An Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet cloisonné pectoral cross from a seventh-century bed burial at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire is the fifth such example to be found. Details of the contextual associations of the five crosses are used to argue that these artifacts, and other high status cross-shaped pendants, were overt Christian symbols, strongly associated with high status female burials of the later seventh century. That one of the five examples was associated with the burial of St Cuthbert is highlighted as an anomaly, and could indicate that the Cuthbert Cross may have been a gift, rather than a personal possession of the saint.

A careful consideration of a ‘scribble’ in English in the margin of a page of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, a ninth-century Latin manuscript, yields a number of important conclusions: that the English material is homiletic, that it was written before the Latin, that the manuscript is certainly of Northumbrian origin and the English shows traces of Northumbrian dialect, and that therefore at least one vernacular homily in Old English was available for copying in Northumbria in the ninth century. It also adds to the evidence that a group of homilies in the Vercelli Book were drawn from an early and a non-West Saxon source-book.

Scholarship on The Dream of the Rood has long entertained the suspicion that the poem might be the product of composite authorship. Recent criticism has tended to reject this possibility on aesthetic grounds, but the present article identifies new metrical and lexical reasons to believe that The Dream of the Rood contains contributions from at least two poets. It reconstructs the poem's textual history and contends that lines 1–77 represent an original core to which a later poet added lines 78–156.

Alcuin's De dialectica has traditionally been dated to Alcuin's second stay at Charlemagne's court (c. 795–6/7). This dating has been based on the perceived dating for another didactic work by Alcuin, De rhetorica. It will be argued that De dialectica (and De rhetorica) must be dated to Alcuin's first period on the Continent (c. 784/6–90). The new dating is primarily based on a philological comparison between De dialectica and Opus Caroli regis (written 790–3 by Theodulf of Orleans) but appears to be confirmed both by the contents of De dialectica and by its use of specific sources. In dating De dialectica to Alcuin's first stay on the Continent, we must now also reassess Alcuin's work as presenting a unique testimony to the scholarly structures and intellectual initiatives of the otherwise badly attested pre-Aachen phase of Charlemagne's court.

The archives of knowledge through which Anglo-Saxons understood the senses ranged from vernacular to patristic. Quotidian understanding of the senses treated them as functions of their corresponding bodily organs, as the injury tariffs of Æthelberht and Alfred illustrate. Old English learned prose catalogues the senses from sight to touch with an order that bespeaks a set of understandings about bodies, materiality, souls and salvation. There the differing appraisals of sight and its lesser sibling, touch, track their perceived mediations between the world and the soul. The Old English Boethius, Wærferth's Dialogues and a range of Ælfric's writings illustrate understandings of these senses’ mediation between the material and the immaterial, the corporeal and the incorporeal. The meaning of Wulfstan's legislation on friðlice steora must thus be sought in a crossing of archives of appraisals – the legal valuation of body parts and the patristic understanding of senses as channels between the flesh and the spirit.

This article examines new evidence and arguments relating to the political, strategic and historical context of the Burghal Hidage document and the burhs which it lists. This evidence can be best interpreted by reference to the thesis that the Burghal Hidage was a near-contemporary record of a complete system of burhs which gave King Alfred political and strategic control of the full extent of the West Saxon kingdom on both sides of the river Thames at a particular period. The burhs are seen as the instruments through which the submission of the populations of their associated territories to the king's lordship was consolidated. As such, their formation as a system is uniquely appropriate to the political and strategic circumstances obtaining in the late 870s. A possible context for the document is suggested as being the surviving ‘boundary’ section of a longer ‘charter of submission’, issued by King Alfred in the context of the affirmation of his re-established hegemony of the Kingdom of the West Saxons in the period 878–9.

The scattered nature of references to dance and the ambiguity of its vocabulary have obscured Anglo-Saxon dance practices, but evidence suggests that dance was a significant cultural phenomenon. The earlier centuries of the Anglo-Saxon period saw the depiction of weapon dances, and later sources also allow us a glimpse of lively secular dance. Performance traditions may have included dance combined with satirical songs, as well as possible secular ritual dance. Finally, scripture provided examples of both holy dance and lascivious female dance. Contemporary iconography of these dance practices, combined with continued associations between dance and music, allow us to understand the conventions in the depiction of dance, and in turn these suggest that the figure of ‘Hearing’ on the Fuller Brooch, traditionally regarded as running, is in fact dancing.

Critics have long wondered about the setting and intent of the Old English translation of Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae, first into prose and then into prosimetrum. This article situates the dual translation within the broader context of ninth- and tenth-century literary culture, challenging the received view of the two versions as separate projects and arguing instead that the Old English Boethius was conceived and received as a vernacular opus geminatum, or ‘twinned work’. While the opus geminatum and the prosimetrum are generally thought to maintain distinct generic identities, this case study allows for a more capacious understanding of both modes, which I demonstrate were inescapably linked in Anglo-Saxon circles – and which were shaped by a broader aesthetic of prose-verse mixture.

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.

Scholars have typically characterized Warsaw, Biblioteka Narodowa, I. 3311, an unlocalized Anglo-Saxon gospel lectionary of the late tenth or early eleventh century, as a book intended for use in private devotional reading. Despite this, a study of the contents of the book indicates that it was used liturgically, possibly by an individual priest or a small clerical community. This article offers a reappraisal of the manuscript and its use based on the complementary pattern of gospel readings that is evident in the two sections of the book and the presence of previously unnoticed musical notation. It is argued that the volume was in fact used in the celebration of mass and should be added to the corpus of Anglo-Saxon liturgical books.

Although post-Conquest uitae of St Swithun narrate the saint's earthly life, the original tenth-century accounts relate only his post-mortem miracles, professing ignorance of his life as bishop of Winchester. Most of the miracles in these pre-Conquest uitae take place in or in some way revolve around the site of the saint's relics at the Old Minster, Winchester. Late-tenth-century Winchester, along with the Benedictine Reformers who had taken up residence there, thus figures prominently in these miracle stories; indeed, Winchester comes to be the true protagonist of Swithun's pre-Conquest uitae. Moreover, each of Swithun's three pre-Conquest hagiographers – Lantfred, Wulfstan the Precentor and Ælfric – writes a different Winchester according to his relationship to that place. This phenomenon illuminates these writers’ differing relationships to the Benedictine Reform, as well as how the Reformers sought to write their own histories.

Scholarship is divided over whether there existed a tradition of recreational hunting in Anglo-Saxon England, in addition to pragmatic forms of venery, and the extent to which it was altered by the Normans after the Conquest. However, hunting scholarship has hitherto neglected the detailed account of a recreational royal deer hunt in the Vita S. Dvnstani. By analysing this account, which describes a hunt resembling a typically ‘Norman’ chasse par force de chiens, I reassess the evidence for the nature of hunting in laws, charters, and the archaeological record. I posit that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy hunted in a similar manner to the Normans, and that hunting was a socially inscribed pursuit, legally restricted to the ruling classes long before 1066. This argument supports the definition of the disputed charter term haga (‘enclosure’) in certain instances as an Anglo-Saxon hunting park. Finally, I suggest the existence of a specialized Anglo-Saxon hunting dog developed specifically to hunt large quarry in the ‘Norman’ manner.

Consisting of six short Old English texts written in the early eleventh century, the Ely memoranda illustrate how a major and recently refounded Benedictine abbey managed its landed endowment. Two of the memoranda relate to generous help provided by Ely to Thorney, and four concern Ely's own lands. The collection as a whole reveals much about interaction between monasteries, monastic perspectives on material resources and investment in them, the economy of eastern England, and the context of record-keeping. This article offers a new edition and translation of the texts, and surveys the contribution the memoranda make to understanding of cultural and economic history.

The first scholars interested in Anglo-Saxon had to learn it by direct contact with original sources. Work on a dictionary preceded that on a grammar, notably through the efforts of John Joscelyn, Archbishop Parker's Latin Secretary. Like Parker, Sir Henry Spelman (1563/4–1641) found that many of his sources for early English history were in Anglo-Saxon. Consequently he encouraged the study of Old English by establishing a Lectureship in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University and worked closely with its first (and only) holder, Abraham Wheelock. Together with Wheelock's pupil, William Retchford, and possibly drawing on some earlier work by Joscelyn (since lost), these scholars attempted to formulate the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon grammar. This pioneering work, basically a parts-of-speech grammar, survives in three versions, two of them incomplete. In this article I discuss the contents and methodology used and present for the first time an edited text of the first modern Old English grammar. It was a remarkable achievement.