Among the relics in the treasury of the church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Limburg, Belgium, there are some luxurious embroideries which form part of the so-called casula (probably ‘chasuble’) of Sts Harlindis and Relindis (pls. I–VI). It was preserved throughout the Middle Ages at the abbey church of Aldeneik (which these sister-saints founded in the early eighth century) and was moved to nearby Maaseik in 1571. Although traditionally regarded as the handiwork of Harlindis and Relindis themselves, the embroideries cannot date from as early as their time, and they must have been made in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, they represent the earliest surviving examples of the highly prized English art of embroidery which became famous later in the Middle Ages as opus anglicanum.

In his discussion of the formal structures characteristic of Ælfric's ‘rhythmical prose’ style, John C. Pope prints the following passage from Ælfric's homily on Cuthbert, calling attention especially to the pointing, given as it appears in Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 3. 28 (?Cerne, s. x/xi):

Ac an ðære fugela. eft fleogende com.

ymbe ðry dagas. þearle dreorig.

fleah to his foton. friðes biddende.

þæt he on ðam lande. lybban moste.

symle unscæððig. and his gefera samod.

Two rules of the metrical grammar of the Beowulf poet are the subject of this paper. One concerns the variation of stress on the prefix un-; the other pertains to the alliteration of compounds. The two are correlated. The paper rests on the premise that the ‘metre’ of an Old English poem is only one function of a set of regularities that make it something we call verse rather than prose. Separately these regularities may be described as ‘rules’; taken as a group, the rules comprise a metrical grammar. Each Anglo-Saxon scop absorbed such a grammar during the course of long immersion in the poetic tradition of his culture. No two scops' metrical grammars could have been exactly alike; in addition to individual differences, there must have been regional and dialectal variations, although the poetic tradition ensured remarkable uniformity over a wide area and a considerable period of time, and only at the end of the Old English period, with let us say The Battle of Maldon, are significant changes manifest. Further investigation would therefore be needed to determine to what extent the rules here described apply to other grammars.

During the last century there were vigorous arguments between architectural historians about whether any buildings had survived from before the Norman Conquest. Although as early as 1817 Thomas Rickman had given reasoned proof that at least a few stone buildings had survived, many writers followed John Henry Parker in maintaining that the Anglo-Saxons built only in wood and that all their buildings had vanished. But by the end of the century careful study had established over a hundred stone churches with features which could be claimed as Anglo-Saxon, and Baldwin Brown listed 182 in the first edition of his masterly treatise in 1903 and 238 in the second edition of 1925. In spite of more than a century's study of these churches, it still remains difficult to give precise dates to more than a few; in the great majority of cases it can be asserted only that they were built before the Norman Conquest and in some others only that their builders had not yet adopted the Norman style.

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct the form of affirmative replies in the English spoken in England in the period 500–800. Examination of the extant texts shows that the two forms of the Old English word for ‘yes’, i.e. gea and gyse, are distinguished functionally, in that the former is used to reply to positive utterances and the latter to negative utterances. It is not clear, however, where the word gyse comes from. It has no cognates in other Germanic languages and the two main existing proposals for its etymology are problematic in several respects, and also fail to explain its functional patterning in the texts. We suggest a new, more plausible, etymology for gyse and use it to reconstruct the positive response system of proto-Old English. Apart from solving the puzzle ofgyse's origins, our proposal has two wider implications. The first is methodological, in that we demonstrate the value in historical reconstructive work of paying close attention not only to grammatical, phonological and semantic factors but also to the pragmatics of the forms being postulated. Secondly, the attested Old English data show a correlation that has been observed more widely through cross-linguistic comparison, i.e. the existence of a designated response item to negative utterances coupled with the existence of ‘high’ clausal negation. Drawing on our reconstruction of the emergence of gyse in proto-Old English, we suggest that one possible source of cross-linguistic correlations of this kind is diachronic development, in this case grounded in properties of day-to-day interaction in discourse.

On 24 August 410 the Goths under their king Alaric entered the city of Rome and spent three days pillaging it. They then moved south towards Sicily, possibly in the hope of escaping to Africa, but Alaric died and the Goths retreated back through Italy to Gaul, from where they were driven into Spain by Roman forces in 414. The sack of Rome was by all accounts of little material significance in the long and complex history of Roman engagement with barbarians; it was in fact the Goths' third visit to the city in three years, and on the previous occasion the senate had allowed them into Rome and collaborated with them in setting up the prefect of the city as emperor in opposition to Honorius, whose administration was based in Ravenna. Contemporary historians emphasized that the forces of the western empire had recovered their dominance within just three or four years at most, and recent historians have seen the attack on Rome as representing a failure on the part of the Goths, who had hoped to use the threat to Rome as a bargaining tool with the emperor in their pursuit of land and supplies. Honorius and his government seem to have been relatively untroubled. On the day after Alaric's seizure of Rome Honorius had time, from his palace in Ravenna, to issue an edict ordering that religious dissension among Christians in North Africa should cease and summoning a conference of all the Catholic and Donatist bishops to examine their dierences. The Liber pontificalis manages to give a quite detailed account of the time of Pope Innocent I (402–17) and his good works without once mentioning the Goths or the attack on Rome (Orosius explains that he happened to be away in Ravenna at the time). But the event acquired remarkable prominence, and a distinctive significance, in the Anglo-Saxon perception of their past, especially in the Alfredian period: it is mentioned prominently in two of Bede's historical works, in four of the Old English prose works associated with King Alfred, and in Æthelweard's Chronicle; it is the context and end-point of the Old English version of Orosius's History of the World; and it is the starting-point of King Alfred's account of Boethius. I want here to explore its developing significance for the Anglo-Saxons, and particularly for the Alfredian world.

Recent work on the two major Old English homilists, Ælfric and Wulfstan, has not been lacking, with new editions of their homilies and continued study of their sources and style. The anonymous homilies have received rather less attention, and this has meant that one important Old English homiletic type, the penitential homily, has been largely neglected. These ‘exhortations to repentance, illustrated by devotional commonplaces’ as the penitential homilies have been called, are fairly rare in the work of Ælfric, the most popular of the Old English homilists, but are common in the Vercelli collection and other anonymous collections like the Blickling Manuscript. They have been neglected, presumably, both because they are anonymous and because they are often composed of standard motifs and topics, unlike Ælfric's sophisticated syntheses of patristic sources and Wulfstan's use of contemporary detail. But we have recently come to accept that the process of selecting and adapting standard formulas and themes which lies behind Old English poetry can be of considerable interest, and the similar process involved in the composition of these penitential homilies seems also deserving of study.

The Battle of Maldon is usually taken by modern scholars to be a reasonably accurate account of the way in which the battle developed. While not everyone today would necessarily agree with Gordon's statement, ‘the account of the battle in the poem, in so far as its statements can be checked, is accurate in every particular’, it nevertheless remains indicative of a not uncommon attitude. This attitude has been accentuated both by such fantasies as that of the late Professor Tolkien, who invented a poetic aftermath for the poem, and by attempts to localize the site of the battle following the indications provided in the poem. Reviews of Byrhtnoth's generalship also presuppose that the poem presents a realistic account of the battle, so that tactical decision can be evaluated. Some voices have been raised against taking the poem's account too literally, and many commentators now tend to assume a general, if not a detailed, accuracy. Most would perhaps agree with Professor Cross when he writes ‘the poet has selected from, elaborated on, and presumably omitted from a knowledge (not necessarily detailed) of the real events to suit his own purpose as distinguished in the poem’. Even this presupposes that the author was using historical evidence as the basis of his poem.

Ælfric's On the Old and New Testament includes a brief synopsis of the story of Judith, the Hebrew widow who decapitated the Assyrian general, Holofernes. In it, Ælfric refers his friend Sigeweard to an English version of the Liber Judith which has been written ‘eow mannum to bysne, þæt ge eowerne eard mid wæmnum bewerian wiþ onwinnendne here’. Ælfric thus defines the tropology or moral lesson of the Judith story as a timely call to men such as Sigeweard to resist the invading army of Danes. Most scholars agree that Ælfric is alluding to his own homily about Judith (‘on ure wisan gesett’), not the Old English poem celebrating the same heroine. Nevertheless many have held that Anglo-Saxon auditors of the poem derived the militaristic moral from it that Ælfric draws from the poem's biblical source.

The purpose of this article is to describe the architectural evidence contained in a ninth-century poem which has recently been published in a new critical edition. The poem relates to a Northumbrian abbey dependent on Lindisfarne and its content provides some welcome additions to the present small number of contemporary descriptions of churches and their fittings. The poet, who was a member of the community, describes in some detail two churches of the abbey as well as a greater church which he saw in a vision. The poem is dedicated to Egbert, bishop of Lindisfarne 803–21, who would presumably be familiar with the abbey; and this dedication therefore serves not only to date the poem within the first quarter of the ninth century but also to indicate indirectly that it should be free from the wilder exaggerations that have sometimes brought discredit on contemporary descriptions of buildings.

The archives of knowledge through which Anglo-Saxons understood the senses ranged from vernacular to patristic. Quotidian understanding of the senses treated them as functions of their corresponding bodily organs, as the injury tariffs of Æthelberht and Alfred illustrate. Old English learned prose catalogues the senses from sight to touch with an order that bespeaks a set of understandings about bodies, materiality, souls and salvation. There the differing appraisals of sight and its lesser sibling, touch, track their perceived mediations between the world and the soul. The Old English Boethius, Wærferth's Dialogues and a range of Ælfric's writings illustrate understandings of these senses’ mediation between the material and the immaterial, the corporeal and the incorporeal. The meaning of Wulfstan's legislation on friðlice steora must thus be sought in a crossing of archives of appraisals – the legal valuation of body parts and the patristic understanding of senses as channels between the flesh and the spirit.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 (hereafter CCCC 303) is an extensive mid-twelfth-century vernacular manuscript produced at Rochester from a variety of Old English source materials. According to the medieval foliation, forty-four leaves are missing at the beginning of the codex and an indeterminate number at the end. As extant, CCCC 303 comprises seventy-three texts which are arranged according to the Temporale and Sanctorale for the church year (the first complete homily is for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany), thus showing that an initial plan of the contents was decided upon by a compiler. Godden distinguishes five groups of texts in all, the last such group being relevant here. This final portion of the manuscript (pp. 290–362, from the middle of quire 19 to the end of the final quire 23) contains twelve texts designated by Godden as ‘Miscellaneous items, mainly by Ælfric’. The first nine of these ‘miscellaneous items’, however, seem to be linked by their suitability for the Lenten period and their emphasis on sin, repentance and prayer. It is within this part of the codex, at pp. 338–9 (between the Ælfric texts De oratione Moysi in media Quadragesima and Quomodo Acitofel 7 multi alii laqueo se suspenderunt), that the Latin formula for excommunication and a unique Old English parallel text are copied as the eighth item in this particular group.

Jewels have always fascinated man. They have been admired simply for their beauty – their depth of colour and their different propensities for catching and reflecting light. The combination of these qualities, rare in nature, has encouraged the attribution to them of many magical and medical powers. The rareness of gems and the distance and inaccessibility of the places from which many are obtained have caused them to figure curiously in legends and travellers' tales. The Anglo-Saxons appreciated the beauty of jewels, as their jewellery shows. Nor were they without interest in precious stones they could not possess; but it has been hard for modern readers to discover what their ideas about them were. The mid-eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, contains what is by common repute the oldest vernacular lapidary in western Europe. No edition has distinguished its sources accurately or analysed the process of its composition. It has been difficult, more generally, to see how the Anglo-Saxons' ideas fitted into those more widely current. There is no reliable published survey of lapidary writings between late antiquity and the late eleventh century.

Old English saints' lives, as a group, have not generated a great deal of critical enthusiasm; and Cynewulf's Juliana has often been regarded as the worst of a bad lot. One of the poem's recent editors sees in it a ‘uniformity verging on monotony’ and finds it ‘unrelieved by any emotional or rhetorical emphasis or by any other gradations in tone’. While critics concede that all Cynewulf's signed poems have a smooth texture and contain ‘fine passages’, they regard Juliana as something of an embarrassment and generally assign it to the poet's adolescence – or senescence.

The various Latin and Old English texts which have come to be called ‘prognostics’ have not, in general, been well served by scholars. For some texts the only available edition is Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England from 1864-6; most others are available only in the broad but somewhat unsystematic series of articles published by Max Förster in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen in the 1910s and 1920s. Anselm Hughes does not include the eight prognostic texts in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391 in his otherwise fairly thorough edition of much of that manuscript; Peter Baker and Michael Lapidge omit any discussion of such texts from their excellent survey of the history of the computus in the preface to their edition of Byrhtferth's Enchiridion. The mid-eleventh-century Christ Church manuscript now known as London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii has attracted the notice of many fine scholars, including liturgists, linguists and monastic and art historians, who have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117-73 and 2-27), including two magnicent full-page drawings (117v and 2v) and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine Reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Despite their appreciation of these manuscript sequences, however, few scholars have included in their study of this material the eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (27v-47), though most of these are in the same hand and are arranged, it may be argued, with equal care.

Beowulf is a secular heroic story. Its main action is set in the three great fifthand sixth-century Scandinavian kingdoms of the Danes, the Geats and the Swed.s, with other action recounted or alluded to in exemplary or informative ‘episodes and digressions’ placed in the same kingdoms or in lesser ones along the northern coastlands. The most important human characters in its dramatis personae are warriors. The present study comprises an analysis of the eighty-eight nominal compounds, thirteen genitive combinations and the many (uncounted) genitive collocations which the poet uses with direct reference to these warriors. However, although the poet refers to warriors by all these terms, some of them do not mean ‘warrior’, even periphrastically, and not all refer to a warrior in respect of his military duties. (The genitive collocations are especially numerous if we count all the epithets of kinship (e.g., Ecglafes bearn) and of tribal relationship (e.g., Wendla leod).)

The following article explores one way of using Latin sources to increase our understanding and appreciation of the surviving corpus of vernacular prose hagiography in Anglo-Saxon England. Although the saints' legends in prose make up a significant portion of the Old English literary remains, they have been relatively neglected in comparison with the saints' legends in Old English verse, such as Andreas, Guthlac A and Guthlac B, and Cynewulf's Elene. As the standard bibliographies reveal well enough, the prose texts have been studied mainly from the perspectives of language, stylistics, codicology and basic Quellenforschung, and much less than the verse texts for their literary, historical or broadly cultural interest. This is particularly true of the twenty-nine anonymous legends, some of which are not readily accessible in printed versions, and most of which need re-editing. But even the hagiographic writings of Ælfric, which are better known, have been read only occasionally for their narrative content perse. Primary emphasis has fallen instead on Ælfric's considerable stylistic and prosodic achievements. Moreover, the two most recent monographs on Ælfric's intellectual and doctrinal concerns hardly touch on his saints' legends.

The study of the sources of the Anglo-Saxon medical texts began more than a hundred years ago with T.O. Cockayne's monumental edition of most of the medical, magical and herbal material extant in Old English. Cockayne demonstrated that the most significant text in this corpus, the late ninth-century compilation known as Bald's Leechbook, drew on an impressive range of Latin source materials. Recent work by C.H. Talbot and M.L. Cameron has further extended our knowledge of the classical texts which underlie the Leechbook. Among the significant sources is the text known as the Physica Plinii. Although the Physica survives in several recensions, there has as yet been no systematic study of the relationship between these recensions and the version of the Latin text used by the Old English compiler. The present article investigates Bald's Leechbook as a witness to the history of the Physica Plinii, and demonstrates the complexity of the transmission of the latter work.

Alcuin's De dialectica has traditionally been dated to Alcuin's second stay at Charlemagne's court (c. 795–6/7). This dating has been based on the perceived dating for another didactic work by Alcuin, De rhetorica. It will be argued that De dialectica (and De rhetorica) must be dated to Alcuin's first period on the Continent (c. 784/6–90). The new dating is primarily based on a philological comparison between De dialectica and Opus Caroli regis (written 790–3 by Theodulf of Orleans) but appears to be confirmed both by the contents of De dialectica and by its use of specific sources. In dating De dialectica to Alcuin's first stay on the Continent, we must now also reassess Alcuin's work as presenting a unique testimony to the scholarly structures and intellectual initiatives of the otherwise badly attested pre-Aachen phase of Charlemagne's court.

It is a century and a half since the Book of Kells began to be revered as the supreme work of Irish calligraphy and art in the Early Christian period, and a quarter of a century since Monsieur François Masai challenged that traditional opinion, arguing that the Book was in fact made in Northumbria, apparently at Lindisfarne, or at least in some centre influenced both by Lindisfarne and Wearmouth–Jarrow – a definition which, he thought, could well apply to Iona. Masai's Essai sur les Origines de la Miniature dite irlandaise, completed in Brussels in 1944, makes no pretence to be based on research at first hand; it was written as a critique of traditional beliefs about the origins of Hiberno-Saxon illumination, with particular reference to works by Mlle Françoise Henry and Mrs Geneviève Marsh-Micheli. As such, it strikes me as a brilliant success, although some of its conclusions are false and some are not as well founded as they could have been, if Masai had revised his war-time text on the basis of a post-war examination of the manuscripts themselves. It was as a follower of Masai – his was the first book I read on Hiberno-Saxon art – that I persuaded Dr E. A. Lowe to consider, shortly before his death in August 1969, the attribution of the Book of Kells which will appear in the second edition of Codices Latini Antiquiores, part 11; and since Dr Lowe cited me as ‘an expert in this field’, I am under an obligation to publish the arguments that I advanced in 1968 and 1969, partly in letters and partly through reports which he received from his successive assistants Dr Braxton Ross and Dr Virginia Brown. The core of what I have to say is a reconsideration of a group of manuscripts, described in CLA, in the history of which Wearmouth–Jarrow had an important part to play. Lowe's devotion to the Venerable Bede and to the manuscripts produced at Wearmouth–Jarrow is well known, and I should like my lecture to count as a tribute not only to Bede's memory but to the memory of the palaeographer whose work has thrown such a bright light on the intellectual history of Bede's monastery.