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.

The Regularis Concordia was issued by the synod which met in Winchester in the early years of the 970s at the height of the English Benedictine reform movement. At this time perhaps as many as fifteen monasteries were either being planned or were in the course of construction. In spite of this building activity, very little is said directly in RC about the buildings of a community, but it contains a considerable amount of primary evidence concerning the assumptions and expectations which its compilers had about the buildings needed by an English monastery at that time. In RC there is no consciously stated ideal setting, like that of the later Cistercians, in which a monastic community should live the life prescribed in this consuetudinary. Certain anxieties are shown about the use to which some of the buildings are to be put, and, in one area – the guest house – improvements are suggested, but for the most part any information which we can gather is from incidental or casual reference.

Yale University, Beinecke Library, 401 contains twenty-six leaves of a ninth-century English manuscript of Aldhelm's De laudibus virginitatis. The manuscript has 189 Old English glosses in ink which were published by A. S. Napier in 1900. Napier also noted the presence of dry-point glosses in the manuscript, and in 1961 H.D. Meritt published twenty-six of these. I have found a total of 160 dry-point glosses and gloss fragments to 153 lemmata in the manuscript, which, other than Meritt's twenty-six, have not been printed before. Dry-point glosses are often neglected in studies of glossing, no doubt due to the difficulty of reading marks scratched into the parchment without ink; I have therefore prefaced my list of glosses and their lemmata with a discussion of dry-point glossing and what it can reveal concerning education in Anglo-Saxon England.

When Old English studies were in their infancy in the seventeenth century, scholars such as Franciscus junius (1591–1677) had very little to study in print. With no grammar and no dictionary (until Somner's in 1659) they had to teach themselves the language from original sources. Junius, whose interest in Germanic studies became active in the early 1650s, was so proficient, not only at Old English, but also at the cognate languages that he became virtually the founding-father of Germanic philology. Over the years Junius made transcripts in his own distinctive imitation-Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of many Old English texts, transcripts that have subsequently proved invaluable, especially where the original manuscripts have been damaged or lost.

Cambridge, St John's College 42 (B. 20) is a Latin manuscript, dated as twelfth century and tentatively placed at Worcester. It contains 136 folios, closely written in double columns of forty-five lines each, in which a range of abbreviations has been used. By these means a quantity of material has been presented, including two collections of homilies/sermons, a calendar, extracts from the works of named authors and miscellaneous smaller items. The most notable of the sermons for Anglo-Saxonists is a new text of Archbishop Wulfstan's Latin composition, De Anticristo, but it keeps company with other anonymous sermons, some of which are variant texts of sermons copied or composed in English manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon historical period. The manuscript needs a closer study than those done by M.R. James, who catalogued the anonymous items without identification, or by H. Schenkl, whose catalogue is incomplete although it includes some identifications. Identification of the anonymous items, with notice of parallel texts in other manuscripts where possible, helps to confirm the date of the manuscript, suggests that its place of origin was Worcester, and allows speculation on the canon of Wulfstan's Latin writing.

A modern field project in archaeology is a co-operative enterprise serving an extensive and diverse public. We can no longer afford to disturb the bones of our ancestors under the mantle of serendipity or academic intuition. The archaeologist, as the one person destined ever to see the evidence at first hand, strives for the virtue of enlightened impartiality, and sets off like an explorer, constrained by communal responsibilities and armed with a list of questions furnished by a wide variety of clients. Since Sutton Hoo has been hailed as the most vivid and instructive set of archaeological evidence for the seventh-century yet identified, Anglo-Saxon questions dominate this lengthy agenda. What was the status of the great ship burial discovered there in 1939? What was the role of the cemetery in which it lay? Why was it sited in that particular place, on a scarp above the River Deben in south-east Suffolk (see pi. V)? Was it the burial ground of kings, and were they kings of East Anglia? Was it a national centre or an overdeveloped version of the local mortuary culture? Is it diagnostic of a formative kingdom, or out of joint with the times, the outstation of a religious and political affiliation alien to the hinterland? What was its connection with Scandinavia and the Scandinavians? Were its people Anglo-Saxon, or Anglian or Saxon or British or multi-racial? Was it typical or unique?

In ‘Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer’, John C. Pope gracefully retracted his earlier suggestion that The Seafarer and The Wanderer contain ‘dramatic voices’ and, in the process of retraction, generously acknowledged my own challenge to his two-speaker theory. In this later essay Professor Pope makes a number of illuminating comments about problems in The Seafarer: I feel especially enlightened by his evidence and argument that the phrase gifre ond grædig (62a) is apt for the bird-soul (the hyge-anfloga) of the speaker contemplating what is spiritually good, conveying ‘precisely the overwhelming desire, comparable to the fierce greediness of a bird of prey but purified by its object, that the seafarer feels for what he is about to name as “Dryhtnes dreamas”, “the joys of the Lord”’.

Although Beowulf scholars have now generally accepted Frederick Klaeber's emendation … Finne / [ea]l unblitme (1128b–9a), the meaning of unblitme has remained in some doubt. Professors Dobbie and Rosier have held that unblitme means literally ‘without casting of lots’ and by extension ‘without choice”, Dobbie explaining that Hengest, ‘having no choice, was forced to remain with Finn’ and Rosier affirming that he did so ‘entirely with lack of choice’. Their view of unblitme has for some time gone unchallenged. But lately Professor Fry has dissented, contending briefly that ‘“without casting of lots” should produce just the opposite of “having no choice”. Casting lots throws the result up to chance, and so un-blitme should logically mean “not by chance”, that is “voluntarily”.’ There can be little question, I think, that Fry is right in rejecting the older view of unblitme. To take unblitme to mean ‘having no choice’ is to equivocate on the word ‘choice’. Any hlitm, ‘casting of lots’, would imply ‘choice’ in the sense ‘decision pursuant to lots and not to one's desires’. But the translation ‘having no choice’ means much more than this; it means ‘unwillingly‘free choice, choice pursuant to one's desires‘.

The author or compiler of the saga of Edward the Confessor Saga Játvarðar konungs bins helga frequently refers to his sources. Sometimes he does this in vague terms such as ‘svá segja sannfróðir menn’ (ch. 1) and ‘segja menn’ (ch. 6). At other times he seems to be bringing together two sources as in the phrases ‘Þat er ok sumra manna sögn’ (ch. 6) and ‘Ok er þpat margra manna sögn’ (ch. 8). Two references indicate English provenance for part of his material: ‘Svá segja Enskir menn’ (ch. 5) and ‘Þat er sögn Enskra manna’ (ch. 8). He also mentions Scandinavian sources, indicating awareness of Danish tradition in ‘Ok þat hafa Danir til þess’ (ch. 9) and alluding to a history of the kings of Norway in ‘Sem sagt er í Æfi Noregs-konunga’ (ch. 7). But he does not always find Scandinavian scholarship well-informed: ‘Þá þykkjaz fróðir menn í Noregskonungs veldi eigi (víst) vita hverr þessi konungr hefir verit.’ Fortunately Icelandic learning can supply the missing detail: ‘þat er sagt frá orðum Gizurar Hallz sonar, eins hins vitrasta mannz á Íslandi’ (ch. 2). This is his only reference to an authority by name.

St Jerome's third Latin translation of the Sefer Tehillim or ‘Book of Psalms’ is called the iuxta Hebraeos or Hebraicum, because he based it on the original Hebrew in which it was composed in order to obtain the greatest authenticity possible. Preceded by the so-called Romanum version of c. 384, which was primarily a translation of the Greek Septuagint, and the Gallicanum of c.392 which was a revision of it based on Origen's hexaplaric Septuagint text, the Hebraicum version of c. 400 represents an attempt by Jerome to produce a Latin translation as close as possible to the Hebrew text. However, despite its greater accuracy with respect to the Hebrew original, the Hebraicum was apparently never used in the liturgy, and was preserved solely as a patristic text in bibles or psalters for scholarly use.

This article offers a new appraisal of the Scandinavian evidence relating to Beow – a figure who surfaces in a range of Anglo-Saxon sources as a member of the famous Scylding dynasty. The well-known appearances of Beow in Old Norse genealogical material and in the composition known as Kálfsvísa are first reviewed, along with their evolving status in the critical history of Beowulf. New evidence is then adduced from the text known as Bjarkarímur, which attests to a more extensive Scandinavian tradition surrounding Beow than has previously been acknowledged. The expanded dossier of Old Norse evidence pertaining to Beow allows, in turn, for reflections on the development of traditions surrounding this figure in Anglo-Saxon England, and the manner of their transmission to Scandinavia.

‘Eaduuius surnamed Basan’ is one of the small number of late Anglo-Saxon scribes to be known by name, and he is unquestionably the most important. Eadwig Ü the Old English name represented by the Latin ‘Eaduuius’–identified himself in a colophon to the small but exquisite gospelbook, Hanover, Kestner-Museum, WM XXIa, 36 (see pl. V); and his distinctive hand has been recognized in a further three gospelbooks or lectionaries, three psalters, and three or four charters. It is on this corpus of material that our knowledge of him rests. The colophon does not, unfortunately, contain much information and it is highly formulaic; it is all the more important, therefore, to interpret its words judiciously. Before we turn to the text, however, it will be helpful to rehearse the salient points of Eadwig's career, in so far as they are known.

The two poems dedicated to King Edgar in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscripts ABC can be dated with some precision. This essay consequently reads the Edgar poems as contemporary products of two very different historical moments during the Benedictine reform. Written from a distinctly monastic perspective, the poem for 973 was one of many ideological texts and events from late in Edgar's reign committed to affirming the king's divinely-sanctioned sovereignty. The 973 poem realigns the function of verse in the Chronicle, adopting dynastic praise poetry to more ecclesiastical concerns. The poem for 975, however, breaks with the Chronicle precedent of panegyric verse and instead offers a critical complaint against the attacks on monastic landholdings in the wake of Edgar's death. The two Edgar poems can be best appreciated as historically-situated verse productions.

This article maps the textual transmission of the Vita S. Aegidii to identify the routes of its reception in Anglo-Saxon England. It shows how the Mass of Giles in Leofric's Missal offers new evidence of Leofric's links to the Liège area. The collation between the Old English Life of St Giles and the critical edition of the Latin source indicates first that the Life was translated from a Latin copy related to Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reginensis 497, containing a palimpsest of the Old English Orosius; second, it highlights the continuing exchanges between the Trier region and England in the eleventh century; and third, it applies inter-lingual transmission in order to understand translation practice. A new edition and translation of the Latin vita are included.

This article proposes ‘military standard’ or ‘banner’, OE segn, as the solution to the problematic Exeter Book Riddle 55 (Ic seah in healle…). The solution addresses each of the clues offered by the riddle-poet, using an object with attested sociocultural significance to the early English people. In so doing, it attempts to resolve several longstanding critical questions surrounding the riddle, and highlights some of the sociocultural insights to be gained from this riddle-solution pair.

A little over five per cent of surviving Anglo-Saxon charters contain some reference to money or purchase. These cover a multitude of transactions: gifts, sales, bequests, annual renders, and so on. They provide a valuable insight into Anglo-Saxon perceptions of wealth and a detailed view of one specific area of exchange. Gold and precious-metal objects emerge as especially prominent, at the expense of silver coin. The formulation of these documents, however, presents a number of obstacles to interpretation, particularly in that no definitive distinction between charters of gift and sale developed in Anglo-Saxon England. Diverse forms of transactions can be exemplified among them – outright purchase, payment for book-right (with or without an earlier claim to the land in question) and gifts to neutralize potential challenges of title – but these show little correlation with ‘price’ or with the complex social background to every act of exchange.

This article analyses the uses of Latin and Old English in the charters of Worcester cathedral, which represents one of the largest and most linguistically interesting of the surviving Anglo-Saxon archives. Specifically focused on the period encompassing the episcopates of Wærferth and Oswald (c. 870 to 992), this survey examines a time of intense administrative activity at Worcester, contemporaneous with significant transformations in the political and cultural life of Anglo-Saxon England more generally. In doing so, this article argues that when writing in either Latin or the vernacular, charter draftsmen responded to a number of variables; language choice did not simply reflect varying levels of literacy. Furthermore, the frequent cases of code-switching found in tenth-century Worcester documents mark this community out as exceptional, suggesting that attitudes towards the interaction between the two languages could vary considerably between institutions.

This paper presents an experimental attempt to investigate the social contexts of certain Old English vocabulary belonging to a particular semantic field, namely that of colour. Sociolinguistic studies are concerned with language variations between social classes, age groups, the sexes and other social groupings, so it is obvious from the outset that this sort of evidence will be difficult to retrieve from a dead language. However, in the case of this particular semantic field, textual information can often be augmented by comparative evidence from the colour semantics of living languages, and by the theories about colour term acquisition and usage developed by linguists and anthropologists.