Referring to the reign of Eorcenberht of Kent, 640–64, Bede writes: At that time, because there were not yet many monasteries founded in England, numbers of people from Britain used to enter the monasteries of the Franks or Gauls to practise the monastic life; they also sent their daughters to be taught in them and to be wedded to the heavenly bridegroom. They mostly went to the monasteries at Brie, Chelles and Andelys-sur-Seine…

In their admirable edition of The Wanderer Dunning and Bliss give the meaning ‘as when’ for swa in line 43b

pinceð him on mode pæt he his mondryhten

clyppe ond cysse, ond on cneo lecge

honda ond heafod, swa he hwilum ær

in geardagum giefstolas breac (41–4)

and defend their gloss in the following words: ‘Here literary considerations must outweigh linguistic arguments.’ And in his latest book, Stanley B. Greenfield approves: ‘Thus Bliss–Dunning…can properly say that though usage of swa meaning “as when” here “would be unique”, but [sic] “literary considerations must outweigh linguistic arguments”.’ I do not approve. I would say that Dunning and Bliss have let literary considerations outweigh not linguistic arguments, but linguistic facts. Hence my title.

In lines 14b–15a of The Dream of the Rood the cross is said to be honoured by a garment, or garments (wædum geweorðode) and in a 21b–2a it is said to change (wendan) because of or along with or with respect to these garments. What they might be is a question which has racked many brains. The usual opinion at the present day is that they are some kind of cloth trappings. Cook, for instance, was reminded of a streamer which, he said, formed part of the labarum (but in so saying he was misled either by memory or by mistranslation, for the only cloth which the labarum comprised might, from its size and shape, more properly be called an apron). Ebert proposed silk cords or tassels. Others prefer the veil or pall with which the cross is shrouded on Good Friday, to be dramatically revealed on Easter Sunday. The weakness of all such explanations is that their proponents feel bound not to leave the spot without discovering an explanation: they scrupulously refrain, that is, from looking either backwards or forwards, with the result that, as the reference fails to explain itself, they are compelled to look outside the poem. They fail to take into account repeated references within the poem itself to coverings that, however unexpected and however diverse their materials, all agree in performing, to a greater or lesser degree, the principal office of a garment, that of enveloping the cross: in line 5b it is described as leohte bewunden, ‘suffused, or wrapped round, with light’ and in 16a, and again in 23b and 77, gold is said to ‘clothe’ it (gyrwan), the verb signifying, as it may, more than a sporadic embellishment. Nor is it to be overlooked that the first reference to the cross's wæde is in the immediate context of its glory: it is wuldres treow (14b) that is so clothed.

Old English saints' lives, as a group, have not generated a great deal of critical enthusiasm; and Cynewulf's Juliana has often been regarded as the worst of a bad lot. One of the poem's recent editors sees in it a ‘uniformity verging on monotony’ and finds it ‘unrelieved by any emotional or rhetorical emphasis or by any other gradations in tone’. While critics concede that all Cynewulf's signed poems have a smooth texture and contain ‘fine passages’, they regard Juliana as something of an embarrassment and generally assign it to the poet's adolescence – or senescence.

Many of the homilies preserved in manuscripts of Old English are composite; that is, they are made up largely of passages drawn with little change from other Old English writings (usually homilies) and not freshly composed or translated from Latin. Most of them exist in only one copy, compared with the several surviving copies of most original homilies, and they were probably not given wide circulation. But such homilies can tell us a great deal about the homiletic tradition in England: about attitudes towards homiletic form and content; about the interests of those who read and plundered the homilies of Æfric and Wulfstan; and about the availability of particular texts in particular areas, and the form in which they were known.

Some twenty years ago the late Professor Alistair Campbell observed that there were two broad stylistic traditions of Anglo-Latinity: the one, which he called the classical, was seen to have its principal proponent in Bede; the other, which he called the hermeneutic, was said to have its principal proponent in Aldhelm. The following discussion is an attempt to clarify Campbell's broad distinction by reference to a variety of tenth-century Anglo-Latin texts which may be described as ‘hermeneutic’. By ‘hermeneutic’ I understand a style whose most striking feature is the ostentatious parade of unusual, often very arcane and apparently learned vocabulary. In Latin literature of the medieval period, this vocabulary is of three general sorts: (1) archaisms, words which were not in use in classical Latin but were exhumed by medieval authors from the grammarians or from Terence and Plautus; (2) neologisms or coinages; and (3) loan-words. In the early medieval period (before, say, 1100) the most common source of loan-words was Greek. This was a result of the universal prestige which Greek enjoyed, particularly after the Carolingian period, when a very few exceptional men seemed to have a fundamental knowledge of the language. But sound knowledge of Greek was always restricted to a privileged minority (principally because of the lack of an adequate and widely circulated introductory primer); for the majority of medieval authors, acquaintance with continuous Greek came only through reciting the Creed, the Lord's Prayer or occasionally the psalter in Greek, and acquaintance with Greek vocabulary came through Greek–Latin glossaries. The most popular of the Greek–Latin glossaries – those based ultimately on the grammar of Dositheus – had originated as bilingual phrase-books in the bilingual world of Late Antiquity. But as first-hand knowledge of Greek disappeared, these glossaries were inevitably carelessly copied, with the result that Greek words derived from glossaries often bear little resemblance to their originals (ιχθυs. becomes iactis in several glossaries, to choose a random example). Accordingly, Greek vocabulary derived from glossaries has a distinctive flavour, either in its bizarre orthography or its unpredictable denotation, and is usually readily identifiable. In the following pages I shall attempt to show how Anglo-Latin authors of the tenth century ornamented their style by the use of archaisms, neologisms and grecisms, derived for the most part from glossaries. One point should be mentioned, however: it is customary among certain scholars of insular Latin to describe a style in which unusual words are found as ‘Hisperic’. But this term is often carelessly employed. It ought to refer strictly to the exceedingly obscure and almost secretive language of the Hisperica Famina themselves, compositions which abound in grecisms and are characterized by a predictable kind of neologism – nouns terminating in -men, -fer, -ger; verbs in -itare or -icare; adjectives in -osus. Unfortunately, however, the term ‘Hisperic’ carries with it some connotation of Ireland. The Hisperica Famina themselves were almost certainly composed in Ireland; but all medieval Latin literature which displays neologisms and grecisms was not. Such literature usually has nothing in common with the Hisperica Famina save that it sends a modern reader to his dictionary. I would therefore urge the use of the more neutral term ‘hermeneutic’ and hope to show that the excessively mannered style of many tenth-century Anglo-Latin compositions has nothing to do with Ireland or the Hisperica Famina, but is in the main an indigenous development.

Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 5.35 is known to scholars principally for the contents of fols. 432–41, the lyric anthology known (somewhat mis-leadingly) as the ‘Cambridge Songs’. Important though this group of poems is for the history of the Latin lyric, it has diverted attention from the contents of the manuscript as a whole, which presents a remarkable range of texts, mainly poetic, from the Early Christian, Carolingian and Anglo-Latin periods. Physical description, moreover, has generally been confined to the section containing the ‘Cambridge Songs’ and consequently the method of compilation of the whole codex has been neglected. The Cambridge University Library catalogue, for instance, gives the impression of forty-four works entered sequentially in the manuscript, and leaves unexplained such curiosities as no. 41 ‘Prose treatise on medicine’ and no. 44 ‘Certain medical prescriptions’, which appear to sandwich between them the ‘Cambridge Songs’ and another group of ‘hymns’. This article describes the compilation as a whole, its physical appearance, its genesis, and its contents in detail.

The most famous manuscripts with music of the early Middle Ages in England are the Winchester ‘Tropers’ at Oxford and Cambridge. More has been written about them than about all the lesser known sources put together, and it is right that this should have been so, for the troper at Cambridge preserves one of the oldest repertories of polyphonic music while the other, the so-called ‘Æthelred troper’, has provided generations of scholars with the task of establishing its relationship to the other manuscript. This activity has resulted in a high degree of clarification, but the Winchester ‘Tropers’ are not the whole of early English medieval music – even though a study of their combined trope repertories would be a welcome contribution – and we must begin to turn our attention to other sources of the period.

In a paper in Anglo-Saxon England 3 N. F. Barley has drawn attention to the richness of Anglo-Saxon colour vocabulary, which, he suggests, emphasized the light–dark axis of colour perception to a greater degree than does our own, in which hue is differentiated and then qualified adjectivally, pale, dark, etc. It is interesting to examine actual Anglo-Saxon artifacts with his observations in mind. The main sources for our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons' use of colour are the illuminated manuscripts of which the earliest surviving are of the seventh century. We have only one small fragment of wall-painting, the recently discovered mural at Winchester datable to c. 900. There is a considerable amount of metal-work and jewellery, of which the Sutton Hoo find, a seventh-century burial hoard, is the most spectacular, and there are some embroideries of the early tenth century found in the tomb of St Cuthbert, now at Durham. There are also literary descriptions of works of art, especially church furnishings. The paucity of surviving material and the lack of descriptions of identifiable objects are obvious disadvantages. In addition there has to be considered the extent to which the use of colour changed and developed over the period c. 650–1050. In this paper some examples of manuscript illumination will be discussed.

For a long time now students of early personal names have taken evidence from the many coins whose reverse legends preserve the names of Anglo-Saxon moneyers. Lists have been made which are more or less accurate and comprehensive, often with name forms normalized for convenience. Thus Searle cited, with misgivings, his published sources which included Ruding, Hildebrand and the British Museum Catalogue. The latter in its turn included in its lists many names taken from other collections, often from coins that the compilers had not seen. In fact many of the printed lists of moneyers contain names repeated from earlier lists. To a great extent these derive ultimately from that immense treasury of Viking Age coins, B. E. Hildebrand's systematic arrangement from the Anglo-Saxon content of the Swedish coin hoards. So large were Hildebrand's resources for the reigns of Æthelred and Cnut that his catalogue, published almost a hundred years ago, still comes close to being exhaustive, so that even the recently published Danish national collection adds relatively few coins – or at least legends – that are not registered there, and complements it only in the later reigns when the Scandinavian material becomes more sparse. If Hildebrand's catalogue is to be used as a reference system for the publication of other coins, as is commonly the case particularly in Scandinavia, and if philological use is to be made of Hildebrand's transcriptions, his source material, the coins themselves, must be subject to a new scrutiny.

It is a decade since the British Museum published its catalogue of late Anglo-Saxon metal-work – ‘late’ in this context meaning between the eighth century and the eleventh – and the only museum with a comparable collection has now produced an equivalent volume. Probably there will not be any more such catalogues, for no other museum has enough metal-work to make a separate publication worthwhile, although composite catalogues, like the numismatists' sylloges, could be produced; for example, Cambridge, Ipswich, King's Lynn and Norwich would make a substantial East Anglian contribution. Except for catalogues, it seems unlikely that there will ever be books devoted exclusively to the metal-work of post-pagan England, since this is not a subject that can be isolated from its archaeological and art-historical contexts. If there is a distinction between archaeology and art history, metal-work, since it is relevant to both, provides a bridge between them, although often a minor one.

In the preface to F. M. Stenton's collected papers Lady Stenton notes that the publication of Anglo-Saxon England in 1943 marked the culmination of a life-time spent largely preparing for and writing a book in which ‘place-names, coins and charters, wills and pleas, archaeology and the laws of the Anglo-Saxons were all for the first time adequately used to produce a balanced narrative, supported by Domesday Book and the twelfth-century charters which made it easier to understand the earlier material’. Indeed, with the exception of archaeology, Sir Frank had been actively engaged in all these fields of research, as is revealed by the list of his published works, and it seemed unlikely at the time that it would ever be necessary to make major adjustments to the view of the Scandinavian settlements that he presented. Only twelve years had passed, however, when voices of dissent began to arise and the first of three papers that were to herald two decades of controversy about the Vikings in England was published. The present review examines the most significant contributions to the ensuing debate and considers whether it has, in fact, been necessary to depart substantially from the views held by Stenton.

This is the list referred to by Helmut Gneuss in his ‘Guide to the Editing and Preparation of Texts for the Dictionary of Old English’, A. Plan for the Dictionary of Old English, ed. R. Frank and A. Cameron (Toronto, 1973), pp. 9–23. The list has been prepared for use in The Dictionary of Old English and in Old English Syntax now in preparation by Bruce Mitchell, and will (the compilers dare to hope) replace previous systems, including F. P. Magoun Jr's ‘Abbreviated Titles for the Poems of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Corpus’. It will be used in Anglo-Saxon England where appropriate.

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1974. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. Addenda to the previous bibliographies are included at the appropriate places; one that concerns a book or article is preceded by an asterisk and specifies the year of publication. A.B. has been mainly responsible for sections 2, 3 and 4, T.J.B. for section 5, P.H.B. for section 6, P.A.C. for section 7 and M.B. for section 8. Peter Clemoes has been coordinating editor.