The element OE hām, ‘a village, a village community, an estate, a manor, a homestead’, is generally reckoned to belong to an early stratum of English place-names. Within this stratum, and especially in the type in -ingham from OE -ingahām, it is associated with place-names from OE -ingas and -inga- (the genitive composition form). The same common antiquity is noted on the continent between place-names from OHG -heim and those from OHG -ing. In recent years an attempt has been made at a re-appraisal of the value of the place-name from OE -ingas, -inga-, including the numerous -ingahām type, as evidence of the progress of the English settlements, while other recent work has seen the beginning of an examination of the place-names containing OE -hām and the compounds wīc-hīm, hīm-tūn, hām-stede and hām-st(e)all: the distribution of the compound wāc-hām has been shown to be related very particularly to Roman roads and Roman archaeology, and it has been recognized that in Cheshire (see fig. 1), place-names in -ham from -hām and in -ingham (<-ing(a)hām) are distributed in a pattern based on the run of the Roman roads.

Writing a little before the year 1000, Ælfric in a homily on the Feast of the Circumcision (1 January) had this to say about the beginning of the year:

We have often heard that men call this day ‘the day of the year’, as if this day were foremost in the year's circuit; but we find no explanation in Christian books, why this day is accounted the beginning of the year. The old Romans, in heathen days, began the year's circuit on this day; and the Hebrew people at the vernal equinox; the Greeks on the summer solstice; and the Egyptian nations began the reckoning of their year at harvest. Now our reckoning begins, according to the Roman institution, on this day, for no religious reason, but for the old custom. Some of our servicebooks begin on the Lord's Advent; yet it is not on that account the beginning of the year.

The mortal remains of the Venerable Bede rest today in the cathedral church of Christ and Blessed Mary the Virgin, Durham. They were brought there in the early eleventh century by one Ælfred Westou, priest and sacrist of Durham and an enthusiastic amateur of that characteristically medieval form of devotion expressed in the acquisition, by fair means or foul, of the relics of the saints to the greater glory of God. The removal of Bede's remains to Durham, involving as it did considerable preliminary planning and solitary nocturnal vigil before the final successful snatch, was one of his more brilliant coups, upon which he seems especially to have preened himself. The bones were first kept in the coffin of St Cuthbert, being subsequently removed to a reliquary near the saint's tomb. In 1370 they were placed in the Galilee Chapel, where they now lie under a plain table-tomb of blue marble, made in 1542 after the medieval shrine had been defaced. Bede himself would certainly have preferred that his body should have been left in its grave among his brethren at Jarrow, there to await the coming of Christ which he so ardently desired to see; but if a removal had to be made, we need not doubt that he would have been content to lie at Durham, near but not too near the shrine of St Cuthbert, the great saint and patron of the north, under a modest tombstone, so much more in keeping with his nature than the earlier and richer shrine, despoiled by the commissioners of Henry VIII.

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

Anglo-Saxon genealogy is full of pitfalls, and it is not to be wondered that no one has followed the pioneer work of W. G. Searle in reconstructing the pedigrees of some of the noble houses. Much of the source material is suspect, or too vaguely worded for precise conclusions as to family relationships. The whole topic bristles with difficulties, yet its importance is fundamental; for this as for other periods, detailed examination of family ties and estates supplies essential background information for anyone seeking to uncover the interests and pressures which helped to formulate national policy.

In Anglo-Saxon Coins G. Van der Meer has set out in a convenient and readily accessible form the sequence of six sexennial issues (and minor transitional types) which I had worked out during the preceding decade for the coinage of Æthelred II. For the Crux issue (Brooke 3; BMC iii.a; Hild. C – cf. North 770; Seaby 667) the period of issue which I had proposed is from the autumn of 991 to the autumn of 997. I wish now to examine the bearing that some new evidence has on the dating of this issue, but before doing so I need to clarify a controversial feature of the identification of types that is the basis of my chronology for the reign. The six substantive issues which I had distinguished after studying a large number of hoards preserved intact in Sweden are First Hand, Second Hand, Crux, Long Cross, Helmet and Last Small Cross, but others, notably Mr C. E. Blunt, Mr J. D. Brand and, more seriously, Dr Bertil Petersson, have sought to establish that Second Hand is no more than a late variant of a single Hand issue. Each of them has his particular argument to be answered, but first of all there is the relative scarcity of Hand coins generally that has to be explained, for Hildebrand has described a total of only 483 First and Second Hand coins combined, including only 192 of the latter, as against 790 Crux and 940 Long Cross pieces. To my mind there is a quite simple historical reason. Hand coins according to my chronology are ascribed to the 980s: their relative paucity in Viking hoards is surely to be accounted for by the fact that really massive Danish attacks upon England did not begin until the 990s, while it was not until 991 that Danegeld as such began to be paid.

Individualized portraiture is rarely found in early medieval art. Personalities or groups were more often identified by context or inscription or some significant motif. To those who knew the biblical stories and legends, individuals portrayed in scenes such as Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, or Moses and the brazen serpent, or the Last Supper, could be easily identified. Iconographical motifs not only served to identify particular prophets, apostles, saints and others, but also often established the character of certain groups. In the latter case, costume played an important part, and especially the head-dress. In western medieval European art a king can be recognized by his crown, a monk by his tonsure, a bishop by his mitre, a divine being by its nimbus and so on. While there were variations and some exceptions, nevertheless head-dress and costume were useful devices for ordinary labelling.

The silver ring illustrated in pl. IIIg has had a somewhat chequered history over the past years. From some time before 1911, when it was first published, until 1930 the ring was preserved in the Moyse's Hall Museum, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk. In 1930 it was on display at the exhibition of English medieval art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It subsequently disappeared from public view. In 1969 the Hon. Robert Erskine presented it to the Moyse's Hall Museum where it remains, acquisition number K. 132.

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 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.

Many curious traditions are gathered by medieval man to magnify the birth of Christ. Homilies and tracts transmitted the stories of the anonymous apocrypha but this present investigation uncovers well-known names and a different tradition. For the theme in Vercelli homilies v and vi Rudolph Willard blazed the trail when he drew attention to De Divinis Officiis Liber (wrongly attributed to Alcuin) and also to a sequence in Rome, Vatican Library, Reg. Cat. 49, which is now named Catéchèses Celtiques. The historical information in both these Latin texts, however, clearly derives from Orosius‘s Historiarum adversum Paganos Libri VII.

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.

In spite of all that is known of the religious, cultural and literary background of The Dream of the Rood in general, the genesis of its form, and especially of its most immediately striking and unique feature, the device of the speaking cross, has so far resisted attempts at explanation and remains something of a mystery. Albert S. Cook long ago called attention to similarities between the mode of portrayal of the cross and the medieval traditions of epigram, epigraph and riddle, while not going so far as to suggest that these traditions had a direct influence on the poet. Now it is true, of course, that our earliest text of the poem is the series of inscriptions on the Ruthwell Cross, but these inscriptions are strikingly different from all others from the Anglo-Saxon period through which inanimate objects are personified and speak. The inscription on Alfred's Jewel, ‘Ælfred mec heht gewyrcean’, for instance, and those, some of them in the first person, in Latin and English, on the blades, hilts and scabbards of various swords and knives are generally quite brief – limited to a simple statement of the object's name, its maker's name or that of its owner – are seldom metrical and, most important, are not couched in the kind of heroic diction used in the poem. While it is quite possible that the poet sensed an analogy between such inscriptions and his personification of the cross, what these inscriptions manifestly lack is the literary quality intrinsic to his personification – whether on the Ruthwell Cross or in the Vercelli Book. Only a literary explanation can account for this.

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).

Although it is a commonplace of history that Anglo-Saxon England was receptive to Christianity and to Christian-Latin culture and that English churchmen such as Aldhelm, Bede and Alcuin made an important contribution to that culture, it is only in recent years that scholars have explored and emphasized the importance of Christian tradition to the understanding of Old English poetry, especially those poems without explicit Christian content. Increased investigation of Old English prose, which is largely Christian, and the well-known work on Beowulf by Frederick Klaeber, Marie Padgett Hamilton, Dorothy Whitelock and others, seems to have redirected ‘the search for Anglo-Saxon paganism‘ into a search – sometimes opposed – for reflections of Christianity in Anglo-Saxon poetry. While in some quarters this critical and scholarly attention has been confined to the influence of Christian doctrine, ritual and interpretation of the bible, in others it has taken into account the broader cultural influences of the church, especially its transmission of the literature and learning of pagan antiquity.