For nearly a century now, scholars have raised the question of the influence of the apocryphal Passio Andreae on The Dream of the Rood, but this suggestion has been discussed in terms of broad similarities. One striking specific parallel concerns the history of the Cross. In the accounts of the passion of Jesus in the gospels, Jesus is forced to bear the Cross from Jerusalem to Golgotha. In The Dream of the Rood, however, Jesus goes willingly to the place where the Cross (which has been used before) has already been set up. This account of the sequence of the passion corresponds exactly to the passion of Andrew in which Andrew goes willingly and of his own volition to a Cross which has been used as a gallows before. This correspondence, together with other points of similarity, suggest that The Dream of the Rood poet used some form of the Passio Andreae as a model for his narrative.

This essay uses maps that have illustrated Beowulf since Klaeber's edition as a starting point for an exploration of spatial representation in the poem. It is argued that modern maps do not offer particularly useful tools for understanding the poem, and that ‘chorography’, that is, the description of regional space, may be a more accurate term for analysis of Beowulf than ‘geography’. The poem presents a topography intimately connected to the interrelations of different peoples, and the frequent movement between past, present and future times. The final section of the article considers the postmedieval reception of spatial reference in Beowulf, disputes the presence of an Anglo-Saxon ‘migration myth’ in the poem, and raises some implications for genre that result from spatial analysis.

Discussions of the structure of Beowulf that consider the sections of the poem disposed according to specific mathematical ratios are among the most frequently contested and least accepted by the larger scholarly community. This article examines several theories advocating numerical composition in light of both scholarship that describes structural patterns in the poem and editorial practice. Much agreement is found among theories from widely differing theoretical camps, clustering particularly around the first sections of the poem; however, such agreement does not consistently extend to specific numerical ratios. Further, the significance of such numerical correspondences as can be shown to exist has not been reliably demonstrated.

Many of the minsters founded and generously endowed in the first century and a half of Anglo-Saxon christianity were evidently failing as efficient managers of their estates by the late eighth century, if we judge by the actions of the bishops in whose dioceses they sat. In the diocese of Worcester bishops can be seen transferring the administration of the lands of such minsters to the cathedral community, and then seeking ratification from the Mercian kings whose direct ancestors or royal predecessors had often been involved in the original acts of foundation. When ninth-century kings were acutely short of land, they alleviated the problem by engineering forced loans of the lands concerned from the see of Worcester. These processes are well exemplified in the history of the minster at Hanbury (Worcs.) and its landed endowment, for which particularly good contemporary evidence survives.

This article examines Byrhtferth of Ramsey's derogatory comments about the secular clerics in the Enchiridion and suggests that they should not be read at face value as accurate representations of real members of his monastic classroom, but instead should be read as epideictic literature, the literature of praise and blame. Through these portraits of lazy and incompetent secular clerics, Benedictine monks inscribe their own identity by means of a negative example. Particularly important to the monks' self-definition is the skilful deployment of the so-called hermeneutic style, which encodes the values of the Benedictine Reform, especially the reform's emphasis on education.

London, British Library, Harley 3271 is a composite manuscript designed for use in teaching Latin, and contains Ælfric's Grammar beside other pedagogical works. The book also contains a large number of miscellaneous items, and fourteen scribal hands. Many of the texts point to the usual interests of the Anglo-Saxon scholar in computus and prognostics, while others suggest an interest in the tradition of numerical notes. The items written by Scribe C, the only one whose stints are spread throughout the blank space of the composite volume, point to a combined interest in education, numbers and the Jewish people.

Recent investigations into the sources of Holinshed's Chronicles, both in the latter's text and in the collections of the late-sixteenth-century antiquaries responsible for its compilation, have brought to light a number of passages derived from the eleventh-century Vita Ædwardi regis, some in Latin and others translated into English. In most cases, corresponding passages occur in the single surviving manuscript of the Vita, but this is not invariably so. It is argued here that the antiquaries had access to a manuscript of the Vita which was at one time in the keeping of John Stow, but has since been lost, and that certain passages missing from the extant manuscript of the Vita can now be reconstructed on the basis of the passages derived from Stow's manuscript. Prominent among them is the complete poem describing the magnificent ship and other gifts given by Earl Godwine to King Edward the Confessor in 1042.

The Vita Ædwardi regis, written probably in the late 1060s, is a major source for our knowledge of the reign of King Edward the Confessor (1042–66). The discovery by Henry Summerson of the complete text of a hitherto incomplete poem in the Vita Ædwardi, describing a ship given to the king by Earl Godwine, on the occasion of the king's accession in 1042, contributes significantly to our understanding of the poem itself, and bears at the same time on the relationship between the Encomium Emmae reginae and Vita Ædwardi, and between the Vita Ædwardi and the later eleventh- or early-twelfth-century source common to John of Worcester's Chronicle and to William of Malmesbury's Gesta regum Anglorum. These matters are pursued further, in a preliminary exploration of the wider significance of Dr Summerson's discovery.