In 1891, Germain Morin identified a set of brief, anonymous Latin sermons that he controversially attributed to Alcuin’s Anglo-Saxon pupil named ‘Witto’ or ‘Wizo’ in Old English, ‘Candidus’ in Latin. The texts in question are of considerable interest but have remained unprinted and thus scarcely known. The present article offers an edition of them, based on all the known manuscripts, as well as a translation and commentary. An introductory discussion reviews the state of scholarship on Candidus’s career and writings, then examines in detail the content and sources of the four texts, the evidence supporting their attribution to Candidus, and some points of comparison between the items here edited and other Latin sermons produced at Carolingian centres in the early ninth century.

The article assesses the rhetorical uses of the main kinds of non-functional alliteration that are attested in Old English poetry, and gives complete lists of their incidence in all of the poems. Two main general types are isolated. Supererogatory alliteration does not depart from the known alliterative rules, and is deployed ornamentally with some freedom by at least some of the poets. Five sub-types are examined in turn: double alliteration in the a-verse, consonant cluster alliteration, alliteration which is continued across lines, patterned alternation of alliteration across lines, and enjambed alliteration (where the last stress of a line initiates the alliteration of the next). Secondly, licentious alliteration draws a line‘s final stress into alliteration in its own line. Four sub-types are considered: crossed, postponed, and transverse alliteration, and double alliteration in the b-verse. Whilst crossed alliteration appears quite freely, the primary alliteration of a line on the final stress is shown to be avoided almost completely. Most of the unusual uses of extra alliteration congregate in non-traditional or late poetry.

This article argues that the Beowulf-poet’s use of the word aðsweord, usually glossed as ‘sworn oath’ in Beowulf 2064 is a play on the words for oaths (að) and swords (sweord) intended to evoke the difficulty inherent in social mechanisms designed to end cycles of reciprocal violence. By tracing the idea of a ‘sword-oath’ as a means to secure peace through a number of Latin and Norse analogs, this article elucidates an important feature of Beowulf’s rhetoric in his speech to Hygelac’s court, showing how he contrasts his own heroic successes in defeating the Grendelkin with Hrothgar’s failure to cement peace between the Danes and the Heatho-Bards. The article thus offers a structural rationale for the Ingeld episode, which has often seemed repetitious to critics, and illustrates the value of criticism that focuses on the intersection of style, narrative logic and theme in Beowulf.

During Cnut’s two decades on the throne, his English court was the most vibrant centre in the North for the production and performance of skaldic praise poetry. Icelandic poets composing for earlier Anglo-Saxon kings had focused on the predictive power of royal ‘speaking’ names: for example, Æthelstan (‘Noble-Rock’) and Æthelred (‘Noble-Counsel’). The name Cnut presented problems, vulnerable as it was to cross-linguistic gaffes and embarrassing associations. This article reviews the difficulties faced by Cnut’s skalds when referring in verse to their patron and the solutions they devised. Similar techniques were used when naming other figures in the king’s vicinity. The article concludes with a look at two cruces in an anonymous praise poem celebrating Cnut’s victory in battle in 1016/17 against the English. Both onomastic allusions — to a famed local hero and a female onlooker — seem to poke fun at the ‘colonial’ pronunciation of Danish names in Anglo-Scandinavian England. Norse court poetry was nothing if not a combative game.

Despite the recent increase in attention given to Archbishop Wulfstan and his writings, the so-called ‘Laws of Edward and Guthrum’ – a lawcode forged by the archbishop in the opening years of the eleventh century – has received little analysis since Dorothy Whitelock’s 1941 study established the churchman as its true author. My article seeks to fill this gap firstly by expanding on Whitelock’s article. I show that many more of the text’s clauses function as antecedents to Wulfstan’s later legislation than those she identified in her important article. Second, I argue that §10 of the code, a clause not repeated in the archbishop’s later legislation, surely still held legal authority given Wulfstan’s prescriptions for non-lethal punishment in some cases. Finally, I posit that Wulfstan’s attribution of the code to Alfred, seen in its opening, reflects the archbishop’s value of him as a king worth emulating.

This article discusses the similarity between two apparently unrelated hagiographical texts: Vita et Miracula Kenelmi, composed between 1045 and the 1080s and attributed to Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, and Vita Melori, composed perhaps in the 1060s–1080s but surviving only in a variety of late-medieval versions from England and France. Kenelm was venerated at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, Melor chiefly at Lanmeur, Finistère. Both saints were reputed to be royal child martyrs, and their Vitae contain a sequence of motifs and miracles so similar that a textual relationship or common oral origin seems a reasonable hypothesis. In order to elucidate this, possible contexts for the composition of Vita Melori are considered, and evidence for the Breton contacts of Goscelin and, earlier, Winchcombe Abbey is investigated. No priority of one Vita over the other can be demonstrated, but their relationship suggests that there was more cultural contact between western Brittany and England from the mid-tenth to the twelfth centuries than emerges overtly in the written record.

The Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

London, British Library, Add. 56488, fols. i, 1–5, is a fragment from a monastic breviary of the first half of the eleventh century, probably made at or for Muchelney Abbey (Somerset). It is here argued on palaeographical, musical and liturgical grounds that this breviary represents a liturgical tradition separate from that of Æthelwold’s network of reformed houses, which imitated the northern French monastery of Corbie. The fragment’s liturgy is based instead on a local ‘secular’ (non-monastic) liturgical tradition that has been minimally supplemented and rearranged to agree with the requirements of the Regula S. Benedicti. The scribe apparently compiled the breviary from several separate exemplars (a collectar, a bible, a homiliary, and what seems to have been a ‘secular’ antiphoner), which may indicate that the liturgy at Muchelney was ‘Benedictinized’ much later than might have been assumed. The same secular tradition seems to be preserved, beneath subsequent layers of modification, in a thirteenth-century Muchelney breviary (London, British Library, Add. 43405–6) and a fifteenth-century ordinal of St Mary’s Abbey, York (Cambridge, St John’s College D. 27). These later sources, while not representing the Benedictine liturgy of the lost ‘old books of Glastonbury’ under Dunstan (as suggested by McLachlan and Tolhurst), are valuable potential witnesses to the otherwise largely unattested Office liturgy used in English minsters before the ‘Benedictine Reform’ of the tenth century.

St Margaret of Scotland owned a reliquary containing a relic of the True Cross known as crux nigra. Both Turgot, Margaret’s biographer, and Aelred of Rievaulx, who spent some years at the court of Margaret’s son, King David, mention the reliquary without offering sufficient information on its origin. The Black Rood was probably lost or destroyed in the sixteenth century. Some lines written on the margins of a twelfth-century manuscript containing Aelred’s Genealogia regum Anglorum can now shed a new light on this sacred object. The mysterious lines, originally written on the Black Rood or more probably on the casket in which it was contained, claim that the relic once belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king, and at the same time they seem to convey a significant political message.

This fourth supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), and the three supplements which appeared in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983), 21 (1992) and 33 (2004). This fourth supplement contains twenty-two entries and includes all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions that have come to my notice between 2004 and 2017. Wherever possible I have personally examined all the existing inscriptions contained in this supplement. For ease of reference, this supplement follows the same pattern as before: the Entries appear first, with the same layout as before, followed by the Bibliography and Addenda.