Readers of Beowulf are now in apparent agreement that the frequent Christian references in the poem fit easily and naturally into their contexts and give every sign of being simply an unconscious part of the normal language and thought of the poet. We must make the customary proviso, to be sure, that by ‘poet’ we have in mind the final reteller of some older pre-Christian story or stories now beyond recovery. The old Monkish Interpolator who used to be hauled out and execrated by scholars for smearing his despicable Christian Colouring like graffiti over a noble pagan monument has vanished like the ghost he always was. He has, however, now been replaced by equally busy Monkish Extrapolators working tirelessly to insert large sections of the Patrologia Latina somewhere between the lines of Beowulf. In doing so, they take advantage of the undeniable fact that the early Middle Ages provided an ample supply of patristic material, to argue (I think indefensibly) that it must have been put to use – that no vernacular poet could have fought off the urge to wrap any plain tale he had to tell in rich folds of typology, allegory and deeper meanings.

There is a lingering notion among Beowulf scholars, despite Chauncey Tinker's effort to dispel it eighty years ago, that the Beowulf manuscript is slowly but inexorably crumbling away in its modern home in the British Library. The gloomy news for a general audience is that the manuscript, ‘charred at the edges by the fire’ that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731, ‘continues to deteriorate year by year’. A scholarly audience gets the same impression from Norman Davis, who gives us a reproduction of an old transliteration beside new photographs of the manuscript. He says, ‘Zupitza's transliteration … has permanent value as a record of what he could see in the manuscript in 1880–2’, a comment that certainly implies that Zupitza was able to see more in the manuscript a century ago than we can see today. In fact, with the aid of modern artificial lighting, notably fibre-optic and ultra-violet light, we can see far more in the manuscript today than Zupitza was able to see in 1882.

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.

The bulk of Old English literature, both poetry and prose, has come down to us in manuscripts of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Most of the texts in these late manuscripts are written in a form of Old English called late West Saxon. This dialect was used not only by West Saxon scribes and authors of that period but also by their contemporaries from other dialect areas, and the scribes employed it even when they were copying much earlier Old English texts, such as the early West Saxon Alfredian prose texts or the early Anglian glosses in the Vespasian Psalter. Late West Saxon thus cannot be looked upon as a regionally restricted dialect but – with certain reservations – as a written standard current in all of late Anglo-Saxon England.

Among the relics in the treasury of the church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Limburg, Belgium, there are some luxurious embroideries which form part of the so-called casula (probably ‘chasuble’) of Sts Harlindis and Relindis (pls. I–VI). It was preserved throughout the Middle Ages at the abbey church of Aldeneik (which these sister-saints founded in the early eighth century) and was moved to nearby Maaseik in 1571. Although traditionally regarded as the handiwork of Harlindis and Relindis themselves, the embroideries cannot date from as early as their time, and they must have been made in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, they represent the earliest surviving examples of the highly prized English art of embroidery which became famous later in the Middle Ages as opus anglicanum.

When Ælfric wrote that ‘every mass-priest should have a mass-book and epistle-book and song-book and reading-book and psalter and handbook and penitential and kalendar’, there is every possibility that by ‘song-book’ he was thinking of a book containing not just chant texts, but also their melodies. A type of musical notation recognized as Anglo-Saxon appears in more than one hundred manuscript sources of the late tenth and the eleventh centuries, many of which may be linked with major ecclesiastical centres such as Worcester, Exeter, Sherborne, Canterbury, Durham and Winchester. Whilst it is possible that knowledge of musical notation reached England via northern France during the ninth century, it was apparently not until after the mid-tenth century, when the Benedictine revival occasioned numerous contacts between England and the continent, that music-writing became established in Anglo-Saxon England. Several Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of the late tenth century have contemporary notation, and they show the use at this period of two different neumatic systems. One system – closely related to northern French notations, particularly those of Corbie — was to set the pattern for the great majority of eleventh-century English notations; the other type, related to notations of Breton provenance, appears mainly confined to sources originating in south-west England. The breadth of notational detail found in one of the so-called Winchester Tropers (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 473) indicates that the practice of notating music was well established, at least at Winchester, by the year 1000.

In the second half of the twelfth century Northampton was one of the largest and wealthiest towns in all England. This represented, however, only a transient phase, since by the early part of the fourteenth century the town had assumed a more modest position. As a result of a series of disastrous fires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, little now survives to remind us of Northampton's former medieval glories, and its earlier development has been until recently but dimly perceived. Over the last decade, however, archaeological and other research has facilitated the identification of elements of continuity in the upper Nene basin (in which Northampton lies) stretching back several thousand years. In particular it is now possible to demonstrate that the late Saxon borough emerged as the culmination of a gradual evolutionary process throughout the Anglo-Saxon period rather than as the result of a single dramatic act of foundation. This has important implications for ideas relating to the re-emergence of towns in the ninth and tenth centuries and is particularly significant in that Northampton has no obvious major Romano-British antecedent.

The document printed below, an early- or mid-seventeenth-century copy of a hitherto unrecorded charter of 963 by which King Edgar granted 5 hides at Ballidon in Derbyshire to a certain Æthelferth (see pl. XIV), came to light early in 1983 among some manuscripts on temporary deposit at the Staffordshire Record Office. It is published by kind permission of the depositor. The account of the provenance of the charter and of the history of the estate, which follows, is the work of one author (D.A.J.), whilst another (N.P.B.) is responsible for the edition and the topographical analysis, and the third (M.G.) has contributed the discussion of the place-name forms.

Chapter 73 of the laws ‘þe Æðelbirht cyning asette on Agustinus dæge’ reads ‘Gif friwif locbore leswæs hwæt gedeþ, xxx sell' gebete.’ The sole manuscript evidence for the laws of Æthelberht is in the early-twelfth-century Textus Roffensis; since this is so late, the manuscript word division is not necessarily significant. For what it is worth, two of the three crucial words are written locbore and les wæs, but it is not absolutely clear whether friwif is intended as one word or two. The elements are divided by the smallest of spaces. Friwif and locbore do not occur elsewhere in the laws; les wæs occurs also at Æthelberht, ch. 3, written lyswæs. Comparatively recent texts and translations can be found in editions of the Anglo-Saxon laws by Thorpe, Liebermann and Attenborough, and, translation only, in Dorothy Whitelock's English Historical Documents (probably the most widely used and certainly the most readily accessible of the four). The earliest of these editors, Thorpe, avoids the difficulties by leaving certain problematical words in the original: ‘If a free-woman loc-bore commit any leswe let her make a bot of xxx shillings.’ Liebermann offers: ‘Wenn eine Freie, eine Lockenträgerin, etwas Unzüchtiges thut, büsse [ihr Schander ihrem Vormunde] 30 Schll’, where, as Attenborough subsequently and charmingly explains, ‘Liebermann understands as the subject of gebete not the woman, but the man with whom she misconducts herself.’ Attenborough's own translation agrees grammatically with Thorpe's: ‘If a freeborn woman, with long hair, misconducts herself, she shall pay 30 shillings as compensation.’ Whitelock has a minor variant: ‘If a freewoman, with long hair, commits any misconduct, she is to pay 30 shillings compensation.’

The stylistic disjunctions in The Dream of the Rood are not a new topic. They have been treated explicitly and implicitly for many years from several different points of view. The most frequently noted disjunction occurs at line 78 where the cross, having completed its eye-witness account of the crucifixion, commences a homily explaining the significance of its experience. But there are others as well: at 27 where the poet switches personae from dreamer to cross, at 121 where the dreamer again becomes the speaker to describe his personal reaction to his vision and at 147 where the poet begins an impersonal magnification of Christ which concludes the poem.

In recent years a number of books and articles has appeared in which new and contradictory claims have been made about the compilation of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius II. In view of these contradictions it is necessary to re-examine the manuscript and to set out what information can be gained from it and what can reasonably be inferred from that information.

By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period six feasts of the Virgin were celebrated in England; this large number represents an honour granted to no other saint. The feasts in question – the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple and Conception – did not originate in England, however. Before turning to the English evidence, therefore, it is necessary to consider the background of Marian feasts at Rome and elsewhere in the context of the development of ritual from the seventh century to the eleventh.

Over a hundred years ago, T. O. Cockayne published his Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, in which he edited the texts of all the medical writings in Old English he could find. It is massive in its scope, and no modern scholar is ever likely to produce its equal. Yet we, metaphorically standing on Cockaynes's shoulders, and equipped with aids provided by more recent research, are able to examine more closely than he could some of the special features of the field which he revealed to us. Its English substrata have been comparatively neglected, however, and therefore I propose in this paper to examine closely the relationships of the hundred or so medical remedies in Old English which have been preserved – usually in different manuscripts – in two or three versions so close that it is obvious, even on a superficial view, that they either derive from the same English original, or are copied the one from the other. These remedies usually begin by specifying the ailment for which they are recommended, and then go on to set out the ingredients and method of making the appropriate herbal concoction. Nearly all the repeated remedies are found at least once in the Leechbook manuscript, now London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, and so I will begin by describing it, and use it as the basis of the argument. Then I will describe briefly in turn the other manuscripts in which the remedies are found, discussing as I proceed those with minor parallels to Bald's Leechbook; and then, separately and in detail, the important duplications in the two final manuscripts under consideration. It may thereafter be possible to draw some conclusions about the method of compilation of Bald's Leechbook.