In his Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship Professor D. A. Binchy reconsidered the early (pre-Norman) Welsh law of succession and concluded that ‘it was recast after the Anglo-Saxon model’. In his view the matter turned on two questions which have an important bearing on both Welsh and English history. When did the ‘Common Celtic’ type of kingship, in which a successor could be drawn from a four-generation group, give way in Wales to a system in which ‘the reigning king nominates his successor, who will normally be his son and only in exceptional circumstances his brother or paternal nephew’, and in particular what is the evidence provided on this point by the Welsh laws? Was the Anglo-Saxon ætheling the model for this Welsh constitutional innovation? It is my purpose in the present paper to discuss the position of the ætheling in matters of royal succession during the Anglo-Saxon period. Consideration of the relevance of these findings to Welsh history and law will be reserved for an article to be published elsewhere.

Of recent years, the persuasion seems to have been gaining ground that the records of earliest Northumbria are muddled and that the eighth-century sources are more muddled than those of the twelfth and later. If the last part of this proposition were true, it would be a remarkable and unique fact, worthy of much further exploration; if the first part were true in any distinctive sense, that the early Northumbrian material is more confused than the West Saxon or Dalriadan, then we should have to consider how far Bede was contaminated by his native context.

Bede's remarks about the paintings placed by Benedict Biscop in his twin Northumbrian monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow have often been quoted, but I do not think they have ever been examined or analysed with the full attention they deserve. It is my purpose to provide such an examination here, in the hope of shedding some further light on this subject and also of correcting the misconceptions that have gained currency. Bede's allusions to the paintings occur in only two of his works, the Historia Abbatum and his homily on Benedict Biscop. He does not mention them in his Ecclesiastical History. The only other contemporary references occur in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, but it is so brief that it can be omitted from our discussion. The most important source is unquestionably the Historia Abbatum.

The nominal compound and the correlative genitive combination occupy a major position in the vocabulary of Old Germanic poetry; a poet composing in any of the several languages was free to draw upon the basic stock of Primitive Germanic or West Germanic compounds or, because then as now the Germanic languages were compounding languages, to create his own compounds according to his need or skill. But, despite all the volumes that have been written about the morphology, relationships and classification of the compounds, both in Common Germanic and in the several languages, we still do not fully comprehend the nature, the semantic types, the full meanings of individual compounds or, above all, the uses to which the various poets put their compounds for informative and aesthetic purposes.

One of the most distinctive features of Beowulf is the presentation of Grendel and his mother as members of Cain's monstrous progeny. What knowledge of a race (or races) of giants and monsters descended from Cain, and of their survival after the Flood, is the poet likely to have had? I take up the first part of this question in this article and the second part in an article to be published later in Anglo-Saxon England.

After almost a century of discussion of the traditions about the apostles in Cynewulf's poem it is somewhat surprising to find that some simple literary contacts have been ignored. This is true of the latest edition of the poem and of the more recent book, Sources and Analogues of Old English Poetry. In an earlier edition G. P. Krapp had chosen Bede's Martyrology as a source for Fates, but, since Dom Quentin's detailed work on historical martyrologies has excised the accretions which that martyrology has accumulated, the authentic Bede can now be left out of the discussion. In modern times it seems that two lists of apostles which preface the Hieronymian Martyrology in eighth-century manuscripts are regarded as analogues or contributory sources. These are the Notitia de locis Apostolorum (Notit.), a list of the apostles’ resting-places, in the Echternach manuscript, and the Breviarium Apostolorum (Brev.), in other manuscripts. The two tracts entitled De Ortu et Obitu Patrum in Migne's Patrologia Latina, the one normally assigned to Isidore of Seville (IO) and the other now regarded as an anonymous Hiberno-Latin tract (HLO) from the eighth century, and both including the apostles, have been considered by previous scholars. All these four works are early enough to have been consulted by Cynewulf, who is thought to have been writing in the ninth century, but none of them individually nor all of them collectively could have provided Cynewulf with all his factual details: none of them reports that James Zebedaei died ‘mid Iudeum’ (35 a) (although this fact could be assumed from Brev., IO and HLO, which state that he was killed by Herod), that Philip preached in Asia (38a), that Thomas raised Gad, the king's brother, from death and that he himself was killed by a sword (54–60), that Matthew preached in Ethiopia (64) and that a named king ‘Irtacus’ (68a) ordered him to be slain ‘wæpnum’ (69b), that Simon and Thaddeus (or Jude) went together to Persia (76b) and that they died on the same day (‘him wearð bam samod / an endedæg‘, 78b–9a). These details are all lacking in HLO, which has the least differences from Cynewulf's poem. Each of the other texts individually has other differences, Notit. having the greatest number. These abbreviated accounts, of course, merely transmit traditions about the apostles, and so it is clear that Cynewulf used different traditions for at least Philip, Thomas, Matthew and the pair Simon and Thaddeus, who are linked by Cynewulf, whereas in the other texts either they are separated or Thaddeus is not mentioned. It is possible that a curious assumption of ‘short poem, short source’ has prevented scholars from being alert to the significance of a clear clue which has long been available. In Brooks's edition we read that ‘the resurrection of Gad… is not mentioned in Bede's Martyrology, nor in the Breviarium; hence neither of these can be the sole source of the poem. A full account is given in the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas’, in other words, in the full story of Thomas's Passio. I hope to demonstrate that almost all the details about the apostles in the poem came immediately from the full stories of the Vitae or Passiones which are still extant. In my opinion it is unnecessary to consider the possibility of an abbreviated intermediary, since, as a religious of his period Cynewulf would have heard stories of the saints, including the apostles, on their feast-days, and, as we know, he had access to written accounts for two pieces for such festivals, a story of the Inventio Crucis for his poem Elene and a Vita S. Julianae for his poem under her name. He would have been remarkably inattentive, not to say undevout, if he had not recalled the few details about individual apostles from such hearing or reading.

Although a great deal has been written about the sources and manner of compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in its various versions, very little attention has been paid to its earliest section – the annals covering the period from the landing of Julius Caesar, s.a. 60 BC, to the coming of Hengest and Horsa, s.a. 449. Eight of these annals deal with the history of Britain and derive their material from the chronological summary at the end of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastical. The remaining twenty-four (1–45 and 62–155) deal with world history, and the origin of their information is a matter of dispute. Plummer claimed that they are derived from ‘some epitome of universal history, the source of which I have not yet been able to trace’. Hodgkin, on the other hand, considered that the composition of the Chronicle was intimately connected with that of the Old English Orosius and took Orosius to be a major source for the annals in question:

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

During the last three decades the corpus and text of the late Old English homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan have become established with ever greater certainty. The scholars who have made this advance have naturally needed to examine much of the anonymous writing that is associated with the works of these authors in the manuscripts, so that it is now possible to attempt an investigation of the whole corpus of anonymous homilies in the vernacular and, in particular, to begin to isolate that part which antedates Ælfric.

It has been recognized that in late Anglo-Saxon England one writer, Wulfstan the Cantor, knew the poems of Venantius Fortunatus well, but hitherto no manuscript of Fortunatus's poetry of English origin or provenance in this period has been known. The discovery of a leaf of such a manuscript in a collection of fragments at Badminton set me enquiring. It has turned out that there is more manuscript evidence than I expected to find.

In recent years there has been a great increase in both excavation and research in the field of pagan Anglo-Saxon archaeology. Yet much of the literature remains so detailed and specific for a non-specialist it resembles a maze without obvious clues. A recent book, The Archaeology of Anglo-Saxon England, dealt with many aspects of later Anglo-Saxon archaeology but did not cover some of the topics which have been central to study of the pagan period in recent years. This article is an attempt at an outline of some of those topics. The subject falls into two interrelated parts. First there is the course, date and nature of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, involving consideration of the continental background, both late Roman and Germanic, and assessment of the significance of the earliest Germanic finds in England. The second part is concerned with the material culture of early Anglo-Saxon England, chiefly as reflected in the cemeteries of the period. Although I discuss settlement patterns in general, I do not examine individual settlements or house types in detail, because this subject has been dealt with twice recently, once by Addyman in this publication and once by Rahtz. I refer only occasionally to documentary records, since my intention is to present the archaeological evidence to non-archaeologists.

This bibliography is meant to include all books, articles and significant reviews published in any branch of Anglo-Saxon studies during 1978. It excludes reprints unless they contain new material. It will be continued annually. The year of publication of a book or article is 1978 unless otherwise stated.