It is well known that sources for the Anglo-Saxon period are unevenly distributed, and that we are particularly badly off for reliable evidence relating to East Anglia, especially in the period before the Viking raids and settlements. The main reason for this lies in the effects of those raids and settlements, for not only were the monasteries destroyed, but the two East Anglian sees of Dommoc and Elmham ceased to exist, and only Elmham was restored, and not, as far as our evidence goes, much before 955. Henceforward there was only one bishop for the whole of East Anglia, though at times it appears to have had a centre for Suffolk at Hoxne as well as one at Elmham. The East Anglian see was transferred to Thetford in 1071–2, and eventually about 1095 to Norwich. With such breaks in continuity it is not to be wondered that no pre-Viking age manuscripts or charters have come down by preservation in East Anglian churches, and it is doubtful how far any information in post-Conquest writers is likely to go back on genuine tradition. What we know about the early church in East Anglia comes from evidence preserved elsewhere, except in as far as the finds at Sutton Hoo have implications concerning the conversion of this kingdom. Our main source is Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica, but this can be supplemented by some pieces of evidence from other sources, and it may be worth while to assemble these and study their implications.

This paper is offered in the hope that it will provide reliable evidence for those wishing to make use of episcopal dates during the century 850–950. The original editors of the Handbook of British Chronology were assured by experts that ‘until all the available charter-evidence had been critically sifted, it would be useless to try and revise the available lists of Anglo-Saxon bishops’, so they used for their lists the information available in W. Stubbs's Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1897) and W. G. Searle's Anglo-Saxon Bishops, Kings and Nobles (Cambridge, 1899). We are still far from the desired state of charter study, but a good deal has been done on this and related studies in the last few decades, and perhaps the time has come to look again at the bishops' dates. In many cases the episcopal witnesses can corroborate or impugn the genuineness of a charter, and it is sometimes the misfortune of the Anglo-Saxon historian, in using the appearance of a certain bishop to strengthen the validity of a charter, to find that the date of the bishop's episcopate is determined by the very charter in question. So the critical sifting of all the available charter evidence must include a study of episcopal dates – one cannot take place without the other.

A great deal has been written about the geographical first chapter of the Old English Orosius since it attracted the attention of scholars in the sixteenth century. Not only has this chapter been a valuable source of information for historians and historical geographers, but also it has proved a fertile subject for speculation, particularly as regards the origins and accuracy of the modifications made in it to its Latin original. Most discussions have been concerned exclusively with the apparently independent section on the geography of Germania. Recently, however, a theory has gained favour which requires all the ‘new’ geographical information in this work to be taken into consideration: the theory that, to help him in his translation and adaptation, the author may have used a mappa mundi, a traditional map portraying the orbis terrarum of classical geographers. Thus Professor Labuda considers the source of certain additional details, such as the association of the Sabaei with Arabia Eudaemon and the location of the legendary Land of Women and Riphaean mountains north of the ninth-century Croats of Bohemia, to be a mappa mundi on which the author marked the positions of Germanic, Slav and Baltic countries. Dr Havlík and Professor Derolez suggest that the apparent clockwise deviation of a number of directions in Or. may similarly be due to the use of an enlarged mappa mundi. According to them, the author of Or. would seem to have described the relative positions of peoples and countries from the standpoint not of astrological north, south, east and west, but of cartographic oriens (near the mouth of the Ganges), meridies (south of the Nile), occidens (near the Pillars of Hercules) and septentrio (in the region of the river Tanais). Thus, for instance, the Abodriti, whose ‘centre’, Mecklenburg, was true north-east of the Old Saxons, are cartographic north of them, by virtue of their location on an imaginary line between Saxonia and septentrio. Finally, Dr Linderski, on the basis of possible classical sources that he has found for Or.'s siting of Dacia east of the Vistula and placing of an unnamed waste-land between Carentania and Bulgaria, has suggested that if the author did indeed use such a map – an alternative being a ‘description’ – it was almost certainly a late offspring of the Commentarii of Agrippa and his now lost mappa mundi.

‘In literary culture’, Sir James Murray has said, ‘the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece.’ Indeed when the Normans set foot on English soil Anglo-Saxon England was in possession not only of a remarkable literature but also of a highly developed written standard language, known and used in all regions of the country. Most of our Old English manuscripts were written in the late tenth century and in the eleventh in a form of English – although not always quite pure – which the grammarians call late West Saxon. This form of the language is by no means just a dialect, any more than its literature is merely the literary product of a dialect. This fact is first brought home to us when we examine the negative evidence – the rareness before the end of the tenth century of texts in dialects other than West Saxon and their almost complete absence after this time, a state of affairs for which various explanations might be found, historical factors among others. Considerably more important, however, is a positive criterion: texts in this late West Saxon were written and read in other parts of the country too, in Kent (Canterbury), in Mercia (Worcester) and indeed even in Northumbria (York). Moreover, texts which had originally been written in Anglian were transcribed into late West Saxon, as was a large part of Old English poetry. There can be no doubt: in our Old English texts of the eleventh century we are dealing with a standard literary language which, although based on a dialectal foundation, had extended its domain beyond the borders of this dialect.

I present here an edition of three Anglo-Latin poems from a Cambridge University Library manuscript, Kk. 5.34, 71r–80r. In addition to these three poems the manuscript contains important recensions of the Aetna, the Culex, Ausonius's Technopaegnion and the late Latin Carmen de ponderibus. These recensions have occupied the interest of previous editors and almost no attention has been given to the Anglo-Latin poems. These Anglo-Latin poems are nevertheless of considerable interest to the study of Anglo-Latinity and of medieval Latin in general. I have named them the Altercatio magistri et discipuli, the Responsio discipuli and the Carmen de libero arbitrio respectively, for reasons which will become clear in the following discussion.

The Beowulf poet tells us (194–201) that when his hero heard about Grendel's doings he had a good ship made ready for himself, saying he was minded to seek overseas the war-king (i.e. join Hrothgar), who stood in need of men. We learn further (202–4) that the wise men made no objection, though he was dear to them; they urged him on, saw (good) omens. These compatriots, presumably elders or councillors, come up again a little later, when the hero tells the Danish king:

King Hygelac himself was of another mind if we go by his words of welcome when Beowulf came home from Denmark:

On the face of it, then, king and council were at odds in the counsel they gave Beowulf, who chose to follow the bold rather than the safe course, despite his lord's pleas. A headstrong hero he.

As a narrative poem, Andreas usually suffers from comparison with Beowulf. Stanley, for example, writes that the Andreas poet ‘can do the big bow-wow like any man going’, but also that the versified saint's legend is to Beowulf roughly as Cowley's Davideis is to Paradise Lost. Such comparisons are of long standing, and the reasons for them are apparent. Further, the common emphasis in both poems on the language of war and seafaring and the similarities in the larger patterns of their plots – both heroes cleanse foreign lands – imply a degree of dependence. Despite our knowledge, therefore, of Andreas's Greek and Latin sources and of the traditional character of Old English poetic diction, most readers would agree generally, I suppose, with Brodeur's observation that the Andreas poet was familiar with Beowulf and sometimes reproduced its phrasing.

Some years ago Professor Fred C. Robinson advised retention of the usually emended manuscript reading afrisc meowle in line 580b of the Old English Exodus poem. His argument was that afrisc meowle, ‘African woman’, alluded to the wife of Moses, who is mentioned elsewhere in the biblical Exodus though not in the passage to which the last lines of the Exodus poem correspond. Moreover, Robinson maintains, Moses's wife might have been familiar otherwise to an early medieval audience, for among the commentators she was identified as a type or figure of ‘the church gathered out of the nations’. In explaining why Moses's wife might be alluded to at this point, Robinson considers the suitability of such an allusion as an amplifying, even though extra-biblical, detail. His reasons are of weight. They concern, however, only the literal identity of the afrisc meowle as the wife of Moses; they make nothing of her significance as a type of the church. But another compelling reason for retaining the manuscript reading here may be found if the phrase afrisc meowle and also the following lines 582–9a are considered from the figural point of view. The passage as a whole has never been so considered. The Israelites plunder the Egyptian treasure washed up on the shore, and that is that.

The classification of The Phoenix as a Christian allegory has obscured the perception that the poem may contain a single symbolic vision, for the attention given the poem has always centred on the apparent allegorizations drawn from the Lactantian De Ave Phoenice. The long description of paradise at the beginning, the phoenix's journey from paradise, its fiery death and resurrection – elements derived from Lactantius and expanded by a clearly Christian reading – invite the exegete to untangle a carefully woven allegorical web. The exegetical approaches are, in some ways, justified. Even Lactantius's poem, which at no time refers to a system of Christian theology, is legitimately subject to this kind of inquiry, for the phoenix, standing by itself, had been a symbol charged with Christian meaning since the earliest patristic writers. Augustine's words may be taken as a summary statement for the Christian interpretation: ‘Quod enim de phoenice loqueris … Resurrectionem quippe ilia significat corporum.’ In practice, however, strict allegorical readings of The Phoenix have not proved very helpful. An ever-changing perspective in the poem makes it difficult to discover a logically coherent and consistent pattern of allegorical meaning, and attempts to find such a pattern have led either to disappointment with the poem or to an exegetical system so rigid that it falsifies the poem itself.

As Professor Clemoes has demonstrated, Ælfric treats a wide variety of subjects with both felicity and facility. While Clemoes makes his case by presenting passages differing in intellectual content but displaying the same flexibility of style, it is noteworthy that first among his selections is a narrative excerpt from the Life of St Swithhun. Generally students of Old English prose have not chosen to pursue the implicit connections between narrative and intellectual prose, preferring, it appears, to keep generic guidelines clear and distinct. At least one significant exception is C. E. Wright's search for saga in histories and chronicles. Clemoes's suggestion of a ‘narrative style’, however, merits a wider application to Old English, homiletic literature. Obviously homilies are not stories, but one can find in the use of exemplum, anecdote and history a narrative style at work, or at least a narrative consciousness.

In Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 383, on pp. 102–7, there are instructions for the tasks of a reeve, followed by several long lists of necessary tools and appurtenances. The closing list is preceded by mention of some particular kinds of craftsmen – mylewerde, sutere, leadgotan, contains some sixty terms of tools and equipment and concludes with the entries sapbox, camb, yrfebinne, fodderhec, fyrgebeorh, meluhudern, ælhyde, ofnrace, mexscofle. From the entry ælhyde BT Suppl enters with a query , ‘an eel-skin’, and Hall enters ǣlhyd queryingly defined as ‘eel receptacle’, ‘eel-skin’. Perhaps ælhyde is not a compound and perhaps æl does not mean ‘eel’.

In April 1970 I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to examine Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Vossius Lat. 4° 106, 25v, the page containing the text of the Leiden Riddle (see pl. I), under extremely strong early morning sunlight. Strong sunlight combines the advantage of ordinary light with, to a much lesser degree, the advantages of both infra-red and ultra-violet light whilst permitting a prolonged and close scrutiny of the manuscript. In sunlight some of the applications of reagent appear as opaque white, whereas in a photograph they appear as dark stains because the opaque white does not register adequately on the negative. In these conditions I was able to distinguish in the damaged parts of the text of the Leiden Riddle between traces of ink left upon the surface and stains left by the various reagents as well as other marks in the substance of the parchment itself. The following day I made an independent examination of the manuscript under ultra-violet light. Later by way of experiment a series of very hard prints was produced from photographs taken in ordinary light. Subsequently I compared the various readings and as a result of these examinations I offer a new transcription and notes on the more difficult passages.

It is a century and a half since the Book of Kells began to be revered as the supreme work of Irish calligraphy and art in the Early Christian period, and a quarter of a century since Monsieur François Masai challenged that traditional opinion, arguing that the Book was in fact made in Northumbria, apparently at Lindisfarne, or at least in some centre influenced both by Lindisfarne and Wearmouth–Jarrow – a definition which, he thought, could well apply to Iona. Masai's Essai sur les Origines de la Miniature dite irlandaise, completed in Brussels in 1944, makes no pretence to be based on research at first hand; it was written as a critique of traditional beliefs about the origins of Hiberno-Saxon illumination, with particular reference to works by Mlle Françoise Henry and Mrs Geneviève Marsh-Micheli. As such, it strikes me as a brilliant success, although some of its conclusions are false and some are not as well founded as they could have been, if Masai had revised his war-time text on the basis of a post-war examination of the manuscripts themselves. It was as a follower of Masai – his was the first book I read on Hiberno-Saxon art – that I persuaded Dr E. A. Lowe to consider, shortly before his death in August 1969, the attribution of the Book of Kells which will appear in the second edition of Codices Latini Antiquiores, part 11; and since Dr Lowe cited me as ‘an expert in this field’, I am under an obligation to publish the arguments that I advanced in 1968 and 1969, partly in letters and partly through reports which he received from his successive assistants Dr Braxton Ross and Dr Virginia Brown. The core of what I have to say is a reconsideration of a group of manuscripts, described in CLA, in the history of which Wearmouth–Jarrow had an important part to play. Lowe's devotion to the Venerable Bede and to the manuscripts produced at Wearmouth–Jarrow is well known, and I should like my lecture to count as a tribute not only to Bede's memory but to the memory of the palaeographer whose work has thrown such a bright light on the intellectual history of Bede's monastery.

The author or compiler of the saga of Edward the Confessor Saga Játvarðar konungs bins helga frequently refers to his sources. Sometimes he does this in vague terms such as ‘svá segja sannfróðir menn’ (ch. 1) and ‘segja menn’ (ch. 6). At other times he seems to be bringing together two sources as in the phrases ‘Þat er ok sumra manna sögn’ (ch. 6) and ‘Ok er þpat margra manna sögn’ (ch. 8). Two references indicate English provenance for part of his material: ‘Svá segja Enskir menn’ (ch. 5) and ‘Þat er sögn Enskra manna’ (ch. 8). He also mentions Scandinavian sources, indicating awareness of Danish tradition in ‘Ok þat hafa Danir til þess’ (ch. 9) and alluding to a history of the kings of Norway in ‘Sem sagt er í Æfi Noregs-konunga’ (ch. 7). But he does not always find Scandinavian scholarship well-informed: ‘Þá þykkjaz fróðir menn í Noregskonungs veldi eigi (víst) vita hverr þessi konungr hefir verit.’ Fortunately Icelandic learning can supply the missing detail: ‘þat er sagt frá orðum Gizurar Hallz sonar, eins hins vitrasta mannz á Íslandi’ (ch. 2). This is his only reference to an authority by name.

From the Norman Conquest onward, the architectural history of England has been put on a firm basis by the work of nineteenth-century writers who were able to associate precise dates, and even named builders, with a considerable number of buildings as a result of the survival of contemporary written records which could be unequivocally linked to the surviving buildings. For the period before 1066 the position is very different: the studies of the last century have indeed established firmly the principal distinctive features of Anglo-Saxon workmanship; but for only a handful of buildings is there any written record that allows a firm assignment of date; and there is consequently a wide divergence of opinion between scholars in the dates which they assign to individual buildings or particular architectural features.

The past two decades have witnessed an almost complete revision of ideas about the character of Anglo-Saxon settlements. The advances have come in the main from a series of archaeological excavations in which techniques commonly used in prehistoric archaeology have been applied to sites of the period in the light of results from contemporary settlements on the continent. The excavations have in effect produced entire new categories of evidence about the domestic accommodation, service buildings and general planning of settlements of all levels of Anglo-Saxon society, in most of England and in all parts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1950 almost no domestic buildings were known other than the sunken huts found first by Leeds at Sutton Courtenay and subsequently by others in various parts of the country. Leeds‘s conclusions, accepted albeit with reluctance by scholars, were that ‘the bulk of the people, we can now be assured, were content with something that hardly deserves a better title than hovel, only varying in its greater or lesser simplicity’. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Radford, moreover, in a seminal paper in the first volume of Medieval Archaeology demonstrated that they stood in some considerable contrast to the settlements and to the standards of domestic accommodation enjoyed by the ancestors and contemporaries of the Anglo-Saxons on the continent.