‘In literary culture’, Sir James Murray has said, ‘the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece.’ Indeed when the Normans set foot on English soil Anglo-Saxon England was in possession not only of a remarkable literature but also of a highly developed written standard language, known and used in all regions of the country. Most of our Old English manuscripts were written in the late tenth century and in the eleventh in a form of English – although not always quite pure – which the grammarians call late West Saxon. This form of the language is by no means just a dialect, any more than its literature is merely the literary product of a dialect. This fact is first brought home to us when we examine the negative evidence – the rareness before the end of the tenth century of texts in dialects other than West Saxon and their almost complete absence after this time, a state of affairs for which various explanations might be found, historical factors among others. Considerably more important, however, is a positive criterion: texts in this late West Saxon were written and read in other parts of the country too, in Kent (Canterbury), in Mercia (Worcester) and indeed even in Northumbria (York). Moreover, texts which had originally been written in Anglian were transcribed into late West Saxon, as was a large part of Old English poetry. There can be no doubt: in our Old English texts of the eleventh century we are dealing with a standard literary language which, although based on a dialectal foundation, had extended its domain beyond the borders of this dialect.

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.

In 669 Theodore, a Greek-speaking monk originally from Tarsus in Asia Minor, arrived in England to take up his duties as archbishop of Canterbury. He was joined the following year by his colleague Hadrian, a Latin-speaking African by origin and former abbot of a monastery in Campania (near Naples). One of their first tasks at Canterbury was the establishment of a school; and according to Bede (writing some sixty years later), they soon ‘attracted a crowd of students into whose minds they daily poured the streams of wholesome learning’. Bede goes on to report, as evidence of their teaching, that some of their students who survived to his own day were as fluent in Greek and Latin as in their native language. Elsewhere he names some of these students: Tobias (later bishop of Rochester), Albinus (Hadrian's successor as abbot in Canterbury), Oftfor (later bishop of Worcester) and John of Beverley. Bede does not mention Aldhelm in this connection; but we know from a letter addressed by Aldhelm to Hadrian that he too must be numbered among their students. Unfortunately Aldhelm is the only one of these Canterbury alumni to have left any writings, so we are in no position to appraise the high opinion which Bede had formed of their learning.

It is a cardinal tenet of classical textual criticism that medieval scribes were most prone to error when copying from an unfamiliar system of script. Accordingly a good deal of attention has been given by classical scholars to what happens to a text when it is copied from one system of script to another, and to the characteristic sorts of error which such copying involves. The great French textual critic, Alphonse Dain, even coined a Greek term, metacharakterismos (μεταχαρακτηρισμός), to describe the scribal process of copying, character by character, from one script to anodier. (The Latin equivalent would be translitteratio, which might be rendered ‘transliteration’ in English.) Dain was thinking principally of the transliteration of Greek uncial manuscripts into minuscule script; but the process is also known to have taken place in the transmissional histories of Latin texts, when works of classical literature in (say) rustic capital script were transliterated into the various regional minuscules. By observing patterns of repeated error, Latin textual critics have often been able to demonstrate that the archetype of such-and-such a text must have been written in a particular system of script. The first attempt at such a demonstration was apparently that by the humanist scholar Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), who in his Castigationes in Catullum (1577) showed that the archetype of all surviving manuscripts of Catullus was written in what he called Langobardicae litterae, what we should describe as a form of pre-Caroline minuscule.

Exeter, Cathedral Library, 3501, fols. 8–130, the celebrated Exeter Book of Old English Poetry, preserves approximately one-sixth of the surviving corpus of Old English verse, and its importance for the study of pre-Conquest vernacular literature can hardly be exaggerated. It is physically a handsome codex, and is of large dimensions for one written in the vernacular: c. 320 × 220 mm, with a written area of c. 240 × 160 mm (see pl. III). In contrast to many coeval English manuscripts, particularly those in the vernacular, there is documentary evidence for the Exeter Book's pre-Conquest provenance. Assuming it is identical with the ‘i mycel Englisc boc be gehwilcum þingum on leoðwisum geworht’ (‘one large English book about various things written in verse’) in the inventory of lands, ornaments and books that Leofric, bishop of Crediton then Exeter, had acquired for the latter foundation, then it has been at Exeter since the third quarter of the eleventh century. This, however, is at least three generations after the book was written, and it has generally been assumed that it originated else where. Identifying the scriptorium where the Exeter Book was made is clearly a matter of the greatest interest and importance. A recent, admirably thorough monograph has put forward a thought-provoking case for seeing Exeter itself as the centre responsible, and has proceeded to draw a range of literary and historical conclusions from this. The comprehensive new critical edition of the manuscript has favoured the thesis, and it has been echoed elsewhere. If correct, this is extremely valuable and exciting – but is it correct? The matter is of sufficient importance to merit further scrutiny.

Although the lexicon has frequently been used in discussions of the dating of Old English poetry, little attention has been paid to the evidence that poetic simplexes offer. One exception is an article by R. J. Menner, who noted that Beowulf and Genesis A share three poetic words, apart from compounds, that are not found elsewhere: freme ‘good, valiant’, gombe ‘tribute’, and secg ‘sword’. Menner used these words as part of an argument for an early date of Genesis A, an argument which hinged, in part, on lexical similarities between this poem and Beowulf, which he assumed was early. Although such an a priori assumption is no longer possible, evidence provided by the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes is nonetheless useful for demonstrating the presence of a connection between two or more poems. Such a connection may be a matter of date or dialect, or it may indicate that the poems were the products of a single poetic school or subtradition. Unfortunately, we know little, if anything, about poetic subtraditions, and the poetic koiné makes the determination of the dialect of individual poems a complex and subtle matter that requires a much wider variety of evidence than poetic words can provide. However, the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes can serve as an index of the poetic conservatism of the poems in which these words occur. This conservatism could be due to a number of factors: genre, content (that is, heroic legend vs biblical or hagiographical), style, or date of composition. As will emerge in the course of this discussion, the most straightforward explanation for this conservatism is that the poems which exhibit it were composed earlier than those which do not. Other explanations are, however, possible, and the evidence of poetic words is hardly sufficient by itself to determine the dating of Old English poems. But by focusing on patterns of distribution that centre upon Beowulf, we can examine what certain words may tell us about the conservatism of this poem and of those poems which are connected to it.

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

Anglo-Saxonists have been able to use Dr N. R. Ker's admirable Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon for over twenty years now, but so far no comprehensive catalogue or list of Latin manuscripts written in, or imported into, Anglo-Saxon England has been available, although a great deal of information on these manuscripts can be found, much of it in widely scattered publications. I have been collecting such information for some time with the intention of making it more complete and, if possible, eventually publishing a bibliographical hand-list of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. In order to create a sound basis for such a project it has seemed advisable to circulate a preliminary list, or search-list, of English manuscripts up to 1100 (including those with texts or glosses in Old English). The present list is therefore of a provisional sort. Its publication will, I hope, serve several purposes. One is to help me to learn of manuscripts and manuscript fragments of Anglo-Saxon origin or provenance which are not generally known and not yet recorded in my list. I shall therefore be most grateful for any information concerning addenda and corrigenda. (For my address, see above, p. ix.) I hope to publish a supplement in due course.

Around the year 695 Aldhelm, abbot of Malmesbury, wrote a collection of one hundred Latin enigmata or riddles to illustrate the rules of Latin metrics and versification, hoping that through that exercise ‘the rudiments of his small talent’ might grow sufficiently to enable him to write eventually ‘of more important subjects’. Almost instantly his Enigmata gained universal popularity: they were read as a primer of Latin poetry, they inspired other Anglo-Saxons (such as Tatwine and Eusebius, whose combined Latin enigmata make another hundred-piece collection) to follow in his footsteps, and they are said to have influenced the vernacular Old English riddles of the Exeter Book.

Various attempts have been made by Anglo-Saxonists to deal with the Old English colour vocabulary but the subject remains far from clear. In the present article I shall try to show some of the reasons why this is so and offer a re-interpretation of the Old English colour words as a system, treating the Anglo-Saxons simply as a standard ethnographic corpus of anthropological data and therefore amenable to the techniques applied to those present-day communities that are the concern of the anthropologist.

Ever since the question of the origin of the Old English dialects was first raised, Bede's brief account of the Anglo-Saxons' tribal origins (HE 1. 15) appears to have been a stumbling block as much as a help. Considering that scholars have been investigating the dialect origins for almost a century now, with a very limited set of data supplemented by varying degrees of insight and imagination, one may wonder whether the present body of facts warrants yet another approach. It seems, however, that not all possible sources of information have been tapped. The admittedly marginal material which I propose to examine here may perhaps serve to place the whole question in a somewhat different perspective from that which has been usual so far.

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.

St Anskar, a monk of Corbie and Corvey, is often referred to as the ‘Apostle of the North’. In 826 he was attached to the retinue of Harald, king of Denmark, upon the king's baptism at the court of Louis the Pious; Anskar was sent to evangelize first the Danes, who were an increasing threat to the northern border of the Empire, and then the Swedes of the Mälar region, whose rulers may have hoped for imperial favour. If the mission of Anskar and his immediate successors had significant and enduring effects beyond his death in 865, however, they have so far failed to make themselves known to historians. The see of Hamburg-Bremen, of which Anskar was the first archbishop, had indeed been given responsibility for the northern mission-field, and successive popes renewed their theoretical support for this goal; but activity, let alone success, was not conspicuous for many years thereafter. The conversion of the Scandinavian peoples had to wait, and when it came the impetus was not from Hamburg-Bremen alone. Rather, the story of the Christianization of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the later tenth century through the eleventh is one with a significantly English cast and an English script, although the German church – and maybe others – never quite withdrew from the stage. Scandinavian historians have long been concerned with this missionary activity of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, but it has attracted undeservedly less interest and attention on this side of the North Sea.

Old English poetry had its origins in the pagan continental past of the Anglo-Saxons. The development of an Old English literary prose is generally supposed to have taken place many centuries later in Christian England. According to a recent work by Michael Alexander, for instance.

Anglo-Saxonists have often referred to a ‘penitential tradition’ in Old English literature, the poetry in particular, without establishing a connection between that tradition and the administrative sources on which it rested. Especially in the later Anglo-Saxon period, the time of Ælfric and Wulfstan, the literature pertaining to penance was extensive. It included handbooks of penance or ‘penitentials’, homilies about penitential practice and liturgical texts of various kinds, among them instructions for confessors, prayers for penitents and rites of public penance. Whether this material should be called ‘literature’ is an open question, but certainly its relevance to penitential themes in Old English poetry needs to be examined. Before we can grasp the significance of the ‘penitential tradition’ for either the literary or the social history of Anglo-Saxon England, it would seem necessary to understand better than we now do the sources and affiliations of the legislative texts, the penitentials in particular, which governed the practice of penance.

After a period of sustained viking pressure, from 991 to 1005, the English had to endure two major raids in quick succession: the attack by ‘the great fleet’ in 1006–7, and the attack by ‘the immense raiding army’, also known as ‘Thorkell's army’, in 1009–12. This article reviews the impact of these raids on the English people, as reflected in the writings of Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, and Wulfstan, archbishop of York, with reference at the same time to Æthelred's programme of prayer (VII Æthelred), devised by the king and his councillors in 1009, to the Agnus Dei coinage, and to the appearance of distinctive chrismons in charters. It is also suggested that Wulfstan's Sermo ad Anglos originated during these tumultuous years.

A re-examination of the evidence on which the life of Aldhelm can be reconstructed. Attention is focussed initially on Aldhelm's links with the royal family of Wessex, and the relationship between the West Saxon and Northumbrian royal houses is used to throw light on the period in Aldhelm's early life when he was fostered along with Aldfrith on Iona. The same relationship is reflected thereafter in Aldhelm's ties with Aldfrith as king of Northumbria, and Aldhelm's fosterage on Iona is reflected in aspects of his later literary activity. His period with Theodore and Hadrian (after 670) is illuminated by his familiarity with texts known to have been studied at Canterbury, and the length of Aldhelm's period of study there is extended by reconsideration of the date of his appointment as abbot of Malmesbury. Evidence also suggests that, while abbot, Aldhelm accompanied the West Saxon king Ceadwalla to Rome (688), and made a careful study of Latin inscriptions while there. An Appendix supplies a revised chronology of the composition of Aldhelm's Latin writings.

Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston is the title of a short document in Old English which is extant in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 149–51, and London, British Library, Stowe 944, 34v–39r. These manuscripts are dated to the middle and the first half of the eleventh century respectively on the evidence of their script. A third copy was once in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii but was destroyed in the fire of 1731. The only scholarly edition is that of Felix Liebermann. The document mentions the resting-places of eighty-nine saints: all but one of these places are in England and all but ten of the saints were active in England. The usual formula is of the type, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Congarus confessor on Cungresbirig’ (37b), but in many cases the place is further defined by reference to some topographical feature, most often a river, as, for example, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Iohannes biscop on þare stowe Beferlic, neah þare ea Hul’ (5a).

Over a century ago Eduard Dietrich noted that Æfric, pupil of Bishop Æthelwold and educated at Winchester, consistently used certain words (e.g. ælfremed, (ge)gearcian, (ge)fredan) in preference to synonyms (e.g. fremde, (ge)gearwian, (ge)felan) commonly found in other writers. The small number of words given by Dietrich as characteristic of Æfric's usage has been increased as a result of some lexical studies of more recent date. Karl Jost, for example, notes, among several other peculiarities of his vocabulary, Æfric's exclusive use of behreowsian and behreowsung instead of their synonyms hreowsian and hreowsung. Hans Schabram's study of the Old English terminology for superbia shows that Ælfric's language displays a remarkable uniformity in the almost exclusive choice of modig and its derivatives. One of the results of Elmar Seebold's work on the Old English equivalents for sapiens and prudens is to show that Ælfric always employed snotor and snotornes to express the concepts ‘prudens’ and ‘prudentia’. Furthermore, in his study of the Old English vocabulary for corona, Josef Kirschner argues that Ælfric's almost exclusive use of wuldorbeag for corona in a figurative-religious sense (e.g. ‘corona vitae aeternae’, ‘corona martyrii’) suggests a deliberate attempt to standardize vocabulary.

In the second part of Beowulf (2200–3182) two crucial questions are posed, neither of which has ever been satisfactorily answered: precisely how is Beowulf related to Wiglaf and what is Beowulf's connection with the Wægmunding family? The fact that the poet himself does not provide a clear cut answer to either of the questions or indeed any kind of answer at all is as surprising as it is puzzling. Throughout the poem he takes pains to make family relationship clear, usually specifying it and repeating it when the relationship is particularly significant and sometimes mentioning it even when it is pointless. But in the final and climactic episode of the poem recounting how the aged hero Beowulf fights his last battle and meets his death, accompanied only by one loyal and fearless follower, his young kinsman Wiglaf, the poet is content to leave their relationship obscure.