Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite.

Recent research has established beyond question that, in the study of medicine at least, Anglo-Saxon England was far from being ‘a backwater in which superstition flourished until the mainstream of more rational and advanced Salernitan practices flowed into the country in late medieval times’. On the contrary, Anglo-Saxon medicine was at least at the same level as that of contemporary European schools. In ninth-century England the medical works inherited by ‘post-classical Latin medical literature (which included translations and epitomes of Greek and Byzantine medical authorities)’ were not only well known, but served as the basis for original reworking and compilation, as the example of the Læceboc shows. More important, it was in pre-Conquest England that, for the first time in Europe, medical treatises were either compiled in or translated into a vernacular language rather than being composed in Latin or Greek. Ancient medicine made substantial use of drugs obtained from plants; and therefore, since the sources of Anglo-Saxon medical lore were in Latin (or in Greek: but invariably known through the medium of Latin), it is not surprising that most medicinal herbs used in the preparation of Old English prescriptions were not indigenous to England or even to continental Germany. And since such medicinal herbs were not indigenous to northern Europe, it is evident that, in using them, speakers of vernacular languages were obliged to create a vocabulary appropriate to denote them.

The metrical grammar of Beo 665a cwen to gebeddan is, for that poem, strikingly irregular: the verse is of Sievers Type A with a preposition and prefix in the first dip and yet displays single - rather than the expected double - alliteration. The Metres of Boethius, a text whose metrical grammar (unlike that of Beowulf) generates a number of similar examples of this licence, allows a better understanding of the structure and rhetoric of the Beowulf verse. In particular, these analogous exceptions show that the absence of the expected alliteration accentuates the semantic contrast of the two stressed elements of the verse.

The main contents of the Bosworth Psalter (BM Add. 37517; henceforth cited as B) are on palaeographical grounds commonly assigned to the last quarter of the tenth century. It is thus the oldest surviving English manuscript in which all the important texts of the Benedictine Office – psalter, canticles, hymns and monastic canticles – have been placed together. These texts are preceded by a calendar of slightly later date. Parts of the psalter and six of the canticles were glossed in Old English very early in the eleventh century and there are Latin additions contemporary with the Old English gloss – a short litany, prayers and mass-texts. Finally some psalms were heavily annotated in Latin in the twelfth century. B, still bound in its original oak covers, is of considerable interest on several counts. Early English psalters supply a very good text of the Psalterium Romanum, and B is one of those which appear in the apparatus of Weber's new edition. The hymnologist appreciates B as the oldest representative of the ‘New Hymnal’ in England. And the art historian values it both for its initials to the psalms, which display a style different from that of the contemporary Winchester School, and for the full-page figure of Christ on 128v. Hence any light that can be thrown on the place of origin of this manuscript is important to several disciplines.

The Metres of Boethius offer a unique opportunity to study the complex subject of Old English verse syntax. They enjoy this distinction because of the unusual way in which they were composed. The versifier did not work directly from the original Latin metra of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy but from an Old English prose intermediary, freely translated from the Latin originals. King Alfred was the author of the prose translation and was probably also responsible for turning the parts of the prose corresponding to the Latin metra into Old English verse. Since a copy of the prose model survives, it affords us an opportunity to compare the two versions in order to judge the versifier's debt to the prose. He apparently followed it quite faithfully and without referring back to the Latin originals. In many verse passages one can find words and half-lines which are direct transcriptions from the prose. Consequently the Old English Metres are generally considered nothing more than prose expanded into verse, adding only ‘poetic’ embellishments (like repetition and variation) and obvious morals drawn from the passage. The fruit of the versifier's labours may be uninspired poetry, but the way that he rearranged the words of the prose offers a rare glimpse into the more elusive conventions of verse-making. Since the many similarities make the differences quite pronounced, the poetical shortcomings of the Metres may be a blessing. A mediocre versifier is more likely to compose mechanically and to imitate established patterns than a good poet, whose virtuosity often conceals the rudiments of his craft.

Almost exactly forty years ago, Evert Barger published his survey entitled ‘The Present Position of Studies in English Field Systems’. It is a measure both of his percipience and of an underlying stasis in this field of scholarly enquiry that, even after the academic dynamism which has characterized agrarian studies so much in the two most recent decades, Barger's paper is still, if suitably edited rather than completely recast, by no means entirely superseded. Indeed, in some respects large parts of the evidence, the research and the published sources on which he drew for his synthesis are not only as relevant today as they were in 1938 but could even be said to be more fashionable now.

During Cnut’s two decades on the throne, his English court was the most vibrant centre in the North for the production and performance of skaldic praise poetry. Icelandic poets composing for earlier Anglo-Saxon kings had focused on the predictive power of royal ‘speaking’ names: for example, Æthelstan (‘Noble-Rock’) and Æthelred (‘Noble-Counsel’). The name Cnut presented problems, vulnerable as it was to cross-linguistic gaffes and embarrassing associations. This article reviews the difficulties faced by Cnut’s skalds when referring in verse to their patron and the solutions they devised. Similar techniques were used when naming other figures in the king’s vicinity. The article concludes with a look at two cruces in an anonymous praise poem celebrating Cnut’s victory in battle in 1016/17 against the English. Both onomastic allusions — to a famed local hero and a female onlooker — seem to poke fun at the ‘colonial’ pronunciation of Danish names in Anglo-Scandinavian England. Norse court poetry was nothing if not a combative game.

Two Old English versions of a sunshine prognostication survive in the mid-eleventh century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391, p. 713, and in a twelfth-century addition to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 149v–150r. Among standard predictions promising joy, peace, blossom, abundance of milk and fruit, and a great baptism sent by God, one encounters an enigmatic prophecy which involves camels stealing gold from the ants. These gold-digging ants have a long pedigree, one which links Old English with much earlier literature and indicates the extent to which Anglo-Saxon culture had assimilated traditions of European learning. It remains difficult to say what is being prophesied, however, or to explain the presence of the passage among conventional predictions. Whether the prediction was merely a literary exercise or carried a symbolic implication, it must have originated in an ecclesiastical context. Its mixture of classical learning and vernacular tradition, Greek and Latin, folklore and Christian, implies an author with some knowledge of literary and scholarly traditions.

This article re-examines the use of place-names in the early prose Lives of Cuthbert and provides an additional explanation for Bede's removal of many of the place-names that greatly localize the events in the anonymous Life. I argue that the author of the anonymous Life was following a common Irish hagiographic practice of using place-names as propaganda to create a network of churches, monasteries, or lands under the authority of the paruchia of a saint's leading church. Bede's deliberate choice to remove certain place-names that were outside Lindisfarne's diocese, or even its immediate sphere of influence, suggests that he was aware of this agenda and intentionally revised these details in order to set right the Northumbrian ecclesiastical landscape.

Of the three legends of virgin spouses in Ælfric's Lives of Saints, Julian and Basilissa would have been the least familiar to an Anglo-Saxon audience. Yet it is the most useful among the stories of chaste marriage and martyrdom for demonstrating how Ælfric uses them to emphasize the importance of constancy in the Christian faith. Altering verbally and structurally his Latin source, he rewrites Julian and Basilissa to model the asceticism and orthodoxy he feels are lacking among his flock. As odd a choice as the legend may seem, his selection suits his aim of rekindling the faith of the English laity with the Lives and is consistent with the larger goals of his programme of pastoral care.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Tanner 10 is the oldest extant copy of the Old English translation of Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. The volume dates from the early tenth century. This in itself adds significantly to its interest, for manuscripts produced in England during the sixty or so years from s. ix2–x1 are scarce. It is ornamented with a remarkable set of decorated initials which are of considerable importance for understanding the characteristics and development of manuscript art during this period, and this is our primary concern here. The text of Tanner 10 was edited at the end of the last century, its codicology and palaeography have recently been reviewed, and a complete facsimile edition is currently being prepared: an examination of its extensive decoration is long overdue. To put this art-work in its context, before turning to the manuscript itself, it will be helpful first to review briefly the main classes of decorated initials which appear in late Anglo-Saxon books as a whole, and then to examine the early history of the particular type that was used in the Tanner Bede.

Although the Ruthwell Cross has universally been regarded as one of the most outstanding achievements of early Northumbrian civilization, the meaning of its iconographic programme remains the subject of considerable debate. Central to most interpretations is the largest panel on the Cross, one depicting Christ and the beasts (see pl. Ia). The correct identification of this scene has long been regarded as crucial for achieving an understanding of the iconographic programme as a whole. While this scene must be accepted as the key to the programme, no entirely satisfactory explanation of its meaning has hitherto been offered. This study will draw attention to textual and visual evidence which provides a new basis for understanding this panel and its relationship to the remaining scenes.

The fragment in question consists of the remains of a bifolium, now a complete single leaf with an irregular stub carrying the ends of three lines of script at its head. The text is Judges v.5–6, vi.6 and x.7 to xi.26. It is undecorated, but written in a highly accomplished Insular cursive minuscule of Phase ii. The fragment, hitherto unpublished, is of importance as the relict of what may have been a bible written in Southumbria during the first half of the ninth century and which on stylistic grounds evidently belongs to the so-called ‘Canterbury’ or ‘Tiberius’ group of manuscripts. This group has played a prominent and often controversial role in the evaluation of the ninth century and its contribution to the history of Anglo-Saxon manuscript production.

Received scholarly opinion regards Genesis A as an Old English versification of the Latin text of Genesis in Jerome's Vulgate revision of the bible. This view has prevailed in modern editions of the poem, which normally print a critical text of the Vulgate Genesis in their apparatus. The textual basis of Genesis A is perhaps ‘vulgate’ in character in so far as the poem renders Genesis readings that were commonly known in Anglo-Saxon England, but the identification of this base text with that of the Hieronymian Vulgate remains an untested hypothesis. Ten years ago A. N. Doane printed a list of readings in the Old English text which show affinity with the ancient versions of Genesis that emerged before the completion of Jerome's translation, readings associted with the Vetus Latina or Old Latin bible. Doane did not, however, challenge the long-standing belief that Genesis A follows a single, lost exemplar that contained in all essentials the text established by Jerome. The present study attempts to survey, without any preconceptions, all the details in the poem that might derive from Latin sources; its intention is to make a first step towards the recovery of the Latin textual basis of Genesis A.

In lines 14b–15a of The Dream of the Rood the cross is said to be honoured by a garment, or garments (wædum geweorðode) and in a 21b–2a it is said to change (wendan) because of or along with or with respect to these garments. What they might be is a question which has racked many brains. The usual opinion at the present day is that they are some kind of cloth trappings. Cook, for instance, was reminded of a streamer which, he said, formed part of the labarum (but in so saying he was misled either by memory or by mistranslation, for the only cloth which the labarum comprised might, from its size and shape, more properly be called an apron). Ebert proposed silk cords or tassels. Others prefer the veil or pall with which the cross is shrouded on Good Friday, to be dramatically revealed on Easter Sunday. The weakness of all such explanations is that their proponents feel bound not to leave the spot without discovering an explanation: they scrupulously refrain, that is, from looking either backwards or forwards, with the result that, as the reference fails to explain itself, they are compelled to look outside the poem. They fail to take into account repeated references within the poem itself to coverings that, however unexpected and however diverse their materials, all agree in performing, to a greater or lesser degree, the principal office of a garment, that of enveloping the cross: in line 5b it is described as leohte bewunden, ‘suffused, or wrapped round, with light’ and in 16a, and again in 23b and 77, gold is said to ‘clothe’ it (gyrwan), the verb signifying, as it may, more than a sporadic embellishment. Nor is it to be overlooked that the first reference to the cross's wæde is in the immediate context of its glory: it is wuldres treow (14b) that is so clothed.

It is my purpose in this article to discuss one aspect of land tenure in Anglo-Saxon England. For good reason there has been little enduring agreement among scholars on fundamental tenurial questions, and opinion on issues of interest to legal historians has tended to be cyclical. There are no contemporary manuals on land law, and as legal documents the primary sources are intractable and opaque. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that scholars have held and continue to hold divergent views about the essential incidents that attached to bocland and folcland, the two types of tenure that are usually taken to be comprehensive of all independent landholding in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms after the introduction of written title in the seventh century. At present the most popular explanations of these tenures derive in essence from the thesis set out by Sir Paul Vinogradoff nearly a hundred years ago. Vinogradoff argued that folcland was so called because it was subject to folcriht, the general communal law of the land, and that bocland was land freed by the royal act embodied in the diploma (OE boc) from the constraints and burdens which folcriht imposed. The diploma was thus a kind of private statute in favour of the grantee. The thesis has its difficulties, and few have accepted it without reservation, but alternative views have similarly failed to find wholehearted support.

It has long been accepted that royal households in the pre-Viking period subsisted on annual renders of food, sometimes termed feorm, from the free peasantry. This model of royal support is historiographically fundamental, in the sense that it is built into the foundations of much current thinking not just on the economics of kingship, but on its origins, and on the process of ‘manorialization’. This article argues that the texts which are conventionally read as references to these general-purpose food supplies are in fact concerned with feasts. This is apparent when we scrutinize both the content of food lists – which are so dominated by animal protein as to be inconsistent with the stable isotope evidence for elite diet examined in our companion article – and the contexts of documentary references to feorm and (in Latin) pastus. The article concludes with a review of the potentially far-reaching implications of this finding.

This article presents the first fruits of a long-term project which aims to identify all the landholders named in Domesday Book, and to build up a picture of English landed society before and after the Norman conquest. The first part describes the project's methods and illustrates them with a selection of short profiles of individuals whose careers add distinctive colour to the emerging picture. The second offers firstly an analysis of the social distribution of landed wealth in England in 1066 and 1086, quantifying the numbers of landholders in different groups defined by the amount of the land assigned to them in Domesday. We then turn to a spatial analysis of landed society, using maps to illustrate the geographical distribution of landholding. In doing so, we offer fresh perspectives on the transformation of English landed society in the aftermath of conquest.

Three eleventh-century English coin types bear legends on the reverse field which are customarily interpreted as forms of the Latin word pax, ‘peace’. The earliest is the Pacx type of Edward the Confessor, which takes its name from the letters p-a-c-x distributed in the four angles of a cross (see fig. 2a); the second is the sole, Pax, type of Harold II, which has the legend pax disposed horizontally within an inner circle (see fig. 2b); and finally there is the Paxs type of William I, which has four annulets within the angles of a cross, each containing one letter of the legend paxs (see fig. 2c). The issue of a type conveying ‘peace’ could be, and has been, regarded as a political gesture arising from specific circumstances, but it is difficult for a historian to understand why such a gesture should have been made on the three occasions in the eleventh century indicated by numismatic chronology – at the beginning of the reigns of Edward and Harold, and again two decades after the accession of William.