Sermo Lupi ad Anglos has attracted far more attention by its subject matter than have other Wulfstan sermons, because its apparent topicality is of interest to students of the Old English period. Like all Wulfstan's sermons, though, it has been chiefly esteemed for its forceful oratory – it is this sermon, indeed, which is responsible for his reputation as a fiery orator in the Old Testament vein. Most readers have praised it more enthusiastically than Sir Frank Stenton did, when he stated that it ‘makes its effect by sheer monotony of commination’. But even its admirers have regarded it as little more than a stringing together of the nation's sins and tribulations which impresses by the horrific accumulation of detail. Such a view, it will be argued, is a drastic oversimplification. The Sermo Lupi presents a number of closely related themes, and the catalogues are but one aspect of the development of these themes. Certainly the seemingly inexhaustible fashion in which Wulfstan heaps up specific instances of the nation's iniquities and misfortunes contributes much to the force of his indictment, but the sermon is neither formless nor repetitive. On the contrary, it is the most skilfully and tightly constructed of all his sermons.

It is an index perhaps of changing historiographical trends that the importance of Alfred's illnesses in the moulding of his outlook, both as a layman and as a king, now hardly needs to be emphasized. In the course of the 1990s, Alfred became gradually better understood as a man of the 890s. Yet Victorian sensibilities have died hard. Both Plummer and Stevenson detected an ‘atmosphere of morbid religiosity’ in Asser's account of Alfred's illnesses in ch. 74, and both refused to associate this atmosphere with the ‘historical Alfred’, in view of his well-attested military successes. The recent resurrection of this approach by Alfred Smyth has only served, however, to emphasize the need for greater sensitivity to the ideals and expectations of the society within which Alfred was operating. Smyth's unsuccessful attempt to expose Asser's Life as a later forgery relies heavily upon his assumption that the text is a work of hagiography, because it supposedly portrays Alfred as ‘a saintly king, wrapt up in prayer [sic], and enduring some form of physical disease’. It should therefore be stressed that royal sanctity was an entirely posthumous phenomenon in Anglo-Saxon England, and, in the case of kings, nearly always acquired through an appropriate manner of death.

Part I of this article1 treated the three main streams of lapidary knowledge current in the early Middle Ages (the classical encyclopaedists, the patristic2 and the medical traditions, with particular attention, in the last-named, to the lapidary of Damigeron and its recensions);3 gloss traditions, terminology and popular beliefs about jewels in Anglo-Saxon England; and the origin and content of the Old English Lapidary, with a new edition of it. This part II treats the lapidary passage in Bede's Explanatio Apocalypsis; a Hiberno-Latin tract De Duodecim Lapidibus (henceforth DDL) used by Bede; and (with a critical edition) a tenth-century Latin hymn Cives celestis patrie, quite likely composed in Anglo-Saxon England, and closely based on Bede's work.4

A not infrequent observation in criticism about Old English Christian poems holds that a body of diction which was inherited from a Germanic, military and heroic past forced the poets to describe Christian characters inappropriately in terms belonging to the ideals of a warrior society. In my opinion, this is a simplistic assumption which needs to be challenged, particularly in relation to Cynewulf's Juliana, where, I believe, it has been positively misleading. For instance, in her edition of this poem Rosemary Woolf states that its traditional diction might be explained either as Cynewulf's calculated glorification of Christian story or as his mere deference to convention:

The landscape of the epic poem Beowulf is a fantasy construct in which incompatible features coexist, but while it is an unprofitable exercise to attempt a reconstruction of a coherent topography in which Beowulf's exploits took place, the poet's choice of individual landscape terms is not likely to be random. Where this choice is not influenced by alliteration, each term may have been intended to convey a specific image appropriate to its immediate context. Several of the landscape terms used in the poem are otherwise unrecorded or only found rarely in other literary sources. This applies to hlið, hop and gelad; but by contrast with their rarity in literature these words are well evidenced in place-names, and an understanding of the place-name usage may have some relevance to the interpretation of their occurrences in the poem.

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.

This essay uses maps that have illustrated Beowulf since Klaeber's edition as a starting point for an exploration of spatial representation in the poem. It is argued that modern maps do not offer particularly useful tools for understanding the poem, and that ‘chorography’, that is, the description of regional space, may be a more accurate term for analysis of Beowulf than ‘geography’. The poem presents a topography intimately connected to the interrelations of different peoples, and the frequent movement between past, present and future times. The final section of the article considers the postmedieval reception of spatial reference in Beowulf, disputes the presence of an Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’ in the poem, and raises some implications for genre that result from spatial analysis.

The Old English poem known as The Husband's Message begins in the same minimalist style as is typical of a number of poems of the Exeter Book (Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501). A first-person speaker, an ‘I’, begins speaking without any context for speech yet being established, without any self-introduction, and without as yet any known purpose: Nu ic onsundran þe secgan wille … As with the Exeter Book elegies known as The Seafarer, The Wife's Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer, just as with all fifty Exeter Book riddles that are put into the first person singular voice, there is an implied challenge for the reader to discover who the speaker is and to fill out his or her full story. The poem thus begins with a small enigma. It is easy to tell that we are in the midst of that part of the Exeter Book that consists of close to one hundred riddles interspersed by a small miscellany of other poems, several of which are riddle-like in their resistance to easy interpretation.

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.

The primary purpose of this article is to draw attention to a little-known Anglo-Saxon manuscript of the early ninth century, now Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 10861, a collection of Latin saints' lives or passions. My interest was first drawn to this manuscript by the brief remarks of J. J. G. Alexander and J. E. Cross (the latter incorporating the personal communication of Bernhard Bischoff), both of whom associated the manuscript with the more famous Book of Cerne (Cambridge, University Library, Ll. 1.10) by virtue of its script and decoration. Closer examination of the manuscript reveals far more complex connections and implications. In particular, the script of BN lat. 10861, which incorporates several distinctive calligraphic features, relates it closely to a group of charters produced at Christ Church, Canterbury, and dated between c. 805 and c. 825. There have hitherto been few attempts to link Anglo-Saxon documentary and book hands, with the notable exceptions of the link between Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 426 (Philippus, Expositio in Iob), which has been dated to the mid-ninth century on the basis of its association with two charters (London, British Library, Cotton Augustus ii. 37, dated 838, and Cotton Charter viii. 36, dated 847) thought to have been written in Wessex, probably at Sherborne or Winchester, and the association of London, BL, Royal 1. E. VI and BL, Add. Ch. 19789, a ninth-century forgery of a document dated 759, recently advanced by Mildred Budny. The establishment of such relationships offers potential for a firmer assessment of the date and place of origin of a particular manuscript than might otherwise be possible; it may also provide a valuable insight into the workings of the scriptorium in question. If, as I believe, a reasonably accurate dating may be advanced for BN lat. 10861 through its association with charter material, further chronological implications may arise, for the decoration of this manuscript places it firmly within the ‘Canterbury’ or ‘Tiberius’ group of manuscripts, and the dating of any one member of the group offers scope for the relative dating of others.

Modern scholars can sometimes reconstruct the methods of medieval glossary-makers by tracking individual glosses along the path from the textual source to the final destination in the glossarial list. Here I wish to pursue a trail of clues through two early-eleventh-century manuscripts of the Excerptiones de Prisciano (‘Excerpts of Priscian’), a Latin grammatical treatise which has been identified as the source for Ælfric's bilingual Grammar. Viewed singly, the manuscripts of this work offer partial views of glossatorial activity; viewed together, these fragmentary glimpses snap into perspective, rendering a dynamic picture of glossary-making as a corporate enterprise undertaken by a group of Anglo-Saxon schoolmen working in several manuscripts simultaneously.

This supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runif Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971). It contains twenty-eight entries, including all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions which have come to my notice since the publication of the first supplement. The entries are followed by the Bibliography. This gives in full the references quoted in abbreviated form throughout this second supplement unless they have already appeared in the General Bibliography of the Hand-List or of the first supplement. This is followed by Addenda to the Hand-List and to the first supplement, where additional information about several inscriptions is given. Then follows a list of Corrigenda to the Hand-List and to the first supplement and, finally, a list of Addenda to the bibliographies of the entries in the Hand-List and the first supplement, to bring them up to date.

Exeter Riddle 40 presents two related problems as a translation of one of Aldhelm's Enigmata (no. c: ‘Creatura’): its dislocation, in an otherwise accurate translation, of six lines from their position in the Latin text; and its connection with the so-called ‘Lorica’ of Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Voss. lat. Q. 106, the only other surviving Old English translation of an Aldhelmian enigma. In his edition of the Exeter Riddles, Tupper addressed these problems by postulating that both Old English riddles were the work of one translator and that Exeter Riddle 40 was revised from an earlier version of Aldhelm's enigma now lost to us. Although Tupper's view has been widely accepted, it presents a number of difficulties. It is the purpose of the present article to suggest an alternate interpretation of the evidence: that Exeter Riddle 40 – a much later poem than the ‘Leiden Riddle’, a Northumbrian poem perhaps of the eighth century – was translated from a ninth-century continental manuscript with tenth-century English corrections: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson C. 697.

Manuscripts can be studied, first, and most obviously, as objects of material culture. Such study may provide valuable information concerning the parchment, the arrangement of quires, the type of script, the letter forms, the decoration, and so on. Manuscripts can also be studied as witnesses to the intellectual preoccupations of the scholars who compiled and copied them: such preoccupations are most apparent in the selection and glossing of the texts which manuscripts from various periods transmit. There is yet a third class of information to be gleaned, from some manuscripts at least, by a combined study of both their physical appearance and of the texts they contain: this information pertains to the time when, the place where, and the reasons why a collection of texts (which is preserved only in a later book) was first put together. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 57 is a manuscript which invites such an approach. The book, its physical appearance (including its numerous later additions), the texts it presents, and the way it was used in late Anglo-Saxon England have been thoroughly and competently studied, and such studies are invaluable for what I shall attempt to do here: to uncover the ambience in which the ultimate exemplar of Corpus 57 was compiled and used, and to uncover the reason why this exemplar was copied into Corpus 57 and why it was copied in the fashion in which it appears there.

The often-anthologized story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is typically regarded as the earliest example of heroic English prose, perhaps a summary of an earlier oral tale. Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to its context within the A MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Given this text's association with King Alfred, this article locates the tale within the broader context of Alfredian writing on the morality of rule and, in particular, royal wisdom. Rather than simply endorsing the loyalty of fighting men to their lord, the tale also warns of the dangers of royal folly and the consequences of unrighteous rule.

In the definitive publication of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial, R. L. S. Bruce-Mitford comments that the figural scenes on the purse-lid may be thought to have had a special significance known to those who commissioned them and to those who saw the purse, because they appear as part of the design on an important item of the regalia. However, the meaning of the pair of plaques which show a bird of prey grasping a smaller bird (pl. VIIa) has not yet been satisfactorily analysed. Bruce-Mitford states that no close parallels to the scene can be cited. Haseloff, in a study of the purse plaques, considers that they show the general influence of Mediterranean representational art upon the Germanic tendency towards abstraction, with the bird pairs being the adoption and stylization of a foreign theme. Werner, in a discussion of Lombardic shield mounts, suggests that the Sutton Hoo birds represent Christian ornament and therefore associates the purse with the other supposedly Christian elements in the burial. But no really convincing background for the birds has been found. This is in contrast to the other figural plaques, the man between beasts and the interlacing quadrupeds, which both belong to groups of designs of more familiar type. It is the purpose of this article to provide some sources for the bird plaques and to attempt to interpret the special significance behind the use of this design on an item of the regalia.

The ‘Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100’, which appeared twenty years ago in vol. 9 of this periodical, was a first attempt to bring together, in a concise inventory, what was then known about surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments written in, or imported into, England from the end of the sixth to the end of the eleventh century. This has now been superseded by the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, published as vol. 241 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series in 2001. Like the ‘Preliminary List’, the Handlist cannot possibly claim to be perfect or complete, but it is hoped that it may serve some useful purposes as a reference work and, once again, as a searchlist.

The belief that monsters had a human genealogy originating at a point of transgressive sexual behaviour is something attested to in early medieval texts that either circulated or were written in Anglo-Saxon England. The Hiberno-Latin Reference Bible, a widely known text of the period, and the Old English poem Genesis A both suggest that the sexual deviancy of the progenitors of monsters is perceivable as reiterated stigmata on the monstrous bodies of their progeny. It is within this context of theological exegesis and poetic imagination that the Anglo-Saxon drawings of monsters in The Wonders of the East were produced. What one sees in the depiction of monsters therein is a performance of sexual monstrosity that links monsters to their human forbears; but also, by means of the illustrated interaction of monster and human, the monster is brought perilously close to the here-and-now of the Anglo-Saxon reader-viewer's imagined world.

This article aims to evaluate the likelihood that whelk dye was known in Anglo-Saxon England, either in the form of imported cloth and textile products, and/or as an activity carried out in England. The nature of whelk dye and the likely processing options available to early societies are considered in the light of extant records and modern experimentation in Israel and Britain. The currently available ‘hard’ evidence is then presented from archaeology, manuscript studies, and the chemical analysis of textiles. Finally, the semantic and literary evidence is considered, including three passages from texts by Bede and Aldhelm, and a new interpretation of OE cornwurma.

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.