As is well known, Bede gives a biased account of the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England. He highlights the role of the Roman mission, initiated by Pope Gregory the Great and led by Augustine, the first bishop of Canterbury. Almost as important in the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum is the effort made by the Irish to Christianize Northumbria. The Frankish contribution to the missionary process, however, is not mentioned at all, though Frankish clerics certainly played an important role in the conversion of England. This role is attested by later contacts between England and the Frankish church. The letters of Gregory the Great relating to the mission of Augustine, moreover, make it clear that this mission also benefited greatly from help supplied by the Frankish church. The continuity of the British church seems to have been stronger than Bede suggests and his statement that the Britons did nothing to convert the Angles and the Saxons should be regarded as an overstatement. It has been argued recently that Bede left out an account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons living west and south-west of the Mercians, the Hwicce, the Magonsæte and the Wreocensæte, not because of a lack of information, but because of the part the Britons played in it.

Evidence concerning the position of women in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly during the early period, is sparse and often difficult to assess. Surviving law-codes constitute an important source of information, but due to their cryptic phraseology and sometimes archaic vocabulary they are notoriously open to misinterpretation. Two clauses from the earliest extant code, issued by King Æthelberht of Kent towards the beginning of the seventh century, are commonly treated as evidence of the independent status of divorced women in early Kentish society. So far as I am aware this view has never been challenged, although it remains uncorroborated by other sources and is by no means the only possible interpretation of the text. In this paper I wish to put forward an alternative reading.

In Lincolnshire as a whole, place-names which have Old English burh ‘a fortified place’ as their generics fall into two distinct geographical groups (fig. 1). In the northern half of the county, the locations of these names suggest that a comprehensive system of defence was eventually created for the territory of the Lindisfaran. In the far south, the two isolated instances of burh may signal original strongholds of Middle Angles styled in The Tribal Hidage the Bilmigas (but who on place-name evidence are more correctly to be called the Billingas) and the Gyrwe. It is, however, the burh names in that region defined as Lindsey in The Lindsey Survey of the reign of Henry I (1100–35) which are the focus of this paper.

The ‘Fonthill Letter’ is a document sent by Ordlaf, ealdorman of Wiltshire from 897 onwards, to King Edward the Elder (899–924). It was intended to be used as evidence in a lawsuit which one Æthelhelm Higa had instituted against the bishop of Winchester, claiming possession of five hides at Fonthill in Wiltshire, which Ealdorman Ordlaf had given to the bishop in exchange for five hides in another part of Wiltshire. The letter traces the intricate history of the Fonthill estate, relating the sequence of events by which it had come into Ordlaf's possession through his godson Helmstan, who had distinguished himself by having been twice convicted of theft. Eventually, the letter served its purpose: Æthelhelm Higa withdrew from the suit.

The first recorded use of the idea of the ‘Three Orders’ of society in an English context, and indeed it has been said, the first use of the idea in medieval Europe, is in King Alfred's ‘translation’ of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae. It contains a digression on the responsibilities of kingship in which Alfred, speaking as ‘Mind’ in a dialogue with ‘Wisdom’ reflects.

I wished for tools and resources for the task that I was commanded to accomplish, which was that I should virtuously and worthily guide and direct the authority which was entrusted to me. You know of course that no-one can make known any skill, nor direct and guide any enterprise, without tools and resources; a man cannot work on any enterprise without resources. In the case of the king, the resources and tools with which to rule are that he have his land fully manned; he must have praying men, fighting men and working men. You know also that without these tools no king may make his ability known. Another aspect of his resources is that he must have the means of support for his tools, the three classes of men.

I propose here to continue my exploration and survey of the history of that quintessentially tenth-century script form, English Square minuscule. Since 1987, when my account of the background and earliest phases of the script was published in this journal, new material and new thinking have encouraged continued investigations into Anglo-Saxon script of the 930s and the use of Square minuscule at Canterbury in particular. These factors must serve as a justification for taking a further look at Phase II before proceeding to a preliminary and provisional account of the styles of the 940s, 950s and early 960s. This is a self-contained era which concludes with the origination and propagation of Anglo-Caroline script. The closing phases of Square minuscule will have to await treatment in a third instalment of this essay, as will consideration of some of the larger issues advertised in 1987. However, since it is critically intertwined with the mid-century phases of script history, I shall discuss here (as promised at the outset) the role of the royal chancery in calligraphic developments.

Thanks largely to the work of John Mitchell Kemble, it could be said in connection with the publication of a charter of King Edgar in 1984 that ‘the discovery of a new Anglo-Saxon charter is a very rare event’;1 yet by a strange and happy coincidence two more charters of the same king have recently come to light, in quite different places. The first was issued in 958, when Edgar was king of the Mercians, and relates to an estate at Coundon in Warwickshire. The second was issued in 974, near the end of Edgar's reign as king of all the English, and relates to an estate at Brickendon in Hertfordshire. In both cases, the charters survive in the form of early modern transcripts made direct from originals now lost; the transcripts are of excellent quality, complete with vernacular boundary-clauses, full witness-lists, and notes of the vernacular endorsements.2 Both charters prove, moreover, to belong to a distinctive series known to modern scholarship as the ‘Dunstan B’ charters, which stand apart from the mainstream of diplomatic practices in the tenth century, and which appear to have a particular association as a group with Glastonbury abbey. Provisional editions of the two ‘new’ charters are presented below, pending the fuller treatment which each must receive in its appropriate archival context; the opportunity is then taken to redefine the corpus of ‘Dunstan B’ charters, and to review their significance in diplomatic and historical terms.3

Yale University, Beinecke Library, 401 contains twenty-six leaves of a ninth-century English manuscript of Aldhelm's De laudibus virginitatis. The manuscript has 189 Old English glosses in ink which were published by A. S. Napier in 1900. Napier also noted the presence of dry-point glosses in the manuscript, and in 1961 H.D. Meritt published twenty-six of these. I have found a total of 160 dry-point glosses and gloss fragments to 153 lemmata in the manuscript, which, other than Meritt's twenty-six, have not been printed before. Dry-point glosses are often neglected in studies of glossing, no doubt due to the difficulty of reading marks scratched into the parchment without ink; I have therefore prefaced my list of glosses and their lemmata with a discussion of dry-point glossing and what it can reveal concerning education in Anglo-Saxon England.

Ælfric's Judith is one of the few Anglo-Saxon works for which we have explicit authorial guidance on how it is to be interpreted. In the often-quoted Letter to Sigetveard, Ælfric says:

Iudith seo wuduwe, be oferwann Holofernem pone Siriscan ealdormann, hæfð hire agene boc betwux pisum bocum be hire agenum sige; seo ys eac on Englisc on ure wisan gesett eow mannum to bysne, pæ ge eowerne eard mid wæmnum bewerian wið onwinnendne here.

The Old Testament translations in the compilation known as the Old English Hexateuch or Heptateuch are based on good Vulgate exemplars. That is to say, where variation can be demonstrated between the version associated with Jerome's late fourth-century revision and the pre-Hieronymian ‘Old Latin’ versions, the Old English translations can be shown to derive from exemplars carrying the former. The opening of Genesis–‘On angynne gesceop God heofonan 7 eorðan. seo eorðe soðlice was idel 7 æmti’–illustrates this general rule. Behind it is the Vulgate ‘in principio creauit Deus caelum et terram. terra autem erat inanis et uacua”, not a version with the characteristic ‘old’ readings, such as fecit for creauit and inuisibilis et inconpositas for inani et vacua. Indeed, much of the Old English translation, especially in Genesis, is sufficiently full and faithful for the identification of specific Vulgate variants in the exemplar text to be made with some confidence and for the influence on it of the important Carolingian revisions asssociated with Orléans and Tours to be demonstrated. There is, however, a small number of Old English readings throughout the Heptateuch for which Latin parallels in the thirty or so collated Vulgate manuscripts are unknown or hardly known. Instead, they appear to derive from models available in pre-Hieronymian texts. Uncertainty often surrounds their identification, owing to the complexities both of the translation process and the history of the Latin Bible. Understanding their origins involves consideration of the influence of patristic literature and the liturgy, as well as the availability of ‘contaminated’ exemplar texts.

Although St Dunstan's earliest biographer gave the impression that there was a major collection of books at Glastonbury Abbey before 956 and although it seems that St Dunstan imported books from abroad while abbot and that he himself was actively involved in correcting and illuminating, there is remarkably little hard evidence concerning surviving pre-Conquest books from the monastery. Indeed, the only book which can be said with certainty to have been produced there — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 30 (S. C. 4076) — subsequently followed Dunstan to Worcester. Several years ago I was able to show that two pre-Conquest books written elsewhere were later imported to Glastonbury; in this article I shall add two more examples.

At first sight, fragments of Anglo-Saxon missals may seem unprepossessing. They are often badly worn, difficult to read and rarely have any decoration to speak of. But their texts are normally of considerable interest. One such fragment which has so far escaped notice is preserved in London, British Library, Harley 271.