The Metres of Boethius offer a unique opportunity to study the complex subject of Old English verse syntax. They enjoy this distinction because of the unusual way in which they were composed. The versifier did not work directly from the original Latin metra of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy but from an Old English prose intermediary, freely translated from the Latin originals. King Alfred was the author of the prose translation and was probably also responsible for turning the parts of the prose corresponding to the Latin metra into Old English verse. Since a copy of the prose model survives, it affords us an opportunity to compare the two versions in order to judge the versifier's debt to the prose. He apparently followed it quite faithfully and without referring back to the Latin originals. In many verse passages one can find words and half-lines which are direct transcriptions from the prose. Consequently the Old English Metres are generally considered nothing more than prose expanded into verse, adding only ‘poetic’ embellishments (like repetition and variation) and obvious morals drawn from the passage. The fruit of the versifier's labours may be uninspired poetry, but the way that he rearranged the words of the prose offers a rare glimpse into the more elusive conventions of verse-making. Since the many similarities make the differences quite pronounced, the poetical shortcomings of the Metres may be a blessing. A mediocre versifier is more likely to compose mechanically and to imitate established patterns than a good poet, whose virtuosity often conceals the rudiments of his craft.

It has long been accepted that royal households in the pre-Viking period subsisted on annual renders of food, sometimes termed feorm, from the free peasantry. This model of royal support is historiographically fundamental, in the sense that it is built into the foundations of much current thinking not just on the economics of kingship, but on its origins, and on the process of ‘manorialization’. This article argues that the texts which are conventionally read as references to these general-purpose food supplies are in fact concerned with feasts. This is apparent when we scrutinize both the content of food lists – which are so dominated by animal protein as to be inconsistent with the stable isotope evidence for elite diet examined in our companion article – and the contexts of documentary references to feorm and (in Latin) pastus. The article concludes with a review of the potentially far-reaching implications of this finding.

The pilgrimage to discriminate the styles of Anglo-Saxon architecture on which Dr Harold Taylor embarked with his late wife Joan some fifty years ago was brought to a majestic conclusion in 1978 by the publication of the third volume of Anglo-Saxon Architecture (hereafter AS Arch), the first two volumes of which appeared in 1965. It is a work in the mainstream of English antiquarianism, reaching back to the days of Camden, Aubrey, Stukeley and Horsley, and is to be compared in our own time only with Pevsner's The Buildings of England.

Hereward ‘the Wake’ is renowned as one of the leaders of the English resistance to the Normans in the late 1060s and early 1070s. His involvement in the resistance is noted by all main sources, even though the extent to which he was responsible for actions in Ely and Peterborough remains to be elucidated. He is listed as a pre-Conquest Lincolnshire landholder and tenant in Domesday Book, which is the only contemporary source to mention, but not date, his outlawry. Hereward's career as an outlaw is shrouded in mystery, due to the lack of detail in contemporary sources and also to the rise of stories incorporated in the Gesta Herewardi (The Deeds of Hereward), written in the twelfth century, which claim that he went as a mercenary to Cornwall, Ireland and Flanders. Two sections of the Gesta Herewardi are devoted to his exploits in the county of Flanders, and there is a curious third passage describing his relationship to Gilbert of Gent, the richest post-Conquest Flemish settler in England, who is said to have been Hereward's godfather. The purpose of this article is to take a fresh look at these passages and to assess them in the light of sources written on the Continent which seemingly confirm the Gesta sections on Flanders.

In his account of the contents of the second volume of London, British Library, Cotton Otho C. i, Kenneth Sisam drew attention to an unpublished sermon on the sins of the tongue to which he gave the title Evil Tongues. The sermon is written in the same hand as the two texts which precede it in the manuscript – an Old English version of St Jerome's Vita Malchi monachi captivi (henceforth Malchus) and a translation of a letter by Boniface (Wynfrith) on an anonymous priest's vision of the next world (henceforth Wynfrith's Letter) Sisam was unable to identify a source for the Evil Tongues sermon, but close parallels for most of the Old English text are found in anther work by Jerome, the exposition of Ps. CXIX in his Tractatus in Psalmos.

The ‘Old English Vision of Leofric, Earl of Mercia’ was first printed in a philological journal in 1908. It contains extremely interesting information about the arrangement and furnishings of two major Anglo-Saxon churches, Christ Church, Canterbury, and St Clement's Church, Sandwich. The Visio Leofrici is the only testimony, written or (apparently) archaeological, to the existence of St Clement's before the Conquest; it confirms and deepens aspects of our exclusively documentary knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral at Canterbury, which was destroyed by fire in 1067. Thus, it is particularly unfortunate that the Vision of Leofric, which has had but slight attention from students of language, literature or religious visions, has attracted even less notice from archaeologists, art historians and students of medieval liturgy.

The Old English account of the passion of St Vincent of Saragossa survives only in one late manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33, written in the second half of the twelfth century. This manuscript contains a large proportion of saints' lives by Ælfric, belonging mainly to his two series of Catholic Homilies and his later collection known as the Lives of Saints. The passion of St Vincent, from its alliterative style, reveals itself also to be the work of Ælfric. Since it was appended by W.W. Skeat to his edition of the Lives of Saints, it has generally been treated as part of the Lives of Saints collection, although there is no evidence that Ælfric himself ever added it to that set.

The editorial history of Old English poetry has known two extremes in its attitude to the transmitted manuscript readings. Whereas Franciscus Junius in his Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetic a Genesios ac Praecipuarum Sacrae Paginae Historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonice Conscripta & nunc Primum Edita (Amsterdam, 1655) aimed essentially at reflecting the readings of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, and was by and large successful in transcribing what the manuscript offered, by the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest an entirely different approach had become predominant. By then it had become clear that our manuscripts are by no means authors' originals; in the course of transmission numerous errors have crept into them. Since it was undeniable that in the copying process errors had occurred it was considered imperative to try to restore the original versions.

Among the fragments in the Newberry Library listed by Michael Masi in 1972,1 his item no. 15 was described as ‘ninth century’ and ‘insular’. When I examined them, the two leaves of this fragment proved to contain portions of three letters of Alcuin, written to Charlemagne in the late 790s.2 Copies of these letters are found in several ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts, but the only copy hitherto known to survive from Anglo-Saxon England is an elegant volume now in the library of Lambeth Palace, bound as the third part of manuscript 218, from the library at Bury St Edmunds.3 Both the Newberry fragments and Lambeth 218 deserve consideration both on palaeographical grounds and for what they reveal about the literary interests of Anglo-Saxon England. This study explores the circumstances in which they were produced, copied and read, in an effort to restore to them ‘the place, the traditions, the influences, the sources which explain the various aspects of its composition and contents; its destination and its purpose; the people who were involved’.4

The Beowulf poet tells us (194–201) that when his hero heard about Grendel's doings he had a good ship made ready for himself, saying he was minded to seek overseas the war-king (i.e. join Hrothgar), who stood in need of men. We learn further (202–4) that the wise men made no objection, though he was dear to them; they urged him on, saw (good) omens. These compatriots, presumably elders or councillors, come up again a little later, when the hero tells the Danish king:

King Hygelac himself was of another mind if we go by his words of welcome when Beowulf came home from Denmark:

On the face of it, then, king and council were at odds in the counsel they gave Beowulf, who chose to follow the bold rather than the safe course, despite his lord's pleas. A headstrong hero he.

Cultural archaism is often thought of as a natural concomitant of oral tradition, and by extension, of a literature that is influenced by oral tradition. In the case of Old English poetry, archaism might include residual pagan religious beliefs and practices, such as the funeral rites in Beowulf or the use of runes for sortilege, and certain outmoded aspects of social organization such as the idea of a state dependent upon the comitatus for military security. An example often cited is the adaptation of heroic terminology and detail to Christian topics. The compositional method in Cædmon's ‘Hymn’, for instance, is regarded by many scholars as an adaptation of panegyric epithets to the praise of God, although N. F. Blake has noted that heroic epithets in the poem could have derived their inspiration from the psalms. In The Dream of the Rood, the image of Christ mounting the Cross as a warrior leaping to battle has been regarded variously as evidence of an artistic limitation imposed by oral tradition, or as a learned metaphor pointing to the divine and human nature of Christ and to the crucifixion as a conflict between Christ and the devil. The martyrdom of the apostles is represented as military conflict in Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles, Christ and his apostles as king and comitatus in Cynewulf's Ascension, and temptation by devils as a military attack in Guthlac A; these illustrate a point made by A.B. Lord concerning the nature of conservatism in oral tradition: ‘tradition is not a thing of the past but a living and dynamic process which began in the past [and] flourishes in the present’.

This article rethinks the current assessment of the relationship between Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and his one time pupil Eve of Wilton, suggesting that the difference in their ages was less than André Wilmart assumed and that Eve was not an oblate of Wilton but a girl entrusted to the convent for education and safe-keeping. Drawing on the liturgical evidence for consecrations in Anglo-Saxon England and on the rhetoric of Goscelin's Liber confortatorius the article argues that Goscelin describes Eve's consecration (not oblation as Wilmart and others assume) and suggests a date around 1078 for the ritual. An appendix follows detailing surviving manuscript evidence for the consecration of nuns in Anglo-Saxon England.

In his Catalogus of British writers, John Bale's account of the tenth-century scholar, Frithegod, includes incipits for two hymns, of which the first, on Mary Magdalen (‘Dum pietas multimoda’), was long thought lost. In fact it is not lost, but has simply become uncoupled from its author's name, and is transmitted anonymously in three manuscripts of French origin, and in some Spanish liturgical books, whence it was first printed in 1897. Frithegod's authorship is suggested by Patrick Young's seventeenth-century catalogue of Salisbury Cathedral manuscripts. Young noticed two ‘carmina Frethogodi’ at the end of what is now Dublin, Trinity College 174 (a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Salisbury legendary), giving the incipit of the first as 'Dum pietas multimoda’. After Young had catalogued TCD 174, the page with the hymns must have become detached, and cannot now be traced. Frithegod may have composed the hymn while still at Canterbury, and then perhaps took a copy back to his native Auvergne, given that it ended up in an English manuscript but also circulated in France. Although the circumstances of composition are beyond recovery, I suggest that the hymn was originally intended not for the cult of Mary Magdalen (it was used thus in France), but rather to accompany the penitential rituals of Maundy Thursday. The article includes a text and translation of the hymn.

The Old English Life of St Neot has been generally dated to the twelfth century and dismissed as a late and derivative work. The article argues that it was written much earlier, in the first few decades of the eleventh century, and is both a significant example of late Old English hagiographic literature and an important witness to early legends about King Alfred and his posthumous reputation.

For nearly a century now, scholars have raised the question of the influence of the apocryphal Passio Andreae on The Dream of the Rood, but this suggestion has been discussed in terms of broad similarities. One striking specific parallel concerns the history of the Cross. In the accounts of the passion of Jesus in the gospels, Jesus is forced to bear the Cross from Jerusalem to Golgotha. In The Dream of the Rood, however, Jesus goes willingly to the place where the Cross (which has been used before) has already been set up. This account of the sequence of the passion corresponds exactly to the passion of Andrew in which Andrew goes willingly and of his own volition to a Cross which has been used as a gallows before. This correspondence, together with other points of similarity, suggest that The Dream of the Rood poet used some form of the Passio Andreae as a model for his narrative.

Reviving an argument of 1849, Tom Shippey has lately maintained that the dynasty name ‘Merovingian’ in Beowulf furnishes a firm criterion for attributing an early date to the poem. He contends, using an electronic database, that a deliberate damnatio memoriae caused the name ‘Merovingian’ to fade soon after the dynasty was deposed (751); its occurrence is therefore a terminus ad quem. This article shows that the Carolingians took pains to affirm continuity with their predecessors. The first Frankish dynasty was not condemned to oblivion. Its name was well known in the ninth century and occurs repeatedly in later historiography.

A hoard of 5,248 silver pennies discovered at Lenborough in Buckinghamshire in December 2015 is one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins ever found. Although the deposition of the hoard cannot be precisely dated, it must have been buried in the latter part of the reign of Cnut (1016–35). The hoard was wrapped in lead sheet, establishing without doubt that it represents a single deposit, but contains distinct parcels of coins from the reigns of Æthelred II (978–1016) and the latter part of the reign of Cnut, with a clear gap in between. The cataloguing of the hoard is ongoing, but this paper provides a preliminary description and interpretation of the hoard. While the hoard contains few coins of particular numismatic interest, it is argued that the hoard potentially provides important information for the administration of the late Anglo-Saxon coinage, and for changing patterns of monetary circulation in the reign of Cnut.

What remains of a single fragmentary folio, consisting of a vision from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, is discussed from the palaeographical and philological points of view. The writing of the fragment is placed within the context of Insular books written on the Continent, probably Werden, in the first half of the ninth century. Visual identification of script is made with another contemporary half-leaf. The three fragments are regarded as débris of a book of excerpts gathered from various writers. The formation of the collection as a whole is considered as reaching back behind the extant fragments to a lost eighth-century Insular source.