In August 1939 I drove from Cambridge with Hector and Nora Chadwick to see the Sutton Hoo dig. Phillips and Chadwick had never met and both were slightly apprehensive. The encounter turned out to be a great success. As we were leaving Chadwick said to Charles ‘It's the grave of King Rædwald you know. I've no doubt of that.’

Glyn Daniel (address given at the funeral of Charles Phillips at Teddington on 2 October 1985)

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.

It would be a truism among Anglo-Saxonists to say that we depend for our knowledge of a fair proportion of pre-Conquest literary and historical texts on the labours of scholars active in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Among the many important texts which were casualties, for example, of the Cotton fire on 23 October 1731, and for which we now depend on early modern transcripts and printed editions, one thinks immediately of Asser's Life of King Alfred and of the poem on the battle of Maldon (in Cotton Otho A. xii), of manuscript G of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in Cotton Otho B. xi), and of Ealdorman Æthelweard's Chronicle (in Cotton Otho A. x). Should one choose to venture into the realm of Anglo-Saxon charters, the importance of antiquarian transcripts of manuscripts now lost becomes ever more apparent. The most spectacular addition to the corpus of charters made since the publication of Professor Sawyer's catalogue in 1968 arose from the examination of a sixteenth-century cartulary of Ilford Hospital preserved at Hatfield House, which proved to contain the texts of eleven pre-Conquest charters derived ultimately from the archives of Barking abbey in Essex; of course this manuscript is an ‘original’ cartulary, as opposed to an antiquarian transcript, but it serves here as a salutary reminder of the treasures which may lurk as yet unidentified in libraries and archives throughout the country. Other ‘discoveries’ include a seventeenth-century copy of a charter by which King Edgar granted an estate at Ballidon, in Derbyshire, to his thegn Æthelferth, Sir Henry Spelman's extracts from a lost cartulary of Abbotsbury abbey, and notes made by the jurist John Selden from a charter-roll formerly preserved in the archives of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Part II provides a list of all conjectures and emendations accepted in at least one edition of Beowulf published from 1950 onwards. It thus adds to part I the readings which have been proposed since 1857. The list is intended as a survey only. No context is given for readings proposed by 1857, since that was done in part I, at pp. 253–74. For readings proposed since 1857 the immediate context is given where necessary, but it is assumed that an edition of Beowulf will be used in conjunction with the list. Following the main section, tables 1–8 indicate the origin of each reading, identified by its line number. Each table corresponds to one of the categories I–VIII used in part I and defined there at p. 250. Tables 9 and 10 and the figure accompanying table 10 present the statistics on which the conclusions stated in part I, at pp. 250–1, are based. Appendix I lists addenda and corrigenda to part I. Appendix II presents some conjectures or emendations which were proposed by 1857 but which have not found favour with any editor from 1950 onwards. The items concern places in the text where a majority of editors from 1950 onwards believe that there are defects.

Rhetoricians, orators, and public speakers of all stripes, if asked the question, which Greek or Roman deity they should invoke in case of need, would surely answer ‘Hermes’ or ‘Mercury’. Members of this profession who also read early Latin-Old English glossaries might therefore be surprised to learn that the deus oratorum was none other than Priapus! This came as good news to me as one who occasionally looks for novel ways to arouse an audience. However, as I reflected further on the meaning of Épinal Glossary 10v32, my expectations wilted. Oratorum must be a simple error for hortorum, ‘of gardens’. Priapus may be fecundus, but he is not facundus.

Walter Walter Goffart 31 Temple Court New Haven, CT 06511203 787 4120 In closing the preface to the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’ Bede mentions the possibility of disputed truth, refers to ‘common report’, and invokes the, or a, ‘vera lex historiae’, literally, ‘true law of history’. Oddly, Bede seems to be disclaiming responsibility for his mistakes. These lines continue to be ‘a crux much commented upon’. Bede clarifies the meaning of this ‘law’ in four passages featuring the adverb ‘simpliciter’. They allow us to see that the ‘truth’ he sometimes departs from is not the opposite of ‘error’, but simply reflects an historian's duty to convey what everyone at a particular time believed to be true.

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.

The writings of John Cassian (c. 370–c. 435) circulated widely through the Middle Ages, not least in Anglo-Saxon England. They are commonly assumed by scholars to have been fundamental to the formation of western monasticism, yet it is worth examining the nature and extent of their usage a little more closely. The following discussion considers this usage in Anglo-Latin sources between the later seventh century and the mid-eighth.

Bede entered Wearmouth–Jarrow at the age of seven and thereafter, he tells us at the conclusion of his Historia ecclesiastica, spent all his life ‘applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures’. He goes on, ‘From the time I became a priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.’ Bede's modest remarks preface an impressive list of his own works, which includes commentaries on Genesis, I Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, the Prophets, Mark, Luke, Acts and Revelation, and many other exegetical, didactic and historical volumes. Installed at Jarrow from about 679 until his death in 735, he contributed more than anyone to the intellectual distinction of early-eighth-century Northumbria. At the same time, the twin house of Wearmouth–Jarrow was winning lasting renown for the products of its scriptorium (or scriptoria). Not least among these were the three great Vulgate bible pandects which Abbot Ceolfrith caused to be made, an achievement celebrated by the chroniclers of the house, who included Bede himself. One of these pandects, which we know today as the Codex Amiatinus, was dispatched to St Peter's in Rome in 716, then spent more than 900 years at Monte Amiata in the Appenines, and is now in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiatino 1). The other two were for use in the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches. One of these has been lost without trace, but the second survived in the cathedral priory of Worcester until the sixteenth century, when an entrepreneurial Nottinghamshire family made use of some of its torn-out leaves as document wrappers. Twelve of these, with some fragments of a thirteenth, are now in the British Library under three different shelfmarks (Loan 81, Add. 37777 and Add. 45025).

This article demonstrates that some 180 of the 2,400 text glosses in the ‘Leiden Glossary’ derive from an epitome of the Etymologiae. A reconstruction of this lost source shows that it consisted of abbreviated entries from all twenty of Isidore's books, with selected books heavily glossed in Old English. Mirroring the encyclopedic scope of the Etymologiae, this seventh-century epitome was extensively excerpted by glossary-compilers and gave thousands of English words their first written form.

A commonplace among English historians today is the importance of English ties with Aquitaine during the later Middle Ages. For some three centuries, historical events came to link the destinies of these two countries and peoples who otherwise differed strikingly in economy, language and culture in general, with lasting consequences for both. It has long been taken for granted by both English and French historians that this association came about abruptly in the 1150s as a result of the ascent to the English throne of Henry of Anjou who, through his marriage to Eleanor, heiress of the duchy of Aquitaine, became the sovereign of that enormous territorial principality. Till the present no one has suspected that any significant ties existed between the Anglo-Saxons and Aquitanians prior to that time. To be sure, the Anglo-Saxons had been in contact with the late Carolingian kings in the tenth century and with the Normans in the eleventh, but those were purely northern French phenomena. So too were the important Anglo-Saxon relations with the monks of Fleury-sur-Loire in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, but these were not known to have had any repercussions in Aquitaine far to the south.

Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library 2981 is a large album which Pepys described as ‘My Calligraphical Collection vol. 1’. It contains ‘Original Proofs of Antient Hand-Writing English & Forreign between the Years 700 & 1500’ in the form of fragments from manuscripts pasted down firmly on each of the album's paper pages. Notes are written round the margins of the pages and incorporate ‘the Opinion of that Eminent Critick in re Diplomaticâ, our Country-Man Mr Humphrey Wanley of Oxford, touching the different Ages, Characters & Countrys of ye said Pieces, in Return to my Enquiries from him on that behalf’.

Aside from its Old English gloss, the Lambeth Psalter has largely been ignored. Yet this manuscript furnishes valuable evidence about Latin learning in late Anglo-Saxon England, specifically at Winchester. And it can lay claim to be the most important surviving witness to psalter scholarship from this period.

To a greater extent than other saints' lives, Guthlac A is a poem about a land dispute. Through contextualizing the central ‘battle for the beorg’ within Anglo-Saxon practices of land tenure, this article shows that Guthlac A represents the spiritual conflict between Guthlac and the devils as a land dispute between unworthy tenants who have been given temporary tenure of the land and a warrior of God who is granted permanent tenure as his reward for faithful service. By portraying the devils' loss of the beorg and Guthlac's acquisition of it through the framework of Anglo-Saxon customs of land-holding, the poem dramatizes replacement doctrine, the teaching that the number of the saved would equal the number of fallen angels and replace them in the heavenly kingdom.

This work tackles long held assumptions in both archaeology and history surrounding elite diets in early medieval England i.e., that higher status individuals had a more meat-heavy diet and that this was especially true for males. We utilise the largest isotopic dataset on early medieval diets to date to show that not only were high protein diets extremely rare in England before Scandinavian settlement, but that dietary differences cannot be linked to gender or social status from the funerary record. Comparisons with the calculations made in our companion article and the bioarchaeological evidence demonstrate further that the lists of food demanded by eighth-century kings were not the basis for regular elite diet, and that these texts probably represent the supplies for infrequent feasts.

Lexical and stylistic features indicate that the Preface to the Old English Bede was composed by a writer different from the anonymous Mercian who translated the body of the text. The Preface, therefore, cannot be taken to reveal aspects of the original translator's aims or attitude to the text. Recently discovered collations of the burnt manuscript London, British Library, Cotton Otho B. xi, made by John Smith prior to the 1731 fire, provide further insight, indicating that a copy of the West Saxon Genealogical Regnal List was attached to the Preface by the mid-tenth century. Thus the origins of the Preface may lie in an Alfredian or post-Alfredian initiative to disseminate the translation at some time later than its actual creation.

Strap-ends represent the most common class of dress accessory known from late Anglo-Saxon England. At this period, new materials, notably lead and its alloys, were being deployed in the manufacture of personal possessions and jewellery. This newly found strap-end adds to the growing number of tongue-shaped examples fashioned from lead dating from this period. It is, however, distinctive in being inscribed with a personal name. The present article provides an account of the object and its text, and assesses its general significance in the context of a more nuanced interpretation of the social status of lead artefacts in late Anglo-Saxon England.

The Holme Riddles are a collection of 144 English riddles preserved in London, British Library, Harley 1960. Although the manuscript dates from the mid-seventeenth century, some of these riddles are apparently rooted in ancient Germanic tradition. One of these, an ancient ‘world-riddle’ according to the editor, is a version of the ‘oak-ship’ riddle:

Q. wn j lived j fed the liveing now j am dead j beare the live[in]g & with swift speed j walk our the liveing

A. a ship mad[e] of oake groweing feeds hogs with acorns now b[e]ars men & swims our fishes.

This article discusses the unfinished mappa mundi found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 265, dates it to a late-eleventh-century (c. 1065–95) production in Worcester, identifying it as a nearly exact and earlier analogue of two later twelfth-century English maps of the world from the Ramsey area (Oxford, St John's College 17 and London, British Library, Harley 3667). Contained as it is in a collection of Wulfstanian materials, the Worcester map's relationship to these so-called ‘Bryhtferthian’ maps requires a rethinking of how such maps may have circulated and functioned outside of a computisitical context. The close connections between these three maps further point to a unique, late Anglo-Saxon tradition of mappae mundi thus far unrecognized.

Although it is a precious and rare material testament to the introduction of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, the Liudhard medalet (pl. I) has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. It is scarcely known to art historians. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the emblem on the reverse of the issue, and to offer an hypothesis on its meaning. Discovered ‘some years’ before 1844 with other gold coins – looped for suspension as if for a necklace of medalets – and jewellery in or near the churchyard of St Martin's, Canterbury, and published in 1845, the medalet recently has been convincingly assigned to a group of grave goods deposited c. 580–90. Besides the coin in question, the group included an Italian tremissis of Justin II, a Germanic tremissis of unsure origin, a Merovingian solidus struck by Leudulf at Ivegio vico and two tremisses from southern France, the first from Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, the second from Agen. Today these objects are in Liverpool, and Philip Grierson has persuasively argued for the inclusion of a Merovingian tremissis in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, as once forming part of the deposit. Most likely all the coins of the Canterbury group were issued during the second half of the sixth century.