The Parker manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, is generally recognized to be the earliest surviving copy of the compilation known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It cannot be the original since it contains various scribal errors including dislocation in the chronology, yet its physical characteristics reflect all the major divisions in the text recognized by modern scholars: it seems to reflect the nature and sometimes even the format of the various exemplars from which it was copied. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to these and other palaeographical features and to survey some of the questions arising from them.

Like his illustrious grandfather, Alfred, King Athelstan (924–39) combined a distinguished and successful career as soldier and statesman with more overtly intellectual pursuits. He restored monasteries, established new bishoprics and was an extremely generous benefactor of churches throughout England. William of Malmesbury reports a view allegedly shared by his twelfth-century contemporaries, that ‘no one more just or more learned ever governed the kingdom’. William's assessment has been endorsed by modern historians. Stenton, for example, wrote of Athelstan that ‘in character and cast of mind he is the one West Saxon king who will bear comparison with Alfred’. As in the case of Alfred, we are moderately well informed concerning Athelstan's military exploits and political achievements from early chronicles. But whereas we also have sound evidence for the literary enterprise of Alfred's reign both in the pages of Asser and in the surviving Old English translations which were executed under Alfred's sponsorship, we have no comparable evidence for the reign of Athelstan. Here the contemporary evidence is limited to a couple of Latin letters addressed to the king, a series of royal diplomas issued in his name and a miscellany of (largely incomprehensible) Latin verse. In face of this pitiful collection of contemporary evidence scholars have seized upon a poem quoted at some length by William of Malmesbury, have declared it a near-contemporary document and have used it to fill the void in the historical record – without ever having examined the poem's credentials to authenticity and antiquity with care. I propose to examine the miscellaneous Latin verse contemporary with Athelstan's reign presently; but since the poem quoted by William of Malmesbury has loomed so large in previous discussions of the reign, it may serve as an appropriate point of departure.

In the course of a long letter written in 797 to Speratus, bishop of an unnamed English see, Alcuin declares:

Verba Dei legantur in sacerdotali convivio: ibi decet lectorem audiri, non citharistam, sermones patrum, non carmina gentilium. Quid Hinieldus cum Christo?

Nowhere else in the substantial corpus of his letters does Alcuin name a known figure in early Germanic legend and literature – the Ingeld of Beowulf and Widsith – or refer specifically to the vernacular literature of his home country. Unsurprisingly, since the publication of the first complete and correct text of the letter in 1873, this passage has been quoted in toto (in varying translations) or alluded to in virtually every history of Old English literature and every commentary on Beowulf. Jaffé, however, in the notes he left with his transcript when he died prematurely in 1870, had proposed an identification of the addressee, Speratus, with Bishop Hygbald of Lindisfarne, recorded from 780 to 803. Dümmler adopted Jaffé's view in his editions of the letter: and he has been followed without demur by every subsequent scholar who has quoted or referred to it. Furthermore, for most of the century it has been tacitly assumed that the letter was directed not merely to the bishop in person but also to the community of which he was head – a monastic one, even after the disasters of 793; and that Alcuin's exhortations, whether or not they were a response to the actual practice of Lindisfarne and other Northumbrian houses, are evidence of the acceptability (and indeed, cultural importance) of secular vernacular verse in eighth-century English monasteries.

The first recorded use of the idea of the ‘Three Orders’ of society in an English context, and indeed it has been said, the first use of the idea in medieval Europe, is in King Alfred's ‘translation’ of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae. It contains a digression on the responsibilities of kingship in which Alfred, speaking as ‘Mind’ in a dialogue with ‘Wisdom’ reflects.

I wished for tools and resources for the task that I was commanded to accomplish, which was that I should virtuously and worthily guide and direct the authority which was entrusted to me. You know of course that no-one can make known any skill, nor direct and guide any enterprise, without tools and resources; a man cannot work on any enterprise without resources. In the case of the king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned; he must have praying men, fighting men and working men. You know also that without these tools no king may make his ability known. Another aspect of his resources is that he must have the means of support for his tools, the three classes of men.

Research into the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the last generation has concentrated upon editing the different versions found in the extant manuscripts and on interpreting their differences. That has caused some neglect of the features that all manuscripts share, namely their remarkable preoccupation with the deeds of English kings and with the assertion of English identity – features characteristic both of the Chronicle's ‘common stock’ down to c. 892 and of subsequent continuations. That shared agenda may most readily be explained by supposing that from the 890s until 1131 sections of the annals continued to be disseminated intermittently from the royal household. The sustained royal focus would reflect the career interests of those in the king's service; and the local continuation of Chronicle manuscripts would reflect such men's role in abbatial or episcopal office. The traditional assumption that the Chronicle was being composed in the churches to which copies had been distributed by King Alfred requires an interpretation of the manuscript transmission of improbable complexity.

The traditional image of the stable Anglo-Saxon village as the direct ancestor of the medieval village is no longer tenable in view of growing evidence for settlement mobility in the early and middle Saxon periods. Indeed, it now appears that most ‘nucleated’ medieval villages are not the direct successors of early, or even middle Saxon settlements, and that nucleation itself appears to be a remarkably late phenomenon.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury went to Rome in 990, to fetch his pallium. Sigeric, formerly a monk of Glastonbury and then abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury, had been consecrated bishop of Ramsbury in 985, and became archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 989 or at the beginning of 990, on the death of Archbishop Æthelgar. During the journey, or more likely, once he had returned to England, he committed to writing a diary covering his journey and his stay in Rome. This year, the 1000th anniversary of Sigeric's visit to the ‘city of St Peter’, as medieval travellers called Rome, seems a suitable time to undertake a new examination of the considerable devotional and artistic impact of the Roman pilgrimage on the cultural and spiritual life of the late Anglo-Saxon Church.

For the modern historian of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England, 1849 should be a more significant date than 449. In 1849 John Mitchell Kemble published The Saxons in England. Earlier historians, even critical ones like Sharon Turner and J. M. Lappenberg, had basically retold the narratives of Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with picturesque details from Henry of Huntingdon and others. Kemble swept all that away: ‘I confess that the more I examine this question, the more completely I am convinced that the received accounts of our migrations, our subsequent fortunes, and ultimate settlement, are devoid of historical truth in every detail.’

This article explores some textual dimensions of what I argue is a crucial moment in the history of the Anglo-Saxon subject. For purposes of temporal triangulation, I would locate this moment between roughly 970 and 1035, though these dates function merely as crude, if potent, signposts: the years 970×973 mark the adoption of the Regularis concordia, the ecclesiastical agreement on the practice of a reformed (and markedly continental) monasticism, and 1035 marks the death of Cnut, the Danish king of England, whose laws encode a change in the understanding of the individual before the law. These dates bracket a rich and chaotic time in England: the apex of the project of reform, a flourishing monastic culture, efflorescence of both Latin and vernacular literatures, remarkable manuscript production, but also the renewal of the Viking wars that seemed at times to be signs of the apocalypse and that ultimately would put a Dane on the throne of England. These dates point to two powerful and continuing sets of interests in late Anglo-Saxon England, ecclesiastical and secular, monastic and royal, whose relationships were never simple. This exploration of the subject in Anglo-Saxon England as it is illuminated by the law draws on texts associated with each of these interests and argues their interconnection. Its point of departure will be the body – the way it is configured, regarded, regulated and read in late Anglo-Saxon England. It focuses in particular on the use to which the body is put in juridical discourse: both the increasing role of the body in schemes of inquiry and of punishment and the ways in which the body comes to be used to know and control the subject.

If poststructuralist literary and cultural theory does not pervade Anglo-Saxon literary studies as thoroughly as it does scholarship in later periods, as it has sometimes been said, to a considerable extent the cause is surely the field's dependence on philology. Some see this as cause for regret. It may be, however, that philology is the field's greatest asset. Given the high value that recent literary studies accord textual alterity, Old English texts are of unparalleled worth in the English canon, since they are culturally the most removed. Philology is the set of protocols designed to mediate the cultural difference, making the language accessible and putting texts into a form that modern readers can comprehend. In making Old English studies resistant to the homogenization of critical methods apparent in later periods, philology perhaps represents the respect in which this field has most to offer literary studies at large, embodying a methodology for dealing with texts of a high degree of alterity.

In his Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship Professor D. A. Binchy reconsidered the early (pre-Norman) Welsh law of succession and concluded that ‘it was recast after the Anglo-Saxon model’. In his view the matter turned on two questions which have an important bearing on both Welsh and English history. When did the ‘Common Celtic’ type of kingship, in which a successor could be drawn from a four-generation group, give way in Wales to a system in which ‘the reigning king nominates his successor, who will normally be his son and only in exceptional circumstances his brother or paternal nephew’, and in particular what is the evidence provided on this point by the Welsh laws? Was the Anglo-Saxon ætheling the model for this Welsh constitutional innovation? It is my purpose in the present paper to discuss the position of the ætheling in matters of royal succession during the Anglo-Saxon period. Consideration of the relevance of these findings to Welsh history and law will be reserved for an article to be published elsewhere.

The frequent representation of the mind as a potentially secure enclosure in Old English poetry has unrecognized implications for interpretation. The mind as imagined by Anglo-Saxon poets exhibits both capabilities of an enclosure: containment and exclusion; but the most common image is one of containment, specifically of reified thoughts, knowledge or discourse as figurative treasure objects. This model's interaction with traditional value systems invests it with ethical meaning: what is inside or outside of the mind either should or should not be allowed to pass through its boundary. Mental valuables are closely analogous to material wealth and are subject to the same imperatives for their management and use. The poetry also reflects anxiety about the privacy of the individual mind, which allows the accumulation and concealment of a perverse hord of deceit, sin or folly that can cause social harm through a failure of containment.

Bede's remarks about the paintings placed by Benedict Biscop in his twin Northumbrian monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow have often been quoted, but I do not think they have ever been examined or analysed with the full attention they deserve. It is my purpose to provide such an examination here, in the hope of shedding some further light on this subject and also of correcting the misconceptions that have gained currency. Bede's allusions to the paintings occur in only two of his works, the Historia Abbatum and his homily on Benedict Biscop. He does not mention them in his Ecclesiastical History. The only other contemporary references occur in the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith, but it is so brief that it can be omitted from our discussion. The most important source is unquestionably the Historia Abbatum.

Ever since Georg Schepss wrote ‘Zu König Alfreds “Boethius”’, scholars have thought that Alfred's translation depended to a considerable extent upon an early Latin commentary. Dorothy Whitelock has stated the current position of Old English scholarship succinctly: ‘There is no doubt that Alfred's work did use a Latin commentary on Boethius’ work … which was clearly related to the one now normally ascribed to Remigius of Auxerre.’ It is the purpose of the present article to reconsider that hypothesis and to argue that it should be rejected.

There is no acknowledged corpus of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits. Scholars have had the benefit of Bigelow's Placita Anglo-Normannica for over a century, and this will soon be superseded by the definitive edition which has occupied Professor van Caenegem since 1952. But the nearest that Anglo-Saxonists have come to a counterpart is the set of thirty-five ‘Select Cases in Anglo-Saxon Law’ appended to the Essays in Anglo-Saxon Law, which four of Bigelow's fellow Bostonians published as a symbolic, if apparently unintended, celebration of America's origins in centennial 1876. The limitations of this admittedly useful exercise extend beyond the facts that three of its cases are not Anglo-Saxon at all, and that its editors were unable to distinguish between the Latin names for Dover and Canterbury. Since then, the selections of Harmer, Robertson and Whitelock have made many more texts generally available, but without isolating the procedural records from other ‘historical documents’. Mean-while, the English evidence was ignored in the impressive list which Hübner intended as the basis of Placita section in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica: that august institution has tracked Germanic footsteps across the Alps, the Rhine, the Pyrenees and even the Straits of Gibraltar, but it as seldom followed. the Anglo-Saxons across the North Sea.

It is generally recognized that during the reign of Cnut the Danish king's court came to represent the focal point for skaldic composition and patronage in the Norse-speaking world. According to the later Icelandic Skáldatal or ‘List of Poets’, no fewer than eight skalds were remembered as having composed for Cnut: Sigvatr Þórðarson, Óttarr svarti, Þórarinn loftunga, Hallvarðr háreksblesi, Bersi Torfuson, Steinn Skaptason, Arnórr Þórðarson jarlaskáld, and Óðarkeptr. Comparing this list with the extant poetic remains, one arrives at the following collection of skaldic praise-poems (some fragmentary) in honour of Cnut: Sigvatr Þórðarson's Knútsdrápa; Óttarr svarti's Knútsdrápa; Hallvarðr háreksblesi's Knútsdrápa; Þórarinn loftunga's Ho˛fuðlausn and Tøgdrápa; and (probably) a fragment by Arnórr jarlaskáld. Of the other poets cited in Skáldatal, no verse in honour of Cnut is extant by Bersi Torfuson, and none at all by Steinn Skaptason and Óðarkeptr.

Students of late Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are fortunate to have recourse to a number of fundamental studies which chronicle changes in the various arts of manuscript production during the tenth and early eleventh centuries. These studies provide a background against which to assess the work of individual craftsmen (scribes, initiallers, illustrators) who produced English manuscripts of this period. In the attempt to date a manuscript, each of these studies provides a spectrum of changing practices against which one can measure the most probable date of execution for any aspect of the manuscript. Additionally, if we use these studies as a group rather than one by one, they have much to tell us about the chronological circumstances of the creation of an entire codex as a composite work of art produced by a team of craftsmen.

The increase in urban archaeological work during the last twenty years has both illuminated many facets of pre-Norman life and demonstrated the development of individual sites to an extent hardly conceivable before. Nevertheless, the only well-defined group of sites to have received concentrated attention has been the burhs of Wessex. Prompted by Biddle's work at Winchester and Hill's elucidation of the Burghal Hidage, the establishment of a network of fortified centres and its development into an urban hierarchy in which the component sites variously played commercial, industrial, administrative and ecclesiastical roles has been charted in some detail. Beyond the frontiers of Wessex, Atkin has drawn together the available data from East Anglia. Rahtz has briefly presented the excavated evidence from the towns of the West Midlands, ‘English Mercia’; within the area of Mercia that was to become the south-eastern Danelaw (Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Northamptonshire), Williams has surveyed the new evidence for the urban development of Northampton, the best understood centre in the region, while Haslam has suggested that Bedford and Cambridge are examples of a group of sites, numbering a dozen or more and spread across pre-Viking Mercia, where urban origins can be traced back to deliberate foundation by Offa. North of the Humber, York has a singular position; it is the only important Northumbrian urban centre mentioned in late Anglo-Saxon historical sources, and seems to have achieved a sustained regional preeminence greater even than that of Winchester in Wessex. It has recently been reviewed; there is also a recent study of London.

There is a well-known resemblance between the heroic behaviour described in the Germania and in The Battle of Maldon: in his account of the martial code of honour of the Germanic tribes Tacitus says, ‘ Iam vero infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo ex acie recessisse’, whilst in Maldon the poet has the followers of Byrhtnoth affirm one after the other that it would be a disgrace to leave the battlefield now that their lord lies dead. For a long time it was assumed that this resemblance reflected historical fact, ties of loyalty and heroic aspirations having remained unchanged over 900 years. A more plausible modification of this view has been that, whilst the society of the tribes in first-century Germany had to be firmly distinguished from that of the Anglo-Saxons in tenth-century England, Old English poetry archaically preserved some of the ideals of conduct that characterized a much earlier form of society. But more recently still the harking back to Tacitus by students of Anglo-Saxon history and literature has been shown to be fallacious, originating in the ethnic romanticism of German scholars in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless the long-standing view that there is a particular resemblance between the Germania and The Battle of Maldon cannot be lightly abandoned. Indeed the more one becomes aware that there is no evidence that the obligation of a retainer to die with his lord was a pervasive ideal in Germanic society which could well have lived on into tenth-century English life or literature, the more striking and curious the resemblance becomes. My aims in the present article are first to demonstrate the apparently total lack of historical or literary–historical continuity between the Germania and Maldon and second, nevertheless, to seek an explanation for a resemblance which is too remarkable to be dismissed as pure chance.

The past two decades have witnessed an almost complete revision of ideas about the character of Anglo-Saxon settlements. The advances have come in the main from a series of archaeological excavations in which techniques commonly used in prehistoric archaeology have been applied to sites of the period in the light of results from contemporary settlements on the continent. The excavations have in effect produced entire new categories of evidence about the domestic accommodation, service buildings and general planning of settlements of all levels of Anglo-Saxon society, in most of England and in all parts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1950 almost no domestic buildings were known other than the sunken huts found first by Leeds at Sutton Courtenay and subsequently by others in various parts of the country. Leeds‘s conclusions, accepted albeit with reluctance by scholars, were that ‘the bulk of the people, we can now be assured, were content with something that hardly deserves a better title than hovel, only varying in its greater or lesser simplicity’. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Radford, moreover, in a seminal paper in the first volume of Medieval Archaeology demonstrated that they stood in some considerable contrast to the settlements and to the standards of domestic accommodation enjoyed by the ancestors and contemporaries of the Anglo-Saxons on the continent.