Murder by fellow Christians for secular motives may seem to us an improbable qualification for sanctity. To the Anglo-Saxons, however, the matter evidently appeared differently, for several members of pre-Conquest royal families seem to have been regarded as saints chiefly because of their violent ends at the hands of Christian assassins. The lives and cults of some of these murdered royal saints are well attested in pre-Conquest sources. Others, however, are known chiefly from post-Conquest texts which are mainly hagiographical in character and which were written considerably later than the events which they describe. For these reasons these latter texts have not generally been taken seriously as historical sources and the saints who figure in them have been largely neglected by historians. The hagiographical character of these texts, however, should not exclude them from historical consideration. They may preserve details of the saints’ careers which can be accepted as fact, and the accounts of miracles and wonders which they contain, although not to be treated as factual narratives, provide evidence bearing on the veneration of these saints. As for the date of composition, there is always a possibility that late medieval hagiographical texts represent stylistic and literary modifications of much more ancient versions, the former existence of which may in some cases be revealed by close analysis of the extant texts. The evidence relating to the whole group of murdered royal saints said to have been venerated in pre-Conquest England must therefore be evaluated before conclusions about the significance of this type of sanctity can be drawn. In what follows the saints in question will be considered in order of the apparent validity of the evidence pertaining to them, so that those whose existence and veneration are less certain can be examined in comparison with more firmly documented examples.

Anglo-Saxonists have often referred to a ‘penitential tradition’ in Old English literature, the poetry in particular, without establishing a connection between that tradition and the administrative sources on which it rested. Especially in the later Anglo-Saxon period, the time of Ælfric and Wulfstan, the literature pertaining to penance was extensive. It included handbooks of penance or ‘penitentials’, homilies about penitential practice and liturgical texts of various kinds, among them instructions for confessors, prayers for penitents and rites of public penance. Whether this material should be called ‘literature’ is an open question, but certainly its relevance to penitential themes in Old English poetry needs to be examined. Before we can grasp the significance of the ‘penitential tradition’ for either the literary or the social history of Anglo-Saxon England, it would seem necessary to understand better than we now do the sources and affiliations of the legislative texts, the penitentials in particular, which governed the practice of penance.

It is a matter of general recognition that Wulfstan, bishop of London from 996 until 1002 and archbishop of York from 1002 until his death in 1023, was responsible for the formulation of the series of law codes issued by Æthelred II, most likely between the years 1008 and 1014. For many years, however, the prevailing opinion among scholars was that the code of Cnut, which borrowed extensively from the 1008 code of Æthelred, was not produced until after Wulfstan died. This opinion was based on arguments set out by Liebermann in his article on relations between Wulfstan and Cnut, which he later reproduced in abbreviated form in the Gesetze: Liebermann believed that Cnut's code must have followed his proclamation of 1027.4 Such a dating would, of course, preclude the direct involvement of Wulfstan in its compilation.

This supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971). It contains twenty-six entries, being all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions which have come to my notice since the publication of the Hand-List. The entries are followed by the Bibliography. This gives in full the references quoted in abbreviated form throughout the supplement unless they have already appeared in the General Bibliography of the Hand-List. The Bibliography is followed by Addenda to the Hand-List which give additional information about several of the Hand-List inscriptions. A list of Corrigenda to the Hand-List follows and the supplement concludes with Addenda to the Bibliographies of the Hand-List entries, bringing them up to date.

The discovery of the early-seventh-century Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 and the examination and analysis of the ship's contents in the years following have provided archaeologists and historians with a number of fascinating artifacts which remain the subject of great interest and debate. One of these objects in particular has aroused both admiration and puzzlement, namely the whetstone sceptre. In form the sceptre is an ornate, four-sided, stone bar 22.8 ins. long. Though made from the material commonly used to sharpen knives and swords there is no sign that it was ever used for that purpose, the very gentle smoothing of its sharp edges being such as would result from normal handling. And, again, symbolically important as it would have been in its character as a whetstone, it is too elaborate and too cumbersome ever to have been used as one. The stone bar is 2 ins. wide in the middle, narrows slightly towards the ends and terminates in two roughly spherical knobs. Each of these knobs has a stubby conical projection, and the lower and longer knob is tipped with a small bronze saucer secured to it by a cage of thin bronze ribs and several strands of wire. This is the bottom of the sceptre and it is possible to visualize the saucer resting on the thigh or kneecap of a seated king.

Early English medicine, including that of Anglo-Saxon England, has been frequently described as a backwater in which superstition flourished until the mainstream of more rational and advanced Salernitan practices flowed into the country in late medieval times. This view has been strongly countered by C. H. Talbot, who has shown, convincingly I think, that works usually attributed to Salernitan writers were in use in England at least as early as they were at Salerno, and that, far from being backward, English medicine in Anglo-Saxon times may have been in the forefront of contemporary practice.

Ever since Georg Schepss wrote ‘Zu König Alfreds “Boethius”’, scholars have thought that Alfred's translation depended to a considerable extent upon an early Latin commentary. Dorothy Whitelock has stated the current position of Old English scholarship succinctly: ‘There is no doubt that Alfred's work did use a Latin commentary on Boethius’ work … which was clearly related to the one now normally ascribed to Remigius of Auxerre.’ It is the purpose of the present article to reconsider that hypothesis and to argue that it should be rejected.

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).)

Probably it is generally recognized that present-day apprehension of the text of Beowulf owes a great deal to scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century, for most editions carry numerous textual notes attributing readings to authorities such as Grundtvig, Kemble, Thorpe and Grein. But often realization of the debt remains only vague. Much of the achievement of the first editors is, in fact, difficult to define, because it consisted in a gradual development of editorial standards and practices through the solution of many individual problems of word and line division, the establishment of numerous particular sentence structures and the identification of a number of proper names. The readings which editors have felt obliged to supply in order to restore those lost because of damage to the manuscript or to repair scribal errors or omissions can, however, be identified and quantified, and analysis shows that well over half of all such readings adopted by editors from 1950 onwards had been proposed by 1857. It is therefore the nature and significance of the readings supplied by that date which this article aims at demonstrating.