The literature on watermills is extensive, and includes many papers on what is usually called the ‘horizontal’ mill, that is to say mills with a horizontal wheel and a vertical shaft, as against those with a vertical wheel and a horizontal shaft. It is here proposed that the type under discussion in this paper, sometimes called the ‘Norse’ or ‘Greek’ mill, should be called the ‘horizontal-wheeled’ mill, and the other the ‘vertical-wheeled’ mill.

In the introduction to his edition of the New Minster Missal (Le Havre, Bibliothèque municipale, 330), Derek Turner tells us that the manuscript he is editing ‘is one of the five fairly complete mass-books of probable English provenance remaining from before 1100, and the oldest true missal’. By ‘missal’ he means, of course, that Le Havre 330 is a mass book of the sort which usually contains a suitably integrated ordering of texts and chants of the sacramentary, the lectionary and the gradual according to the various traditional propers and ordinaries of the temporal and sanctoral arranged to accompany the church year; normally there are also some votive masses after the main corpus of the book.

The classification of The Phoenix as a Christian allegory has obscured the perception that the poem may contain a single symbolic vision, for the attention given the poem has always centred on the apparent allegorizations drawn from the Lactantian De Ave Phoenice. The long description of paradise at the beginning, the phoenix's journey from paradise, its fiery death and resurrection – elements derived from Lactantius and expanded by a clearly Christian reading – invite the exegete to untangle a carefully woven allegorical web. The exegetical approaches are, in some ways, justified. Even Lactantius's poem, which at no time refers to a system of Christian theology, is legitimately subject to this kind of inquiry, for the phoenix, standing by itself, had been a symbol charged with Christian meaning since the earliest patristic writers. Augustine's words may be taken as a summary statement for the Christian interpretation: ‘Quod enim de phoenice loqueris … Resurrectionem quippe ilia significat corporum.’ In practice, however, strict allegorical readings of The Phoenix have not proved very helpful. An ever-changing perspective in the poem makes it difficult to discover a logically coherent and consistent pattern of allegorical meaning, and attempts to find such a pattern have led either to disappointment with the poem or to an exegetical system so rigid that it falsifies the poem itself.

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.

The Old English poem Andreas deserves a reading entirely on its own terms. For years we have been studying it in various distracting ways: as if it were a deliberate and feeble imitation of Beowulf (which it is not);1 or trying to attach it to the Cynewulfian canon;2 or taking it as a compendium of patristic lore (which hardly any Old English poems are);3 or we may see it as an example of an inherently inferior medieval genre, hagiographical romance; or (most often) as an embarrassing misapplication of the heroic style to the wrong subject. Clearly the poem invites us to make these classifications, but its own noteworthy achievements have been generally overlooked. We need a straightforward frontal attack by the critic: just what is this poem up to, line by line? The best guide in the process seems to me to be the Latin source, to which we have a fairly close approximation in the Recensio Casanatensis.4 Careful consultation of this source lets us see what forms the poet's imagination imposes on his given material and gives us the clearest idea of the kind of poet he is.

Literary history emerges when critical readers in sufficient number move beyond primary recognition of individual texts into a secondary awareness of a scheme, a sense of the connections that exist between these texts.1 Literary history considers the development of a whole body of literature, tracing multifarious influences and innovations through time. In the course of Anglo-Saxon studies the slow and sporadic reappearance of the literary remains resulted in the late nourishing of a schematic or historical overview. As Wellek reminds us, ‘the antiquarian study of Anglo-Saxon remained…outside the main tendency towards literary history’2 that occurred in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century England. So, too, the special quality of Old English poetry itself contributed to the laggard creation of a history. It is difficult to map the path of a literature in which all dating is only good guessing and in which a tenaciously conservative oral—formulaic style makes attempts at suggesting influence hazardous.

As in other societies, adultery was a punishable offence among the Germanic peoples. Although it is a topic which has commanded considerable attention, it has been given attention not so much because it deals with family law and its significance to social history, as because it concerns the treatment of women. But closely related to the question of women, of course, is that of how men view each other. Even as early as Tacitus, evidence exists that Germanic women were treated with respect, and were subject to the protection or mundium of male relatives. Although exaggerated, the account in the Germania gives us some understanding of the role of Germanic women in respect of betrothal, marriage and family life. But it also leaves us with questions to which we most likely will never find answers.

According to the treatise which he presented as a New Year's Gift to King Henry VIII in January 1546, the English antiquary John Leland (c. 1503-52) received ‘a moste gracyouse commyssion’ from the monarch in 1533 ‘to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of Monasteryes and collegies of thys your noble realme’. As he travelled from monastery to monastery he compiled lists of books, some brief, some considerably more thorough. Leland had a strong interest in pre-Conquest writings and his lists testify both to lost exemplars of known texts and to otherwise unattested writings from the early period. His principles of selection were not always consistent, however, and on occasion he omitted manuscripts of historical or literary interest which he must have seen: in no sense was he setting out to be a cataloguer as such. Ultimately his enterprise was a bibliographical one and he envisaged a volume in four books, De uiris illustribus siue de scriptoribus Britannicis, of which ‘the seconde is from the tyme of Augustyne, unto the aduente of the Normanes’. The original draft of the De uiris illustribus was composed around 1535/6 – it was in part a response to Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia published in Basel by John Bebel in 1534 – but after this burst of activity there was a gap of almost ten years before Leland's next major phase of composition.

Consisting of six short Old English texts written in the early eleventh century, the Ely memoranda illustrate how a major and recently refounded Benedictine abbey managed its landed endowment. Two of the memoranda relate to generous help provided by Ely to Thorney, and four concern Ely's own lands. The collection as a whole reveals much about interaction between monasteries, monastic perspectives on material resources and investment in them, the economy of eastern England, and the context of record-keeping. This article offers a new edition and translation of the texts, and surveys the contribution the memoranda make to understanding of cultural and economic history.

This article takes literary representations of Cnut, the Danish conqueror of England, as a case study of the construction of English identity in the eleventh century. It traces representations of Cnut in four literary texts composed over the course of the century: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Knútsdrápur, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and Osbern of Canterbury's Translatio Sancti Ælfegi. Each of these texts constructs a politically useful national—ethnic identity through the figure of Cnut, using the mechanisms of kingship, piety and devotion, language, place and literary tradition to work through the particular exigencies faced by the audiences that they seek to address.

In the process of literary interpretation no critic can afford to overlook the rôle of the poetic narrator. While poetic and narrative statements (as it is commonly argued) designate their meaning largely in accordance with the conventions of language and literary discourse, linguistic criteria alone cannot determine the attitude of the speaker towards what he says; and this attitude constitutes a crucial element in the meaning of the statement as a speech act or utterance. Indeed, as users of language, all of us habitually include considerations of speaker intentions in our standard operations of interpreting as well as producing discourse. Can the speaker be trusted? Does he speak ironically or sincerely? Is he trying to achieve some aim in relation to the hearer other than that which his act of communication ostensibly purports? Entailed in any act of communication, this dimension of interplay between speaker and statement is inevitably involved in literary discourse as well, since obviously we do not always take literary statements at face value. One of the primary tasks confronting the literary critic, then, in Old English poetry or any other body of work, lies in determining the character of the narrator and the parameters of his functioning.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 27 (S.C. 5139), the Junius Psalter, was written, Latin text and Old English gloss, probably at Winchester and presumably during the reign of King Edward the Elder. Junius 27 is one of the twenty-nine complete or almost complete psalters written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England which have survived. (In addition to these twenty-nine complete psalters, eight minor fragments of further psalters are still extant.) This substantial number of surviving manuscripts and fragments is explained by the paramount importance of the psalms in the liturgy of the Christian church, both in mass and especially in Office. Junius 27 is also one of the ten psalters from Anglo-Saxon England bearing an interlinear Old English gloss to the entire psalter. (In addition there are two psalters with a substantial amount of glossing in Old English, though not full interlinear versions.) Since our concern in the first part of this article will be with the nature of the Old English glossing in the Junius Psalter, and its relationship to other glossed psalters, it is appropriate at the outset to provide a list of the psalters in question. At the beginning of each of the following items I give the siglum and the name by which the individual psalters are traditionally referred to by psalter scholars. An asterisk indicates that the Latin text is a Psalterium Romanum (the version in almost universal use in England before the Benedictine reform); unmarked manuscripts contain the Psalterium Gallicanum. For full descriptions of the manuscripts, see N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon.

Chapter 73 of the laws ‘þe Æðelbirht cyning asette on Agustinus dæge’ reads ‘Gif friwif locbore leswæs hwæt gedeþ, xxx sell' gebete.’ The sole manuscript evidence for the laws of Æthelberht is in the early-twelfth-century Textus Roffensis; since this is so late, the manuscript word division is not necessarily significant. For what it is worth, two of the three crucial words are written locbore and les wæs, but it is not absolutely clear whether friwif is intended as one word or two. The elements are divided by the smallest of spaces. Friwif and locbore do not occur elsewhere in the laws; les wæs occurs also at Æthelberht, ch. 3, written lyswæs. Comparatively recent texts and translations can be found in editions of the Anglo-Saxon laws by Thorpe, Liebermann and Attenborough, and, translation only, in Dorothy Whitelock's English Historical Documents (probably the most widely used and certainly the most readily accessible of the four). The earliest of these editors, Thorpe, avoids the difficulties by leaving certain problematical words in the original: ‘If a free-woman loc-bore commit any leswe let her make a bot of xxx shillings.’ Liebermann offers: ‘Wenn eine Freie, eine Lockenträgerin, etwas Unzüchtiges thut, büsse [ihr Schander ihrem Vormunde] 30 Schll’, where, as Attenborough subsequently and charmingly explains, ‘Liebermann understands as the subject of gebete not the woman, but the man with whom she misconducts herself.’ Attenborough's own translation agrees grammatically with Thorpe's: ‘If a freeborn woman, with long hair, misconducts herself, she shall pay 30 shillings as compensation.’ Whitelock has a minor variant: ‘If a freewoman, with long hair, commits any misconduct, she is to pay 30 shillings compensation.’

A group of half-lines in Cynewulf's poetry that take the form þurh + demonstrative pronoun + adjective + gesceap/gesceaft constitutes a distinctively Cynewulfian realization of a more widespread formulaic system (x X gesceaft). Only Cynewulf substitutes (in two closely similar contexts) gesceap for gesceaft, and Cynewulf consistently uses both words to refer to a specific ‘created thing’ instead of to ‘creation’. Within the system as a whole, the specific referent of gesceaft in the sense ‘creation’ (heaven, or earth, or all of creation) is often clarified by deixis, specifically in the type of demonstrative pronoun that modifies the word. Cynewulf's choice of the distal pronoun þæt likewise indicates that the apparently ambiguous referents of gesceap/gesceaft in Juliana 273b and 728a and Elene 789a are heavenly or unearthly things, and analysis of context as well as Christian-Latin analogues supports a specific identification of the referent in each case. While availing himself of an existing formulaic system, then, Cynewulf was innovative in its metrical realization as well as in its semantic application.

Readers of Beowulf are now in apparent agreement that the frequent Christian references in the poem fit easily and naturally into their contexts and give every sign of being simply an unconscious part of the normal language and thought of the poet. We must make the customary proviso, to be sure, that by ‘poet’ we have in mind the final reteller of some older pre-Christian story or stories now beyond recovery. The old Monkish Interpolator who used to be hauled out and execrated by scholars for smearing his despicable Christian Colouring like graffiti over a noble pagan monument has vanished like the ghost he always was. He has, however, now been replaced by equally busy Monkish Extrapolators working tirelessly to insert large sections of the Patrologia Latina somewhere between the lines of Beowulf. In doing so, they take advantage of the undeniable fact that the early Middle Ages provided an ample supply of patristic material, to argue (I think indefensibly) that it must have been put to use – that no vernacular poet could have fought off the urge to wrap any plain tale he had to tell in rich folds of typology, allegory and deeper meanings.

The translator of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica faced a daunting task. His source text had behind it the authority of a well-known, learned English saint, and a translation of the work would inevitably be a step removed from that saint. How could the translator convince the audience that his translation possessed authority? Alfred's prefaces to his translations and Wærferth's preface to the Dialogues gain the confidence of the readers or hearers through their explicit discussion of motives and methods of translation. By contrast, the Old English Bede authorizes itself not through any overt claims in an original preface but through strategic translations of the Latin preface and of the text itself. The Alfredian prefaces thus provide valuable points of comparison and contrast for the Old English Bede. All the translations assert continuity between source text and translation while replacing the source text in different ways. Alfred and Wærferth reveal their identities as translators and make claims for their own authority while the translator of the Old English Bede relies on the authority of Bede himself; Alfred and Wærferth argue for the ability of Old English to render Latin, while the translator of the Old English Bede simply provides a text in Old English.

In a ninth-century manuscript now in St Gallen (Stiftsbibliothek, 254) are found three Latin poems in three different metres dedicated by a poet who names himself as Lutting, in memory of his master Bede who, according to the first of the poems, died in AD 681 (and cannot, therefore, have been the much better known Bede of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow). In the St Gallen manuscript the poems are transmitted alongside Cuthbert's Epistola de obitu Bedae; judging from the language of Bede's ‘Death Song’ which it contains, the Epistola was copied from a Northumbrian exemplar, and the same is apparently true of the three Latin poems. The fact that the names of Lutting and his master Bede are found near to each other in the Durham Liber Vitae raises the possibility that they were together at Lindisfarne; and detailed metrical analysis indicates that two of the poems follow Hiberno-Latin metrical practice in significant ways, which also points to the Irish cultural milieu of Lindisfarne. In an Appendix, the poems are edited for the first time, with translation and commentary.

In a famous letter to his missionaries in England, Pope Gregory the Great suggested that the newly converted Anglo-Saxons should be encouraged to build small huts, or ‘tabernacula’, in conjunction with Christian festivals. He seems to have associated these structures with the Jewish festival of Sukkot, reflecting a missionary strategy modelled on both the biblical conversion of the Israelites and on Gregory's own proselytizing approach towards the Jews of Rome. Gregory's instructions are discussed in the light of historical writings and archaeological evidence, which suggest that ‘tabernacula’ were indeed constructed in England during the conversion period, possibly adapted from pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon ritual structures.

Writing a little before the year 1000, Ælfric in a homily on the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January) had this to say about the beginning of the year:

We have often heard that men call this day ‘the day of the year’, as if this day were foremost in the year's circuit; but we find no explanation in Christian books, why this day is accounted the beginning of the year. The old Romans, in heathen days, began the year's circuit on this day; and the Hebrew people at the vernal equinox; the Greeks on the summer solstice; and the Egyptian nations began the reckoning of their year at harvest. Now our reckoning begins, according to the Roman institution, on this day, for no religious reason, but for the old custom. Some of our servicebooks begin on the Lord's Advent; yet it is not on that account the beginning of the year.

A previously unidentified annal-entry in the Welsh chronicles Brut y Tywysogion and Brenhinedd y Saesson records the blinding of the sons of Ealdorman Ælfhelm as part of the ‘palace revolution’ of 1006. This article discusses how the Old English names Wulfheah and Ufegeat were recorded by Welsh scribes in accordance with Welsh phonological and orthographical norms. Possible Anglo-Saxon sources for the annal-entry are briefly considered and the transmission of the annal-entry in the Welsh sources is analysed.