Bede has often been accused of a hostile or ungenerous attitude towards the British church (which may roughly be said to comprise the Britons of Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria-Strathclyde). And it is true that hard sayings are to be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica.1 Failure to convert, or even try to convert, the invading Anglo-Saxons is only part of the story.2 Another element, to be considered here, lies in the calculation of Easter.3 In 716 the last of the Irish communities, Iona, had conformed to the Roman practice, but the Britons did not follow suit until 768, so that in Bede‘s experience there was a substantial body of believers who disagreed not over the major issues of faith and doctrine but, principally, about the date of Easter and how to find it. Bede‘s tribute to Aidan, a disciple of Iona who died in 651, is somewhat marred by a reference to this problem.4 Why, after eighty years, should it still rankle? I shall suggest that the Britons were felt to be wrong-headed because, among other things, they were ignoring an observable fact.

A cursory glance at a map of Rutland shows a surprising lack of place-names containing Scandinavian themes. When Rutland's place-names are studied in historical detail, this dearth becomes truly startling, especially when we consider the geographical position of the county, lying as it does between the Danish boroughs of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford and surrounded by heavy Norse settlement in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and a not inconsiderable spread in Northamptonshire to its south.

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: T. S. Eliot's metaphor in The Waste Land evokes the evanescent frailty of human existence and worldly endeavour with a poignancy that the Anglo-Saxons would surely have appreciated. Such a concept lies at the heart of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae, and perhaps prompted King Alfred to include this work amongst those which he considered most necessary for all men to know. Written in the early sixth century, Boethius's work was translated from Latin into Old English at the end of the ninth century, possibly by Alfred himself. It survives in two versions, one in prose (probably composed first) and the other in prose and verse, containing versifications of Boethius's Latin metres which had originally been rendered as Old English prose. It is the latter of these versions which will be the focus of my discussion here. Damaged beyond repair by fire and water, the set of fragments which contains this copy will be seen to epitomize the ideas imparted by the work in ways that Alfred could never have envisaged.

Scholarship is divided over whether there existed a tradition of recreational hunting in Anglo-Saxon England, in addition to pragmatic forms of venery, and the extent to which it was altered by the Normans after the Conquest. However, hunting scholarship has hitherto neglected the detailed account of a recreational royal deer hunt in the Vita S. Dvnstani. By analysing this account, which describes a hunt resembling a typically ‘Norman’ chasse par force de chiens, I reassess the evidence for the nature of hunting in laws, charters, and the archaeological record. I posit that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy hunted in a similar manner to the Normans, and that hunting was a socially inscribed pursuit, legally restricted to the ruling classes long before 1066. This argument supports the definition of the disputed charter term haga (‘enclosure’) in certain instances as an Anglo-Saxon hunting park. Finally, I suggest the existence of a specialized Anglo-Saxon hunting dog developed specifically to hunt large quarry in the ‘Norman’ manner.

The article argues from an empirical study of the alliterative and metrical characteristics of the speeches of Genesis A that the poet made a concerted attempt to differentiate between the spoken language of God and that of mortal speakers. In particular the analysis shows that divine language is highly patterned, alliteratively ornate and unusually hypermetric. The most extreme effects are generated by the genres of benediction and malediction. The evidence shows that the poet was also able to use the rules of his poetics effectively for rhetorical ends. An attempt is made finally to link this characterising of the divine voice with the Biblical vox tonantis.

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.

While the attitudes of Stephen of Ripon and Bede toward church-buildings have previously been contrasted, this paper argues that both shared a vision of the church as a holy place, analogous to the Jewish temple and to be kept pure from the mundane world. Their similarity of approach suggests that this concept of the church-building was widespread amongst the Northumbrian monastic elite and may partially reflect the attitudes of the laity also. The idea of the church as the place of eucharistic sacrifice probably lay at the heart of this theology of sacred place. Irish ideas about monastic holiness, traditional liturgical language and the native fascination with building in stone combined with an interest in ritual purity to give power to this use of the temple-image which went on to influence later Carolingian attitudes to churches.

S 786 is one of the so-called Orthodoxorum charters, a group of documents which provide important evidence about the Anglo-Saxon chancery, the development of charters in the tenth century, and the history of Pershore Abbey and the tenth-century Benedictine reforms. The document has therefore received a great deal of attention over the past century or so, but this attention has been focussed on the surviving tenth-century single sheet, and so a second, significantly different version of the text has lain unnoticed. This second version is preserved in a copy made by John Joscelyn, Latin Secretary to Archbishop Matthew Parker. Among the material uniquely preserved in this copy are Old English charter bounds for Wyegate (GL), Cumbtune (Compton, GL?) and part of the bounds probably for Lydney (GL), as well as a reference to a grant by Bishop Werferth of Worcester. In this article both versions of the document are discussed and are published together for the first time, and a translation of the single sheet is provided. The history of the two versions is discussed in some detail, and the text of a twelfth-century letter which refers to the charter is also edited and translated.

The Lenborough hoard has produced the twenty-third coin struck from Agnus Dei dies, which is also the second known mule of an Agnus Dei obverse with a Last Small Cross reverse. It is illustrated in Gareth Williams's preceding article as Fig. 7 (p. 304). This specimen adds to the small group of English finds of Agnus Dei pennies, which previously consisted of three single-finds. Lenborough is therefore the first ever English hoard to contain an Agnus Dei coin, mule or otherwise. The presence of just one penny of the type in an assemblage of almost 1,000 coins of Æthelred II (with a large proportion of the total consisting of the types either side of Agnus Dei) reinforces the rarity of the issue. Detailed research into the hoard may unveil more about the circumstances behind its composition, including the chronological profile of the Last Small Cross element, and thereby add to the general picture of the context in which Agnus Dei was produced.

A careful consideration of a ‘scribble’ in English in the margin of a page of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, a ninth-century Latin manuscript, yields a number of important conclusions: that the English material is homiletic, that it was written before the Latin, that the manuscript is certainly of Northumbrian origin and the English shows traces of Northumbrian dialect, and that therefore at least one vernacular homily in Old English was available for copying in Northumbria in the ninth century. It also adds to the evidence that a group of homilies in the Vercelli Book were drawn from an early and a non-West Saxon source-book.

Two fragments of an important eleventh-century manuscript, missing for some years, were recently rediscovered by the staof Gonville and Caius College library. The manuscript is signicant both because of its attribution to the hand of ‘Eadwig Basan’, a major figure in the history of eleventh-century English script, and because it constitutes evidence for the use in late Anglo-Saxon England of a mass lectionary, a rare type of liturgical book. The fragments have now been assigned the class-mark 734/782a, in order both to associate them with and distinguish them from manuscript 734/782, a seventeenth-century paper catalogue of a bequest of books to the college, in whose binding they were originally preserved.

This article, which builds on an older publication of the author’s, argues on the basis of nautical, linguistic and logical evidence that some widely accepted opinions on the meaning of the Old English words in the title cannot be upheld any further.

The central theme in both versions of the Old English Boethius is the Christian conversion of the soul. In the prosimetrical version, this theme is highlighted further in the metra through the poetic trope of the human soul figured as a star to reinforce the teaching in the prose passages. In the course of the metra, the trope increasingly focuses on the inner life of the man engaged in earthly affairs as he strengthens his moral resolve and his divine affiliation through meditation. Repetition and variations of the trope in Metres 5, 10, 20, 22 and 23 represent the soul's shift from despair to understanding.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's well-known reference to King Alfred's plan for a new design of war-ships is problematic both in general and in detail. In the account of the year 897 (recte 896), we are told how, after the raids made along the coast of Wessex by Danish gangs based in East Anglia and Northumbria, and in particular with raiding-vessels (OE œscas, ON askar) which they had built ‘many years before’, Alfred ordered ships of a new type to be constructed to meet the Danish menace. In the near-contemporary Winchester manuscript (A) the critical passage reads:

Þa het Ælfred cyng timbran langscipu ongen ða æscas. Þa wæron fulneah tu swa lange swa Þa oðru. Sume hæfdon lx ara, sume ma. Þa wæron ægðer ge swiftran ge unwealtran ge eac hieran Þonne pa oðru; næron nawðer ne on fresisc gescæpene ne on denisc, bute swa him selfum ðuhte Þæt hie nytwyrðoste beon meahten.

In April 1970 I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to examine Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Vossius Lat. 4° 106, 25v, the page containing the text of the Leiden Riddle (see pl. I), under extremely strong early morning sunlight. Strong sunlight combines the advantage of ordinary light with, to a much lesser degree, the advantages of both infra-red and ultra-violet light whilst permitting a prolonged and close scrutiny of the manuscript. In sunlight some of the applications of reagent appear as opaque white, whereas in a photograph they appear as dark stains because the opaque white does not register adequately on the negative. In these conditions I was able to distinguish in the damaged parts of the text of the Leiden Riddle between traces of ink left upon the surface and stains left by the various reagents as well as other marks in the substance of the parchment itself. The following day I made an independent examination of the manuscript under ultra-violet light. Later by way of experiment a series of very hard prints was produced from photographs taken in ordinary light. Subsequently I compared the various readings and as a result of these examinations I offer a new transcription and notes on the more difficult passages.

It is basic to Ælfric's style in the Lives of Saints that he does not aim at word-for-word translation of his Latin sources; ‘nec ubique transtulimus verbum exs verbo, sed sensum ex sensu’ is his governing principle in the Lives, as in his homilies. This is so, for instance, in a brief example from the Life of St Oswald, when Ælfric is recounting some of the miracles associated with the place where Oswald fell in battle; he speaks of the horseman who passed by, Bede has at this point: ‘Tulit itaque de puluere terrae illius secum inligans in linteo’, and the Old English Bede reads: ‘Genom þa þære moldan dæl in þære stowe, gebond in his sceate.’

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

A Vulgate fragment from the Book of Judges was published by Michelle P. Brown in 1989 under the title ‘A New Fragment of a Ninth-Century English Bible’. The depleted bifolium – one trimmed leaf with its ragged, conjoint stub – had been sold at Christie's of London on 2 December 1987 (lot 137) for a hammer-price of £24,000 through Quaritch's to Prof. T. Takamiya of Tokyo. But the manuscript from which it derives is already recorded: the remains of thirty-two further leaves are preserved in Düsseldorf, Universitätsbibliothek, A. 19, and were published in the 1971 Supplement of Codices Latini Antiquiores. Thirty-one of the leaves are more or less complete (some are conjoint), while the thirty-second consists of a top half only. Like the Tokyo fragment, they show all the signs of having been rescued from bindings; the trimming of many edges has created further minor losses of text throughout. They preserve text from each of the first seven books of the Old Testament.