's Ascension Day homily for the structure and much of the subject matter of Christ II has been acknowledged since 1853. After commenting in some detail on the gospel text for the day (Mark xvi. 14–20) Gregory devotes the final third of his homily to more general reflections – ‘ut aliquid de ipsa tantae solemnitatis consideratione dicamus’ – on the theme of the elevation of human nature in the Lord's ascension: ‘Ascendente vero Domino, est humanitas exaltata.’ Though Cynewulf takes his lead from these general reflections of Gregory at every point, a comparison of poem and homily shows that in doing so he substitutes his own theme of God's continuing presence with man since the ascension in his gifts of grace. This article concerns this thematic change and its implications for the relationship of Christ II to Christ I and Christ III.

A great deal has been written about the geographical first chapter of the Old English Orosius since it attracted the attention of scholars in the sixteenth century. Not only has this chapter been a valuable source of information for historians and historical geographers, but also it has proved a fertile subject for speculation, particularly as regards the origins and accuracy of the modifications made in it to its Latin original. Most discussions have been concerned exclusively with the apparently independent section on the geography of Germania. Recently, however, a theory has gained favour which requires all the ‘new’ geographical information in this work to be taken into consideration: the theory that, to help him in his translation and adaptation, the author may have used a mappa mundi, a traditional map portraying the orbis terrarum of classical geographers. Thus Professor Labuda considers the source of certain additional details, such as the association of the Sabaei with Arabia Eudaemon and the location of the legendary Land of Women and Riphaean mountains north of the ninth-century Croats of Bohemia, to be a mappa mundi on which the author marked the positions of Germanic, Slav and Baltic countries. Dr Havlík and Professor Derolez suggest that the apparent clockwise deviation of a number of directions in Or. may similarly be due to the use of an enlarged mappa mundi. According to them, the author of Or. would seem to have described the relative positions of peoples and countries from the standpoint not of astrological north, south, east and west, but of cartographic oriens (near the mouth of the Ganges), meridies (south of the Nile), occidens (near the Pillars of Hercules) and septentrio (in the region of the river Tanais). Thus, for instance, the Abodriti, whose ‘centre’, Mecklenburg, was true north-east of the Old Saxons, are cartographic north of them, by virtue of their location on an imaginary line between Saxonia and septentrio. Finally, Dr Linderski, on the basis of possible classical sources that he has found for Or.'s siting of Dacia east of the Vistula and placing of an unnamed waste-land between Carentania and Bulgaria, has suggested that if the author did indeed use such a map – an alternative being a ‘description’ – it was almost certainly a late offspring of the Commentarii of Agrippa and his now lost mappa mundi.

It has traditionally been assumed that the so-called Agnus Dei penny of iEthelred the Unready (978–1016) depicts the dove of the Holy Spirit on the reverse. It is argued here that it may depict an eagle rather than a dove, so that the obverse alludes to the forgiveness of sins as described at Isaiah XL.1–2, while the reverse alludes to the effects of hope in the Lord subsequent to this forgiveness as described at Isaiah XL.29–31. Hence the coin may have been intended to proclaim the hope of Æthelred that, once the English have won the forgiveness of the Lord, they will ‘take wings as eagles’ and rout the Viking foe. If that was the case, however, the issue was quickly abandoned when it became clear that this would not in fact happen.

Cynewulf's runic signatures have long been understood as a playful means of preserving the poet's name, resembling Latin anagrams or the scrambled runes of Old English riddles. This essay re-evaluates the signatures' function, arguing that their form graphically enacts the concerns about the body, death and salvation that saturate each of Cynewulf's epilogues. When read through the lens of the common medieval grammatical analogy that equates the word's letters to the body and the word's meaning to the soul, the scattered letters of the signatures become a figure of Cynewulf's broken and sinful body; like the worm-eaten flesh described in the epilogue to Fates, Cynewulf's own name is reduced to its most elemental form. The reader's reassembly and comprehension of the dismembered signature as the name CYN(E)WULF thus create a simulacrum of the reconstituted body and its reunion with the soul at the resurrection, anticipating the salvation that Cynewulf asks his readers to help secure with their prayers.

The specifically maritime imagination of Anglo-Saxon poets resolves the potentially incongruous metaphorical models of the mind in this culture as both an enclosure and a wandering entity. The dual containing and travelling aspects of the ship provide a suitable model for the embodied yet metaphysical mind, and act in conjunction with the widespread metaphor of life as a sea voyage to produce a coherent means of imagining how the mind operates in relation to the body. The Wanderer and The Seafarer illustrate how acutely this conventionalized way of representing physical and mental experience relies on the sea voyage as both the setting for and metaphorical representation of a human consciousness that is both enclosed in the body and also able to transcend the physical.

A brief history of the tradition of birds as motifs on textiles is followed by a catalogue of the birds in the Bayeux Tapestry and a discussion of their function. The possible significance of identifiable birds (cocks, doves, peacocks, storks), the birds of Aesop's fables and the creatures in the border ‘bird scaring scene’ is analysed. The individuality, in colouring and position, of all the border birds is demonstrated and the apparent interest which many of them take in the action of the main register is highlighted to suggest that the border birds present a commentary on, and audience-participation in, the narrative.

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite.