During 1981, excavation of a large sand and gravel pit in Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire, revealed many traces of Neolithic occupation and three Roman pits (fig. 8). In the southwestern part of the site, a sub-rectangular feature, aligned approximately east-west (pl. IIa), was found to contain a large number of iron tools and other objects, including Roman coins and glass which initially caused the material to be reported as Romano-British. Subsequently, however, a few objects were identified as post-Roman, and they are enough to show that the material was buried in the seventh century or possibly a little later. Because the soil in the area is very acid, conditions for the survival of organic material were poor, but a few fragments of human bone were recovered nevertheless, and it is therefore assumed that the feature was a grave with an inhumation. The objects had been deposited in two discrete assemblages, at each end of the grave.

Dr W. Urry discovered Canterbury Cathedral Library, Add. 25, containing portions of book iv of Bishop Werferth's translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, about thirty years ago and its text is printed here for the first time. N. R. Ker has described the manuscript and his account should be consulted. After a personal inspection I agree with his description in all particulars save one: the first legible letters on 3r are e of lic (Hecht 313.20), not cíged wæs (313.21). Ker dates the manuscript s. x ex. and believes that it is probably a fragment of an item in the medieval catalogue of Christ Church, Canterbury, and that it has been damaged by fire and used as a wrapper.

The verb forgytan is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six instances are found in King Alfred's translation of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis. As the translation adopts from its Latin source the concept of what I call ‘completely reflexive forgetting’ (the forgetting of one's self), it adjusts the concept for an Anglo-Saxon audience by reimagining and reconfiguring the logistics of the mind and its mechanisms of perception. Completely reflexive forgetting is thus imagined as the process by which a ruler ceases to perceive himself from within (as God always does) and begins perceiving himself from without (from the perspective of his subjects), thereby slipping into a perpetually totalizing state of self-concealment.

When we forget, something doesn't just slip away from us. Forgetting itself slips into a concealing, and indeed in such a way that we ourselves, along with our relation to what is forgotten, fall into concealment.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)’

The first scholars interested in Anglo-Saxon had to learn it by direct contact with original sources. Work on a dictionary preceded that on a grammar, notably through the efforts of John Joscelyn, Archbishop Parker's Latin Secretary. Like Parker, Sir Henry Spelman (1563/4–1641) found that many of his sources for early English history were in Anglo-Saxon. Consequently he encouraged the study of Old English by establishing a Lectureship in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University and worked closely with its first (and only) holder, Abraham Wheelock. Together with Wheelock's pupil, William Retchford, and possibly drawing on some earlier work by Joscelyn (since lost), these scholars attempted to formulate the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon grammar. This pioneering work, basically a parts-of-speech grammar, survives in three versions, two of them incomplete. In this article I discuss the contents and methodology used and present for the first time an edited text of the first modern Old English grammar. It was a remarkable achievement.

This article provides an analysis and edition of newly discovered fragments of an Old English glossed psalter in the Regional Archive of Alkmaar, the Netherlands. These fragments once belonged to the same ‘N-Psalter’ as fragments earlier found in Cambridge (Dietz 1968), Haarlem (Derolez 1972), Sondershausen (Pilch 1997; Gneuss 1998) and Elbląg (Opalińska et al. 2023). The article provides analyses of the language and textual affiliations of the Old English gloss and aims to reconstruct the provenance of the fragments and the N-Psalter as a whole. The annotated edition includes appendices with collations of the Latin and Old English texts of other extant glossed psalters.

This piece identifies an extension to the lesson of the Exeter Book poem The Whale. The work not only admonishes its audience to guard against temptation masquerading as virtue, but also indicates how one may go about doing so. The selection of the whale as a subject places the poem within an extensive biblical and patristic tradition concerning sea creatures that was well represented in Anglo-Saxon England. Specifically, the allusions present in The Whale identify discretio spirituum as the essential skill needed to avoid disguised temptation, and point to Pride as the weakness most capable of leading Christians astray.

This article argues that the Beowulf-poet’s use of the word aðsweord, usually glossed as ‘sworn oath’ in Beowulf 2064 is a play on the words for oaths (að) and swords (sweord) intended to evoke the difficulty inherent in social mechanisms designed to end cycles of reciprocal violence. By tracing the idea of a ‘sword-oath’ as a means to secure peace through a number of Latin and Norse analogs, this article elucidates an important feature of Beowulf’s rhetoric in his speech to Hygelac’s court, showing how he contrasts his own heroic successes in defeating the Grendelkin with Hrothgar’s failure to cement peace between the Danes and the Heatho-Bards. The article thus offers a structural rationale for the Ingeld episode, which has often seemed repetitious to critics, and illustrates the value of criticism that focuses on the intersection of style, narrative logic and theme in Beowulf.

Despite the recent increase in attention given to Archbishop Wulfstan and his writings, the so-called ‘Laws of Edward and Guthrum’ – a lawcode forged by the archbishop in the opening years of the eleventh century – has received little analysis since Dorothy Whitelock’s 1941 study established the churchman as its true author. My article seeks to fill this gap firstly by expanding on Whitelock’s article. I show that many more of the text’s clauses function as antecedents to Wulfstan’s later legislation than those she identified in her important article. Second, I argue that §10 of the code, a clause not repeated in the archbishop’s later legislation, surely still held legal authority given Wulfstan’s prescriptions for non-lethal punishment in some cases. Finally, I posit that Wulfstan’s attribution of the code to Alfred, seen in its opening, reflects the archbishop’s value of him as a king worth emulating.

The distinctive phrase, domino in domino dominorum, shared by the salutations in the prefatory letter of Bede's revised metrical Vita Cuthberti and in the letter sent by Hwaetbert with his former abbot Ceolfrith to Rome, reflects an unexpected historical connection among Bede's revision, Ceolfrith's departure and, more tentatively, the abdication of John of Beverley of the bishopric of York. While only Ceolfrith's journey has been dated to 716, I argue that Bede was revising his poem in anticipation of this event, but under the false assumption that it would be John of Beverley who would lead the party. The salutation, drawn from one of Augustine of Hippo's letters, supports this claim by identifying, after the opening phrase that would be appropriate for a bishop, John as a priest, a playful conjunction of terms used by Bede to call attention to the bishop of York's changing status. This opening, then, was in Bede's mind when the need for a letter from Hwaetbert to Pope Gregory II arose. Bede's revision and, probably, some discussion of John's retirement can be dated to 716.

The Exeter Book Riddles are anonymous, and the generally formulaic character of all Old English verse discourages attempts to establish unity or diversity of authorship for them; but correlations between the sequence of Riddles in the manuscript and the recurrence from poem to poem of aspects of form, content (including solutions), presentation and style sometimes suggest common authorship for particular runs of texts, or reveal shaping episodes in the collection's transmission. Investigation along these lines throws up clear differences between the two main blocks of Riddles (1–59 and 61–95), and evidence emerges that the composition of many (at least) of Riddles 61–95 was influenced by a reading of Riddles 1–59.

The reception in Anglo-Saxon England of Prudentius's Psychomachia has been well studied. In an earlier article I concentrated on the textual tradition and touched only briefly on the important aspect of Psychomachia illustrations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; in the present article I treat the illustrations more fully. Psychomachia illustrations have been studied previously, most thoroughly by Stettiner and Woodruff, and they are also referred to by Katzenellenbogen and Norman. None of these examinations is completely satisfactory as far as the Anglo-Saxon illustrations are concerned. Both Stettiner and Woodruff examine all, that is both continental and Anglo-Saxon, illustrated Psychomachia manuscripts, and their primary aim is to establish stemmata and to determine generic relationships between the various manuscripts. Of necessity this procedure leads away from a scrupulous examination of individual manuscripts and their illustrations. In other words, by being concerned more with the generic similarities of the illustrations, Stettiner and Woodruff pay less attention to the differences (though they do not ignore them altogether). Moreover, they concentrate on the illustrated manuscripts and neglected the evidence which non-illustrated manuscripts can provide. Katzenellenbogen and Norman, in turn, are interested in the Psychomachia and its illustrations exerted on the sculpture and painting of later centuries, and only briefly refer to the Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations thus still remains a necessity.

A notable addition to our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon manuscript fragments with Old English interlinear glosses has been made in a contribution by Professor Herbert Pilch of Freiburg to the recently-published Festschrift for Anatoly Liberman,1 and I hope to show that the leaf he describes and edits has deserved closer inspection.

For part I see ASE 1 (1972), 23–44. Information about the conventions and abbreviations used is given ibid. pp. 24–6.

Some years ago Professor Fred C. Robinson advised retention of the usually emended manuscript reading afrisc meowle in line 580b of the Old English Exodus poem. His argument was that afrisc meowle, ‘African woman’, alluded to the wife of Moses, who is mentioned elsewhere in the biblical Exodus though not in the passage to which the last lines of the Exodus poem correspond. Moreover, Robinson maintains, Moses's wife might have been familiar otherwise to an early medieval audience, for among the commentators she was identified as a type or figure of ‘the church gathered out of the nations’. In explaining why Moses's wife might be alluded to at this point, Robinson considers the suitability of such an allusion as an amplifying, even though extra-biblical, detail. His reasons are of weight. They concern, however, only the literal identity of the afrisc meowle as the wife of Moses; they make nothing of her significance as a type of the church. But another compelling reason for retaining the manuscript reading here may be found if the phrase afrisc meowle and also the following lines 582–9a are considered from the figural point of view. The passage as a whole has never been so considered. The Israelites plunder the Egyptian treasure washed up on the shore, and that is that.

The great monument of tenth-century Anglo-Saxon monastic liturgy, the Regularis concordia, has been particularly fortunate in its twentieth-century devotees. The most prominent was Dom Thomas Symons, who published numerous learned articles on the text and, in 1953, an edition and translation that are still immensely valuable. More recently, Lucia Kornexl has re-edited the Concordia with its continuous Old English gloss from London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, and provided an exhaustive collation against the second Latin copy in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina B. iii. Building on this detailed editorial work, Kornexl's introductory chapters also suggest new and helpful ways of regarding the transmission of this text and the authority of its two extant manuscripts.

As Professor Clemoes has demonstrated, Ælfric treats a wide variety of subjects with both felicity and facility. While Clemoes makes his case by presenting passages differing in intellectual content but displaying the same flexibility of style, it is noteworthy that first among his selections is a narrative excerpt from the Life of St Swithhun. Generally students of Old English prose have not chosen to pursue the implicit connections between narrative and intellectual prose, preferring, it appears, to keep generic guidelines clear and distinct. At least one significant exception is C. E. Wright's search for saga in histories and chronicles. Clemoes's suggestion of a ‘narrative style’, however, merits a wider application to Old English, homiletic literature. Obviously homilies are not stories, but one can find in the use of exemplum, anecdote and history a narrative style at work, or at least a narrative consciousness.

Connections between Andreas and Beowulf have been the subject of much scholarly discussion. This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that the account of the Mermedonians’ discovery of and response to the loss of their prisoners in Andreas fitt X, which corresponds to chapters 22–3 of the poet’s putative Latin source, has been deliberately recast in ways intended to recall the account in fitt II of Beowulf of Grendel’s first attack on Heorot and the reactions of the Danish community. The connection argued for here is based not on verbal correspondences, but on embedded structural and thematic parallels. The Andreas-poet emerges as a careful and sophisticated reader, notable for their specifically literate and textual engagement with Beowulf. This observation has implications not only for our appreciation of the Andreas-poet’s art, but also for the transmission of Beowulf and for our understanding of Old English poetic practices more generally.

It has traditionally been assumed that the so-called Agnus Dei penny of iEthelred the Unready (978–1016) depicts the dove of the Holy Spirit on the reverse. It is argued here that it may depict an eagle rather than a dove, so that the obverse alludes to the forgiveness of sins as described at Isaiah XL.1–2, while the reverse alludes to the effects of hope in the Lord subsequent to this forgiveness as described at Isaiah XL.29–31. Hence the coin may have been intended to proclaim the hope of Æthelred that, once the English have won the forgiveness of the Lord, they will ‘take wings as eagles’ and rout the Viking foe. If that was the case, however, the issue was quickly abandoned when it became clear that this would not in fact happen.