Evidence concerning the position of women in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly during the early period, is sparse and often difficult to assess. Surviving law-codes constitute an important source of information, but due to their cryptic phraseology and sometimes archaic vocabulary they are notoriously open to misinterpretation. Two clauses from the earliest extant code, issued by King Æthelberht of Kent towards the beginning of the seventh century, are commonly treated as evidence of the independent status of divorced women in early Kentish society. So far as I am aware this view has never been challenged, although it remains uncorroborated by other sources and is by no means the only possible interpretation of the text. In this paper I wish to put forward an alternative reading.

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.

An interest in Danish legend first appears at the West Saxon court in the 890s when King Alfred traced his father's lineage to Scyld. Alfred traced his mother's ancestry through the Jutish kings of Wight to Goths and Geats, suggesting a motive for the particular view of the ethnic past we find in Beowulf, especially the friendship the poet constructs between a Geatish ætheling and a Danish monarch. A modification of Michael Lapidge's paleographical dating of the archetype of Beowulf (2000) indicates a West Saxon exemplar before c. 900, confirming the mature king's court as a plausible context for Beowulf's composition.

This paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xv and Cotton Vespasian A. xiv). The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England.

In May 1909 a medieval wall-painting was discovered behind the fitted bookshelves of the Morley Library at Winchester Cathedral. A brief description was published locally at the time of the discovery, but neither the precise subject matter nor the date of the painting were established. Thereafter the wall-painting lay virtually forgotten until it was re-examined early in 1990 by the present writer. It now seems possible that the painting includes the earliest known representation of Winchester Cathedral in its original, Romanesque form, and that it also portrays an important artifact within that church: the reliquary of St Swithun. This identification is supported by the other scene in the wall-painting, which, it is argued, represents either the saint's burial in 862 or (more probably) his translation in 971. In the second part of this paper the history of the reliquary of Swithun is traced. This important and welldocumented artifact had been presented by King Edgar to the Old Minster in 971–4 and was transferred to the Romanesque cathedral in 1093. It is suggested that this major piece of Anglo-Saxon metalwork may have survived until c. 1450.

Around the years 755–6 Chrodegang, bishop of Metz from 742 to 766 and metropolitan of the Austrasian church since the death of Boniface in 754, compiled a rule for the canons of his own familia in Metz. His paruum decretulum or parua institutio, as he himself called it, contained very few thoughts not already expressed about the spiritual principles and practical organization of those canons who wished to live in a quasi-monastic, celibate community. Indeed, Chrodegang himself made it abundantly clear in the preface to his Regula that he would have had no need to compile his Rule if the writings of the Church Fathers and existing ecclesiastical laws on this subject had been honoured:

Si trecentorum decem et octo reliquorumque sanctorum Patrum canonum auctoritas perduraret, et clerus atque episcopus secundum eorum rectitudinis normam uiuerent, superfluum uideretur a nobis exiguis minimisque, super hac re tarn ordinate disposita aliquid retractari, et quasi quidem noui aliquid dici.

The publication of the first fascicule of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English bears witness to the fulfilment of many vows made at symposia in the past. One of these was to abandon the practice of Bosworth—Toller of providing entries with etymological information. To meet trie objections raised against this policy at the second DOE conference in 1970, Christopher Ball assured the audience that entries would contain etymological information only if it would be impossible to establish the meaning of a word otherwise. ‘Frivolous’ etymology, as Ball termed it, such as linking OE fōt to Latin pedem, would be omitted. The editors of DOE will have been confirmed in their attitude by the fact that in those years Dr Alfred Bammesberger announced a plan for a new etymological dictionary for Old English. Since then, besides numerous articles, he has published a volume of Beiträge Zu einem etymologischen Wörterbuch des Altenglischen. In the preface to this book, Bammesberger stresses that the preparation of such a new dictionary is a project which will not be completed in the immediate future. So, for the time being, the comparist will have to make do with BT and Ferdinand Holthausen's etymological dictionary of Old English. This seems an appropriate time, therefore, to focus our attention on that component of Holthausen's dictionary which concerns the closest relative of English, (Old) Frisian: not least because Holthausen himself devoted so much attention to it.

The principles of Old English prose syntax are on the whole well understood, but there is no general agreement about verse syntax. There are many reasons why verse syntax should differ, at least in some respects, from the syntax of prose. The Old English poetic tradition is known to have been conservative, and it is therefore possible that certain ancient syntactic patterns, obsolete in prose, might have survived in verse. The more ‘rhetorical’ purposes of verse might have made it necessary to call extensively on usages either rare or unknown in prose. Above all, the metre might have exercised such a constraint on the syntax that certain syntactic patterns could not be used at all, or could be used only in favourable circumstances. Such general considerations would no doubt be accepted as plausible by all students of Old English poetry, but there is still no agreement about how they may have operated in detail: the result is that any attempt to judge the style of an Anglo-Saxon poet is frustrated at every turn. It is impossible to tell how far his usage is the result of choice, how far the result of constraint; there is no way of judging how skilful he is in avoiding such constraint, or of assessing the ingenuity he exercises in saying what he wants to say in spite of the difficulties imposed by the metrical form; there is no way to tell how far his variations from prose usage are dictated by ‘rhetorical’ motives. Judgement is necessarily limited in this way until there is an agreed analysis of verse syntax.

Latin manuscripts used for preaching the Anglo-Saxon laity in the tenth century survive in relatively rare numbers. This paper contributes a new text to the known preaching resources from that century in identifying the Homiliary of Angers as the text preserved on the flyleaves of London, British Library, MS Sloane 280. While these fragments, made in Kent and edited here for the first time, cast new light on the importance of this plain and unadorned Latin collection for the composition of Old English temporale homilies before Ælfric, they also represent the oldest surviving manuscript evidence of the text.

This article examines Byrhtferth of Ramsey's derogatory comments about the secular clerics in the Enchiridion and suggests that they should not be read at face value as accurate representations of real members of his monastic classroom, but instead should be read as epideictic literature, the literature of praise and blame. Through these portraits of lazy and incompetent secular clerics, Benedictine monks inscribe their own identity by means of a negative example. Particularly important to the monks' self-definition is the skilful deployment of the so-called hermeneutic style, which encodes the values of the Benedictine Reform, especially the reform's emphasis on education.

The Old English Promissio regis is a translation of the threefold promise made at their coronations by Anglo-Saxon kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries followed by two paragraphs on the duties of kingship; it is preserved in one eleventh-century manuscript and we have two copies of a second. This article reviews discussions of the text, looks at the manuscript evidence for what it can tell about its authorship and history, examines its sources and function and suggests a close connection with Wulfstan, archbishop of York. A new edition of the text concludes the piece.

The earlier editors of the Old English Martyrology (OEM), T. O. Cockayne and George Herzfeld, recognized that some notices, or phrases within notices, drew on homilies by named patristic writers. Cockayne identified two entries which closely echoed sentences from two of Gregory's Homiliae in Evangelia, for Emiliana (5 January) from Homilia xxxviii.15 and for Cassius (29 June) from Homilia xxxvii.9. Herzfeld added two more, for Processus and Martinianus (2 July) from Homilia xxxii.7 and for Felicitas (23 November) from Homilia iii.3. Also, guided by Ruinart, Herzfeld identified a passage from Augustine's Sermo cccix.4 within the entry for Cyprian of Carthage (14 September). Herzfeld, by oversight, had actually ascribed his Latin quotation (cited in the Addenda) to Fulgentius of Ruspe's Sermo vi, although Fulgentius's sermon probably did influence one other phrase in the notice.

An Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet cloisonné pectoral cross from a seventh-century bed burial at Trumpington, Cambridgeshire is the fifth such example to be found. Details of the contextual associations of the five crosses are used to argue that these artifacts, and other high status cross-shaped pendants, were overt Christian symbols, strongly associated with high status female burials of the later seventh century. That one of the five examples was associated with the burial of St Cuthbert is highlighted as an anomaly, and could indicate that the Cuthbert Cross may have been a gift, rather than a personal possession of the saint.

In the margins of Ӕlfric's ‘Ash-Wednesday’ homily in Cambridge Corpus Christi College 162, an early-eleventh-century annotator adds a remark specifying ‘invasions’ among various misfortunes afflicting the English on a daily basis. This article argues that this marginal annotation constitutes a contemporary reference to the viking raids of King Ӕthelred the Unready's reign. The article examines this marginal text in the context of Ӕlfric's homily and in relation to other marginalia possibly written by the same scribe, including a second comment on the viking incursions. Based on this evidence, it is suggested that the annotator is revising homilies in this manuscript for preaching, possibly at St Augustine's, Canterbury, in the years 1009–12.

According to his own testimony, the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius devoted himself to writing only late in life. The Praefatio to his works provides all the biographical details which we have of him: he was born in 348, the year in which Salia was consul (lines 25–6: ‘Sub quo [=Salia] prima dies mihi/ quam multas hiemes uoluerit’), he appears to have studied rhetoric (lines 8–9: ‘mox docuit toga infectum uitiis falsa loqui’), possibly practised law (lines 13–4: ‘Exim iurgia turbidos/ armarunt animos’), became governor of two cities (lines 16–7: ‘Bis legum moderamine/ frenos nobilium reximus urbium’) and finally was taken into the emperor's service (lines 20–1: ‘pietas principis extulit/ adsumptum propius stare iubens ordine proximo’). The exact date of his death is unknown, but it appears to have been before 410 because his writings, especially the Contra Symmachum, still praise a victorious Rome that had not yet been sacked by Alaric.

The earliest identified surviving manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey date from the ninth and tenth centuries, but there are reliable post-Conquest traditions claiming that valuable books were found at the monastery as early as the reign of Ine, king of the West Saxons (688–726). By the tenth century at the latest there are reports of an ‘Irish school’ at Glastonbury, famous for its learning and books, and St Dunstan's earliest biographer, the anonymous. B., relates that Dunstan himself studied with the Irish at Glastonbury. During Dunstan's abbacy (940–56) – that is, at the period when most historians would place the beginnings of the English tenth-century reform movement – there was a general revival at Glastonbury which included a concerted policy of book acquisition and the establishment of a productive scriptorium. Not surprisingly, Dunstan's abbacy was viewed by the community ever afterwards as one of the most glorious periods in the early history of the monastery, especially since the later Anglo-Saxon abbots showed a marked falling off in devotion and loyalty to the intellectual inheritance of their monastery. Æthelweard and Æthelnoth, the last two Anglo-Saxon abbots, were especially reprehensible, and confiscated lands and ornaments for the benefit of their own kin. Nor did the situation improve immediately after the Conquest: the first Norman abbot, Thurstan, actually had to call in soldiers to quell his unruly monks. In spite of these disruptions, a fine collection of pre-Conquest books seems to have survived more or less intact into the twelfth century; when the seasoned traveller and connoisseur of books, William of Malmesbury, saw the collection in the late 1120s he was greatly impressed: ‘tanta librorum pulchritudo et antiquitas exuberat’.

The so-called ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum, which tells of the exclamations of a good and a bad soul to the angels or demons who lead them to heaven or hell at the moment of death, was adapted independently by three Anglo-Saxon homilists. Versions of this legend survive in an Old English Rogationtide homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114, 102v–105v, in a homily Be heofonwarum and be helwarum in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina A. ix, 21v–23v, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302, pp. 71–3, and in a Lenten homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85/86, fos. 25–40. In 1935 Rudolf Willard published a study of the exemplum, with a detailed comparison between the three Old English versions, an Irish version, and a single Latin version in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 2628 (s. xi). Two years later Willard published a second Latin version from Oxford, University College 61 (s. xiv). Other texts of the Latin sermon have subsequently come to light.

An investigation of Ælfric's shame-vocabulary allows us to divide his shame concept into three areas: being (a)shamed, active shaming, and the shameful. The prototypical scenario of shame is humiliation or exposure before others. However, Ælfric asks his audience to imagine this kind of public, worldly shame in relation to failures to live up to Christian ideals; he thus encourages the ethicization and psychologization of shame. In addition, readers are invited to read to find Christian moral symbolism in narratives of shaming, while the emotive label of ‘shameful’ cues rejection and disgust towards what is wrong and pagan. Ælfric's appeals to shame promote self-scrutiny and the performance of a Christian identity. With respect to Anglo-Saxon shame in general, Ælfric offers a case-study in the flexibility of shame and its importance as a mode of knowing and performing the self.

Ne sceamige nanum menn þæt he anum lareowe his gyltas cyðe · forðan þe se þe nele his synna on ðissere worulde andettan mid soðre behreowsunge · him sceal sceamian ætforan gode ælmihtigum · and ætforan his engla weorodum · and ætforan eallum mannum · and ætforan eallum deoflum æt ðam micclan dome · þær we eall gegaderode beoð · Þær beoð cuðe ure ealra dæda eallum þam werodum · and seðe ne mæg for sceame his gyltas anum menn ge-andettan · him sceal þonne sceamian · ætforan heofonwarum · and eorð-warum · and hel-warum · and seo sceamu him bið endeleas.

King Alfred's preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, explaining how and why he made this translation from the original of Gregory the Great, ends thus:

Siððan ic hie geliornod hæfde, swæ swæ ic hie forstod, ond swæ ic hie andgitfullicost areccean meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ond to ælcum biscepstole on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ond on ælcre bið an æstel, se bið on fiftegum mancessa.