In a sermon for Ash Wednesday, after general exhortations to prayer, church-going, and almsgiving during Lent, Wulfstan discusses what is to be done with those guilty of ‘high’ sins:

And sume men syndon eac Þe nyde sculan of cyricgemanan Þas halgan tid ascadene mid rihte weorðan for healican synnan, ealswa adam wearð of engla gemanan Þa ða he forworðe Þa myclan myrhðe Þe he on wunode ær ðam Þe he syngode … Leofan men, on Wodnesdæg, Þe byð caput ieiunii, bisceopas ascadað on manegum stowan ut of cyrican for heora agenan Þearfe Þa ðe healice on openlican synnan hy sylfe forgyltan. And eft on Ðunresdæg ær Eastran hy geinniað into cyrican Þa ðe geornlice Þæt Lencten heora synna betað, swa swa hym man wissað; Þonne absolutionem bisceopas ofer hy rædað [agus] for hi Þingiað [agus] mid Þam heora synna Þurh Godes mildheortnesse myclum gelyhtað. And Þæt is Þearflic gewuna, ac we his ne gymað swa wel swa we scoldan on ðisse Þeode, [agus] hit wære mycel Þearf Þæt hit man georne on gewunan hæfde.

The Vercelli Book, as is well known, is a codex of the late tenth century containing a selection of religious prose and verse in Old English. Of the manuscript's twenty-nine items (some of which are defective owing to loss of leaves), six are alliterative poems and the rest prose homilies. There seems little doubt that one scribe (henceforth referred to as V) was responsible for writing the whole of the codex, even though the size of the writing changes considerably at various points, particularly towards the end of the volume where the lineation also changes. As the earliest of the four extant poetic codices and the earliest surviving collection of homilies in the vernacular, the book is potentially a most important source of knowledge of tenth-century English; most linguistic studies which range over Old English as a whole have included some reference to it. Yet the language of the manuscript is a relatively neglected subject of study, the place of its composition has not been established and the circumstances of its compilation have not been fully explained. This paper seeks to learn more of the book's origin in two ways: firstly, by examining its make-up in an attempt to determine the number and the nature of the sources that V used, and, secondly, by considering the distribution of distinctive linguistic forms in the manuscript in order to find out more about the nature of V's exemplars and about his background and training as displayed in his attitude to the language of his exemplars.

The ‘first’ and ‘second’ law codes of Cnut are the last surviving codes issued in the name of an Anglo-Saxon king.They are the final fruit of the interest in kingship and law and in the inter-relationship of the two which characterized the period following the monastic revival in England and which is especially associated with the name of Wulfstan, archbishop of York. Although they are far from being complete codifications of Anglo-Saxon law, they draw extensively on earlier legislation. They are different in kind from much tenth-century law, which is usually more limited and administrative in content and character, and their nature and purpose invite further consideration.

Laboratory in vitro testing of various remedies from the Old English Leechbooks and Lacnunga does not support previous assertions that Anglo-Saxon medical remedies would have been efficacious. For example, the remedy for a stye in the eye takes ingredients that individually have anti-bacterial properties and compounds them into a mixture with no effect on common bacteria. We conclude that Anglo-Saxon remedies were not likely to have cured the ailments for which they were prescribed and that researchers, rather than asserting the probable prowess of the Anglo-Saxon læce, should instead focus on what people in the time period believed would have helped them.

Among the surviving medical writings in Old English, Bald's Leechbook holds a deservedly important place. It is preserved uniquely in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, a manuscript which may be dated on palaeographical grounds to the mid-tenth century (s. xmed), and which may arguably be attributed to a scriptorium at Winchester.1 Linguistic evidence suggests that this manuscript is in turn a copy of a manuscript written perhaps half a century earlier. Although it is written by one scribe throughout, the manuscript contains three distinct books. A metrical colophon at the end of the second book contains the hexameter ‘Bald habet hunc librum Cild quem conscribere iussit’. Neither Bald nor Cild can be identified, and the ambiguity of conscribere in medieval Latin makes it difficult to determine whether Bald ordered Cild to compile the book or simply to transcribe it. (Because of this ambiguity, I shall refer to the person responsible as the ‘compiler’.) In any case, it is clear that the first two books form a distinct unit, and it is these two books that are customarily described as Bald's Leechbook2 (a practice I shall follow in the present essay). The third book is a collection of medical recipes, of lesser scholarly import, entirely separate from and unrelated to Bald's Leechbook; it will not be discussed further here.

‘Forðy me ðyncð betre, gif iow swæ ðyncð, ðæt we eac sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, ðætweðaonðæt geðiode wendenðe we ealle gecnawan mægen.’ With these well-known words, King Alfred, in the prefatory letter to his Old English version of Gregory's Pastoral Care, enunciates the policy of translation he wishes to see implemented with a view to restoring wisdom and learning to his war-torn kingdom. In the last twenty years or so modern scholars have made a determined effort to define the contribution the king himself made to his scheme. Traditionally it had been accepted that he translated the Pastoral Care, Boethius, Soliloquies, Bede and Orosius. But it has now been firmly established that, while the first three works are his, both Bede and Or are to be excluded as the work of others.

During the last three decades the corpus and text of the late Old English homilies of Ælfric and Wulfstan have become established with ever greater certainty. The scholars who have made this advance have naturally needed to examine much of the anonymous writing that is associated with the works of these authors in the manuscripts, so that it is now possible to attempt an investigation of the whole corpus of anonymous homilies in the vernacular and, in particular, to begin to isolate that part which antedates Ælfric.

King Alfred the Great has long been regarded as the archetypal symbol of the nation's perception of itself. Beset throughout his reign with the reality or threat of Viking invasions, Alfred battled fiercely and suffered heroically in leading his people to their eventual victory; at the same time he promoted the causes of religion and learning, and by the example of his government upheld truth, justice and the Anglo-Saxon way. Moreover, although himself fundamentally English (with West Saxon parents and a Mercian wife), he stood for a combination of political interests which made it easier to pass him off as prototypically British. Certainly he has done well, over the years, from the processes which turn history into legend. It may have taken a while for the cult to get going; but once up and running, the bandwagon could not be stopped. My purpose in reviewing the development of the cult of King Alfred is to explore the variety of factors which in their different ways contributed to the process from the ninth century to the present day, and to show how Alfredophilia, and latterly Alfredomania, found expression not only in religious, legal, political and historical writing, but also in much else besides. The overdy ‘literary’ manifestations of the cult of King Alfred, in poetry, drama, music, and prose, are not unfamiliar; yet they must be taken in connection with manifestations of the cult of King Alfred in sculpture, painting, engraving, and book-illustration, and all placed in whatever contexts may be appropriate, if we are to understand how the image of the king was formed and then transmitted to the next generation.

As is well known, Bede gives a biased account of the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England. He highlights the role of the Roman mission, initiated by Pope Gregory the Great and led by Augustine, the first bishop of Canterbury. Almost as important in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is the effort made by the Irish to Christianize Northumbria. The Frankish contribution to the missionary process, however, is not mentioned at all, though Frankish clerics certainly played an important role in the conversion of England. This role is attested by later contacts between England and the Frankish church. The letters of Gregory the Great relating to the mission of Augustine, moreover, make it clear that this mission also benefited greatly from help supplied by the Frankish church. The continuity of the British church seems to have been stronger than Bede suggests and his statement that the Britons did nothing to convert the Angles and the Saxons should be regarded as an overstatement. It has been argued recently that Bede left out an account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons living west and south-west of the Mercians, the Hwicce, the Magonsæte and the Wreocensæte, not because of a lack of information, but because of the part the Britons played in it.

Our uncertainty about the full implications for poet and audience of particular words and phrases is a serious obstacle to our understanding of Old English poetry. With regard to the final section of The Wanderer (73–115) some advances in our knowledge and understanding have already been made, notably by Professor J. E. Cross in his studies of the Latin antecedents of two passages: he shows that lines 80–4 use the motif of the Fates of Men, with the Old English sum … sum … structure translating the Latin alius … alius …, and that lines 92–6 are based on the ubi sunt topos of the transience of life. This information gives us a better grasp of the impact these lines may have had on an informed Anglo-Saxon audience and helps us to evaluate the poem; but many details still remain unclear. The present study is concerned with the context of these two passages (73–105), and in particular with the puzzling image of ‘the work of giants’ that has been destroyed by God (85–7).

The central subject of this discussion is a particular diplomatic form that lasted in England for at most some two hundred years, the writ-charter. When it first appeared is obscure for want of surviving examples, but the reign of King Edgar would be a plausible guess. Its extinction in the 1160s is less obscure, and we may even hazard why it came about at that time, when Henry II's government was changing both the role of local courts and the use of documents in the legal process. What is harder to explain is how the writ-charter came to survive so late, for it served as a vehicle of transition.

Many medieval manuscripts are composite volumes, made up of a number of self-contained units which elsewhere I have called ‘booklets’. Such a unit originated as a small but structurally independent production containing a single work or a number of short works. Two of the earliest surviving examples, dating from the late eighth century, were produced on the continent. Each is a single gathering now bound with other gatherings into a codex: Merseburg, Stiftsbibliothek 105, fols. 85–105, containing Alcuin's Vita S. Vedasti and some of his homilies, and St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 567, pp. 135–53, containing aVita S. Lucii. There is a fold in the centre of every page of both these quires, made after the text had been copied and not present in the other quires with which they are now bound. In both instances the completed quire was folded so that the verso of its last leaf became the outer pages or ‘cover’ of the resulting booklet. This ‘cover‘ is more soiled than the other pages in the quire, suggesting that the booklet once circulated independently of the other quires in the manuscript into which it is bound.

Nothing is more characteristic of the Dark Ages than the ease with which the barbarians assimilated Latin culture. Within a century of Augustine's mission to the pagan English, ‘a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation’ who ‘paralysed [him] with terror’, Ceolfrith had attempted to make Jarrow a second Vivarium and Northumbria could boast scriptoria with an uncial hand superior to the contemporary products of Rome herself. No less striking is the career of a barbarian prince like Cædwalla, who emerged from the forests of Wessex on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was baptized in St Peter's and had his epitaph written in classical metres by the archbishop of Milan. Yet the Christianity which thus introduced the Saxons to Mediterranean classicism did not cut them off from their native cultural inheritance. The Northumbria which produced the Codex Amiatinus was also the home of Cædmon and of the Lindisfarne Gospels, whose rich mixture of Roman and barbaric elements exemplifies the Saxons’ success in turning vernacular poetry and insular art to Christian themes.

In 948 King Eadred of Wessex conducted a military campaign in Northumbria against Eric Blood-Axe. During the course of this campaign the minster church at Ripon – which had been founded by St Wilfrid and which housed his remains – was burnt down. This unfortunate incident was used as the pretext for a notorious furta sacra: the relics of St Wilfrid were seized and were duly conveyed to Archbishop Oda of Canterbury. In order to celebrate the acquisition of these distinguished relics, Oda built a new altar in honour of St Wilfrid and commissioned a member of his Canterbury household, one Frithegod, to compose a poem in honour of St Wilfrid. Frithegod responded by producing the Breuiloquium uitae Wilfridi, a poem of some 1,400 Latin hexameters which is closely based on the early eighth-century prose Vita S. Wilfridi by Stephanus or Stephen of Ripon. Since the poem bears in its closing lines a dedication to Archbishop Oda, it must have been finished before the archbishop's death on 2 June 958; in other words, it was written between 948 and 958.

In the metrical preface to his Enigmata, Aldhelm of Malmesbury denies that he has had anything to do with the Muses. While this gesture connects him to his Christian Latin predecessors (and, less directly, to the pagan poets as well), the unique elements of Aldhelm's poem suggest that he is also drawing upon a native tradition of poetry that valued technical skill above lofty subject-matter. By portraying the Muses within this Germanic framework as useless, rather than dangerous, Aldhelm's rejection enabled his successors to employ the Muses, and other Classical allusions, as harmless decorative elements in their verse.

Although recently the object of renewed scholarly interest, the ‘Solomon and Saturn’ dialogues remain among the most enigmatic of Old English works. To some extent the problem resides in their strange subject-matter and hyperbolic style, exemplified by grotesque personifications of the letters of the Pater noster, endless enumerations of its extraordinary attributes, and the esoteric, Middle-Eastern background attributed to the speakers Solomon and Saturn. But hardly less daunting are the textual difficulties posed by the primary surviving manuscript, and the manner in which modern editors have handled them. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422 is composite, the first two quires of which (pp. 1–26), dating from the mid-tenth century, contain the Old English. Within these two quires the sequence of texts is as follows: a poetic dialogue of 169 lines on the Pater noster (pp. 1–6); followed without a break by a prose dialogue on the same subject, ending abruptly at the end of p. 12 (coinciding with the loss of a leaf); and another poetic dialogue of 335 lines on various aspects of time, nature, good and evil, also ending abruptly, at the end of p. 26. Yet in the editions of Menner and Dobbie the arrangement of texts is altogether different: the prose section is removed and labelled a separate work; and the verse is divided into two discrete poems. The effect, almost inevitably, has been to create a perception of three independent, even unrelated, works.

After the conversion of the various Anglo-Saxon royal houses to Christianity in the seventh century, the mythology of the late pagan cults which had supported their sovereignty was supplanted, but not utterly destroyed, by the sacred history of the Bible. Myths in which the old gods sired the founders of current dynasties proved uniquely adaptive. These foundation myths were preserved at a secondary stratum in the new ideological order, in that body of dynastic pseudo-history and heroic legend which was important but subordinate to the authoritative canon of Christian scripture. As J. M. Wallace-Hadrill suggested, the nascent Anglo-Saxon dynasties needed legitimizing ancestors as much after, as before, their conversion. And if they could no longer have gods, they would settle for men of the same name.

Ælfric's Judith is one of the few Anglo-Saxon works for which we have explicit authorial guidance on how it is to be interpreted. In the often-quoted Letter to Sigetveard, Ælfric says:

Iudith seo wuduwe, be oferwann Holofernem pone Siriscan ealdormann, hæfð hire agene boc betwux pisum bocum be hire agenum sige; seo ys eac on Englisc on ure wisan gesett eow mannum to bysne, pæ ge eowerne eard mid wæmnum bewerian wið onwinnendne here.

Since their excavation in the 1950s and early 1960s, the palace buildings at Yeavering (Northumberland) and Cheddar (Somerset) have exemplified the physical impact of kingship on the Anglo-Saxon landscape. When, in 1980–2, massive eighth- and ninth-century halls were found at the heart of Northampton, the temptation to recognize a major residence of the Mercian kings was irresistible. Thanks to archaeology, the image of the king's tūn as the one fixed point in a shifting, uncertain world, encouraged by poetic sources and adopted in the first detailed studies of Anglo-Saxon local organization, was assuming concrete reality.