It is by no means universally agreed that Lindsey was ever a kingdom or had kings. Stenton, in what is still the most thorough discussion of Lindsey, expressed his doubts on the matter but then dismissed them; there are other scholars who retain theirs. Of those listed, for example, in the supposedly royal genealogy (not a regnal list) of Lindsey, none apart from the last named, Aldfrith, is known to have been a king; some of them may indeed have ruled, but Lindsey would be unique if power had always been transmitted by direct royal primogeniture. Certainly our almost total ignorance of Lindsey's history is a considerable obstacle to viewing it as a fully developed kingdom; but that absence of evidence is no doubt largely due to its early subordination to Northumbria and Mercia by turns. Bede's description of it, whatever else he neglected to tell us, as prouincia and its meriting a bishop both point to the conclusion that Lindsey was indeed a kingdom, but one of those which succumbed early on to aggrandizing neighbours.

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 The fragment, hitherto unpublished, is of importance as the relict of what may have been a bible written in Southumbria during the first half of the ninth century and which on stylistic grounds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.

In the introduction to his edition of the New Minster Missal (Le Havre, Bibliothèque municipale, 330), Derek Turner tells us that the manuscript he is editing ‘is one of the five fairly complete mass-books of probable English provenance remaining from before 1100, and the oldest true missal’. By ‘missal’ he means, of course, that Le Havre 330 is a mass book of the sort which usually contains a suitably integrated ordering of texts and chants of the sacramentary, the lectionary and the gradual according to the various traditional propers and ordinaries of the temporal and sanctoral arranged to accompany the church year; normally there are also some votive masses after the main corpus of the book.

Manige men beoð þe beforan oþrum mannum hwæethugu god begangaþ 7 raþe hie hit anforlataþ, forþan þe Crist sylfa cwaæþ pæt he nelle gehyran þæs gimleasan 7 þæs forgytenan mannes gebedrædene. Ne þæt to nahte nyt ne bið þæt man godne mete ete oþþe þæt betste win on gebeorscipe drince gif þæt gelimpeþ þæt he hit eft spiwende anforlæteþ, þæt he ær to blisse nam 7 to lichoman nyttnesse. Swa we þonne þa gastlican lare unwæriice ne sceolan anforlætan, þe ure saul big leofaþ 7 feded bið. Swa se lichoma buton mete 7 drence leofian ne mæg, swa þonne seo saul gif heo ne bið mid godes worde feded gastlice hungre 7 þurste heo bið cwelmed. Forþon myccle swiþor we sceolan þencan be þæm gastlicum þingum þonne be þæm lichomlicum

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.

A cursory glance at a map of Rutland shows a surprising lack of place-names containing Scandinavian themes. When Rutland's place-names are studied in historical detail, this dearth becomes truly startling, especially when we consider the geographical position of the county, lying as it does between the Danish boroughs of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford and surrounded by heavy Norse settlement in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and a not inconsiderable spread in Northamptonshire to its south.

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.

The buildings and lands of Abbotsbury abbey in Dorset were acquired by Sir Giles Strangways soon after the dissolution of the abbey in 1539, various records pertaining to the abbey's estates seem to have passed into Sir Giles' possession at about the same time. Among these records was a cartulary, which is known to have belonged to Sir Giles' descendant, Sir John Strangways, in the seventeenth century, but which is said to have been destroyed when parliamentary forces set fire to Sir John's house at Abbotsbury during the Civil War. It is possible, however, to reconstruct something of the nature and contents of the lost cartulary from the writings of certain seventeenth-century antiquaries, and in the process to recover parts of the texts of six Anglo-Saxon charters whose existence has not previously been recorded.