Adomnán's description (Vita Columbae II.46) of how the intercession of St. Columba preserved the Picts and the Irish in Britain alone among the peoples of western Europe against two great epidemics of bubonic plague is a coded defence of their use of the traditional Irish 84-year Easter table against the Dionysian Easter table as used throughout the rest of western Europe. His implication is that God sent the plagues to punish those who used the Dionysian table. Hence Adomnán still adhered to the 84-year table by the time that he composed the Vita Columbae c. 697. It probably took a third epidemic 700–c. 702 to persuade Adomnán that his interpretation of the earlier epidemics was incorrect, so that Bede (HE V.15) is correct to date his conversion to the Dionysian table to a third visit to Northumbria c. 702.

While writing his prose Vita S. Cuthberti, Bede appears to have made deliberate choices as to which personal names to spell out. Some of those which he omitted, however, can be found in the marginal annotations of three later manuscripts of the work. A number of these names are also mentioned in the earlier Lindisfarne Vita, but some others have only been preserved through those marginalia. The article examines the monastic milieu within which efforts were made throughout several centuries to remember and transmit the names of the people who had witnessed Cuthbert's sanctity without interfering with Bede's text.

The celestial cross is a prominent motif in Old English texts, and, rather than deriving from a single specific source, the figure provides a case study with implications for understanding the variety of backgrounds that often contribute to Anglo-Saxon conceptions of specific literary images. Tracing the development of the motif from its early Christian origins to its role in Anglo-Saxon England reveals a persistent correlation to eschatology, the importance of the liturgy in its dissemination, and a complex matrix of associations that must be accounted for in considering the Old English settings in which the image exists. An examination of these literary settings further helps to interpret the ways in which Anglo-Saxon authors used this matrix of associations for the celestial cross in their conceptions of the Judgement Day.

To a greater extent than other saints' lives, Guthlac A is a poem about a land dispute. Through contextualizing the central ‘battle for the beorg’ within Anglo-Saxon practices of land tenure, this article shows that Guthlac A represents the spiritual conflict between Guthlac and the devils as a land dispute between unworthy tenants who have been given temporary tenure of the land and a warrior of God who is granted permanent tenure as his reward for faithful service. By portraying the devils' loss of the beorg and Guthlac's acquisition of it through the framework of Anglo-Saxon customs of land-holding, the poem dramatizes replacement doctrine, the teaching that the number of the saved would equal the number of fallen angels and replace them in the heavenly kingdom.

The enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

A group of half-lines in Cynewulf's poetry that take the form þurh + demonstrative pronoun + adjective + gesceap/gesceaft constitutes a distinctively Cynewulfian realization of a more widespread formulaic system (x X gesceaft). Only Cynewulf substitutes (in two closely similar contexts) gesceap for gesceaft, and Cynewulf consistently uses both words to refer to a specific ‘created thing’ instead of to ‘creation’. Within the system as a whole, the specific referent of gesceaft in the sense ‘creation’ (heaven, or earth, or all of creation) is often clarified by deixis, specifically in the type of demonstrative pronoun that modifies the word. Cynewulf's choice of the distal pronoun þæt likewise indicates that the apparently ambiguous referents of gesceap/gesceaft in Juliana 273b and 728a and Elene 789a are heavenly or unearthly things, and analysis of context as well as Christian-Latin analogues supports a specific identification of the referent in each case. While availing himself of an existing formulaic system, then, Cynewulf was innovative in its metrical realization as well as in its semantic application.

Specimens of the several substantive coin-types issued in the name of King Æthelred the Unready (978–1016) survive in their thousands, especially (and for good historical reasons) in Scandinavia; but very few specimens are recorded of his highly distinctive Agnus Dei type. In a checklist of recorded specimens published in 2007 (ASE 36, pp. 215–20), details were given of seventeen coins; and the type was set in the context of the English response to the viking invasion of England in 1009, led by Thorkel the Tall. A further four specimens came to light in 2008–10, one in England and three in Denmark. An updated checklist of the enlarged corpus of Agnus Dei coins is here accompanied by a complete set of illustrations; and the opportunity is taken to review some of the historical and numismatic matters raised by this remarkable type.

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.

The Ordinance concerning the Dunsæte sets out regulations for dealings between the English and Welsh in some part of the frontier between these two peoples. The text is widely assumed to be from the second quarter of the tenth century, but this article argues for a late-tenth- or eleventh-century date. The Ordinance envisages trade and prescribes procedures to settle disputes: it thus reveals cordial contacts between those dwelling along the frontier. This offers an alternative perspective to the focus on kings and conflicts found in many modern accounts of relations between the English and Welsh in the early medieval period.

Two Old English versions of a sunshine prognostication survive in the mid-eleventh century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391, p. 713, and in a twelfth-century addition to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 149v–150r. Among standard predictions promising joy, peace, blossom, abundance of milk and fruit, and a great baptism sent by God, one encounters an enigmatic prophecy which involves camels stealing gold from the ants. These gold-digging ants have a long pedigree, one which links Old English with much earlier literature and indicates the extent to which Anglo-Saxon culture had assimilated traditions of European learning. It remains difficult to say what is being prophesied, however, or to explain the presence of the passage among conventional predictions. Whether the prediction was merely a literary exercise or carried a symbolic implication, it must have originated in an ecclesiastical context. Its mixture of classical learning and vernacular tradition, Greek and Latin, folklore and Christian, implies an author with some knowledge of literary and scholarly traditions.

When the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts was published ten years ago it was clear that it could not claim to be perfect or complete, not only because of the well-known problems and remaining uncertainties of the subject, but also on account of the ever-increasing research work on medieval manuscripts. As a result, a first set of addenda and corrigenda to the Handlist appeared in Anglo-Saxon England 32 (2003), 293–305, and the time has now come for a second supplement intended to update and, where necessary, to correct the Handlist.

Like the first supplement, the second has profited from recent publications and, above all, from kindly provided information by friends and colleagues. Once again I owe a special debt of gratitude to Michael Gullick, who generously shared his expert knowledge with me and read a draft version of this article. What I owe to him this time is acknowledged in the individual entries; Appendices 2 and 3 could not have been written without his help and advice. I am grateful to Richard Gameson, Drew Hartzell and Rebecca Rushforth for letting me know about discoveries they made before these appeared in print. As always, Birgit Ebersperger helped to solve my bibliographical problems. All debts I have incurred, whether from personal communications or from publications, have been recorded in the respective entries. As most readers will have noted, a serious drawback of the Handlist – the lack of any references to musical notation – has been made good by Professor Hartzell's comprehensive Catalogue of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1200 Containing Music.