The ‘Preliminary List of Manuscripts Written or Owned in England up to 1100’, which appeared twenty years ago in vol. 9 of this periodical, was a first attempt to bring together, in a concise inventory, what was then known about surviving manuscripts and manuscript fragments written in, or imported into, England from the end of the sixth to the end of the eleventh century. This has now been superseded by the Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, published as vol. 241 in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies series in 2001. Like the ‘Preliminary List’, the Handlist cannot possibly claim to be perfect or complete, but it is hoped that it may serve some useful purposes as a reference work and, once again, as a searchlist.

This article aims to evaluate the likelihood that whelk dye was known in Anglo-Saxon England, either in the form of imported cloth and textile products, and/or as an activity carried out in England. The nature of whelk dye and the likely processing options available to early societies are considered in the light of extant records and modern experimentation in Israel and Britain. The currently available ‘hard’ evidence is then presented from archaeology, manuscript studies, and the chemical analysis of textiles. Finally, the semantic and literary evidence is considered, including three passages from texts by Bede and Aldhelm, and a new interpretation of OE cornwurma.

The often-anthologized story of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is typically regarded as the earliest example of heroic English prose, perhaps a summary of an earlier oral tale. Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to its context within the A MS of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Given this text's association with King Alfred, this article locates the tale within the broader context of Alfredian writing on the morality of rule and, in particular, royal wisdom. Rather than simply endorsing the loyalty of fighting men to their lord, the tale also warns of the dangers of royal folly and the consequences of unrighteous rule.

In the process of literary interpretation no critic can afford to overlook the rôle of the poetic narrator. While poetic and narrative statements (as it is commonly argued) designate their meaning largely in accordance with the conventions of language and literary discourse, linguistic criteria alone cannot determine the attitude of the speaker towards what he says; and this attitude constitutes a crucial element in the meaning of the statement as a speech act or utterance. Indeed, as users of language, all of us habitually include considerations of speaker intentions in our standard operations of interpreting as well as producing discourse. Can the speaker be trusted? Does he speak ironically or sincerely? Is he trying to achieve some aim in relation to the hearer other than that which his act of communication ostensibly purports? Entailed in any act of communication, this dimension of interplay between speaker and statement is inevitably involved in literary discourse as well, since obviously we do not always take literary statements at face value. One of the primary tasks confronting the literary critic, then, in Old English poetry or any other body of work, lies in determining the character of the narrator and the parameters of his functioning.

The document printed below, an early- or mid-seventeenth-century copy of a hitherto unrecorded charter of 963 by which King Edgar granted 5 hides at Ballidon in Derbyshire to a certain Æthelferth (see pl. XIV), came to light early in 1983 among some manuscripts on temporary deposit at the Staffordshire Record Office. It is published by kind permission of the depositor. The account of the provenance of the charter and of the history of the estate, which follows, is the work of one author (D.A.J.), whilst another (N.P.B.) is responsible for the edition and the topographical analysis, and the third (M.G.) has contributed the discussion of the place-name forms.

It has been recognized that in late Anglo-Saxon England one writer, Wulfstan the Cantor, knew the poems of Venantius Fortunatus well, but hitherto no manuscript of Fortunatus's poetry of English origin or provenance in this period has been known. The discovery of a leaf of such a manuscript in a collection of fragments at Badminton set me enquiring. It has turned out that there is more manuscript evidence than I expected to find.

In August 1939 I drove from Cambridge with Hector and Nora Chadwick to see the Sutton Hoo dig. Phillips and Chadwick had never met and both were slightly apprehensive. The encounter turned out to be a great success. As we were leaving Chadwick said to Charles ‘It's the grave of King Rædwald you know. I've no doubt of that.’

Glyn Daniel (address given at the funeral of Charles Phillips at Teddington on 2 October 1985)

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.

The ‘Galba Psalter’ (London, British Library, Cotton Galba A. xviii) is a pocket-sized (128 × 88 mm.), early-ninth-century Carolingian book, perhaps made in the region of Liège, that was originally decorated with only ornamental initials. By the early tenth century the manuscript had reached England, where an Anglo-Saxon scriptorium added two prefatory quires (1r–19v) containing a metrical calendar illuminated with zodiac signs, KL monograms and single figures (pls. IX–X), and five full-page pictures. Two miniatures of Christ and the saints on 2v and 21r (pls. X–XI) preface the calendar and a series of prayers respectively, and three New Testament pictures marked the customary threefold division of the Psalms. Facing Ps. I was a miniature of the Nativity (pl. XII), now detached from the manuscript and inserted into an unrelated book (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B. 484, 85r). The Ascension on 120v (pl. XIII) prefaces Ps. CI. A third picture before Ps. LI has been lost, but almost certainly it represented the Crucifixion. The placement of an image of this theme between the Nativity and the Ascension would have been appropriate from a narrative standpoint, and some later Anglo-Saxon and Irish psalters preface this psalm with a full-page picture of the Crucifixion. Obits for King Alfred (d. 899) and his consort Ealhswith (d. 902) provide a terminus post quem for the calendar and the coeval illumination. The Insular minuscule script of the calendar indicates a West Saxon origin during the first decade of the tenth century. On the grounds of the Psalter's style and later provenance, the additions were very likely made at Winchester.

Julian Brown's famous analysis of what he termed the Insular system of scripts marked out a number of routes, now well trodden, through the debris of undated and unlocalized manuscript material from the pre-Viking-Age British Isles. Ever since, the best hope for students of palaeography seeking to date and localize examples of early Insular minuscule has been to follow Brown's classification and identify them as Type A or B, Northumbrian or Southumbrian, and Phase I or II. Brown's schema, however, offered orientation rather than a map. As with any typology, it depends on a very few fixed points, themselves unusual because of their lack of anonymity: gospelbooks from Ireland and Northumbria dated by the survival of rare colophons, manuscripts connected with St Boniface which show the operation of a unique editorial mind. Although Brown's system has been successfully applied to the output of scriptoria whose influences, practices, connections, even locations remain mostly unknown, complications inevitably arise. This article concerns one of them, the recycling in Phase II of a type of minuscule displaying the cursiveness and capriciousness characteristic of Phase I: Type B minuscule as illustrated by the script of St Boniface.

Rhetoricians, orators, and public speakers of all stripes, if asked the question, which Greek or Roman deity they should invoke in case of need, would surely answer ‘Hermes’ or ‘Mercury’. Members of this profession who also read early Latin-Old English glossaries might therefore be surprised to learn that the deus oratorum was none other than Priapus! This came as good news to me as one who occasionally looks for novel ways to arouse an audience. However, as I reflected further on the meaning of Épinal Glossary 10v32, my expectations wilted. Oratorum must be a simple error for hortorum, ‘of gardens’. Priapus may be fecundus, but he is not facundus.

It would be a truism among Anglo-Saxonists to say that we depend for our knowledge of a fair proportion of pre-Conquest literary and historical texts on the labours of scholars active in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Among the many important texts which were casualties, for example, of the Cotton fire on 23 October 1731, and for which we now depend on early modern transcripts and printed editions, one thinks immediately of Asser's Life of King Alfred and of the poem on the battle of Maldon (in Cotton Otho A. xii), of manuscript G of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (in Cotton Otho B. xi), and of Ealdorman Æthelweard's Chronicle (in Cotton Otho A. x). Should one choose to venture into the realm of Anglo-Saxon charters, the importance of antiquarian transcripts of manuscripts now lost becomes ever more apparent. The most spectacular addition to the corpus of charters made since the publication of Professor Sawyer's catalogue in 1968 arose from the examination of a sixteenth-century cartulary of Ilford Hospital preserved at Hatfield House, which proved to contain the texts of eleven pre-Conquest charters derived ultimately from the archives of Barking abbey in Essex; of course this manuscript is an ‘original’ cartulary, as opposed to an antiquarian transcript, but it serves here as a salutary reminder of the treasures which may lurk as yet unidentified in libraries and archives throughout the country. Other ‘discoveries’ include a seventeenth-century copy of a charter by which King Edgar granted an estate at Ballidon, in Derbyshire, to his thegn Æthelferth, Sir Henry Spelman's extracts from a lost cartulary of Abbotsbury abbey, and notes made by the jurist John Selden from a charter-roll formerly preserved in the archives of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

Part II provides a list of all conjectures and emendations accepted in at least one edition of Beowulf published from 1950 onwards. It thus adds to part I the readings which have been proposed since 1857. The list is intended as a survey only. No context is given for readings proposed by 1857, since that was done in part I, at pp. 253–74. For readings proposed since 1857 the immediate context is given where necessary, but it is assumed that an edition of Beowulf will be used in conjunction with the list. Following the main section, tables 1–8 indicate the origin of each reading, identified by its line number. Each table corresponds to one of the categories I–VIII used in part I and defined there at p. 250. Tables 9 and 10 and the figure accompanying table 10 present the statistics on which the conclusions stated in part I, at pp. 250–1, are based. Appendix I lists addenda and corrigenda to part I. Appendix II presents some conjectures or emendations which were proposed by 1857 but which have not found favour with any editor from 1950 onwards. The items concern places in the text where a majority of editors from 1950 onwards believe that there are defects.

By the end of the Anglo-Saxon period six feasts of the Virgin were celebrated in England; this large number represents an honour granted to no other saint. The feasts in question – the Purification, Annunciation, Assumption, Nativity, Presentation in the Temple and Conception – did not originate in England, however. Before turning to the English evidence, therefore, it is necessary to consider the background of Marian feasts at Rome and elsewhere in the context of the development of ritual from the seventh century to the eleventh.

The writings of John Cassian (c. 370–c. 435) circulated widely through the Middle Ages, not least in Anglo-Saxon England. They are commonly assumed by scholars to have been fundamental to the formation of western monasticism, yet it is worth examining the nature and extent of their usage a little more closely. The following discussion considers this usage in Anglo-Latin sources between the later seventh century and the mid-eighth.

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.

Bede entered Wearmouth–Jarrow at the age of seven and thereafter, he tells us at the conclusion of his Historia ecclesiastica, spent all his life ‘applying myself entirely to the study of the Scriptures’. He goes on, ‘From the time I became a priest until the fifty-ninth year of my life I have made it my business, for my own benefit and that of my brothers, to make brief extracts from the works of the venerable fathers on the holy scriptures, or to add notes of my own to clarify their sense and interpretation.’ Bede's modest remarks preface an impressive list of his own works, which includes commentaries on Genesis, I Samuel, Kings, Proverbs, the Prophets, Mark, Luke, Acts and Revelation, and many other exegetical, didactic and historical volumes. Installed at Jarrow from about 679 until his death in 735, he contributed more than anyone to the intellectual distinction of early-eighth-century Northumbria. At the same time, the twin house of Wearmouth–Jarrow was winning lasting renown for the products of its scriptorium (or scriptoria). Not least among these were the three great Vulgate bible pandects which Abbot Ceolfrith caused to be made, an achievement celebrated by the chroniclers of the house, who included Bede himself. One of these pandects, which we know today as the Codex Amiatinus, was dispatched to St Peter's in Rome in 716, then spent more than 900 years at Monte Amiata in the Appenines, and is now in Florence (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Amiatino 1). The other two were for use in the Wearmouth and Jarrow churches. One of these has been lost without trace, but the second survived in the cathedral priory of Worcester until the sixteenth century, when an entrepreneurial Nottinghamshire family made use of some of its torn-out leaves as document wrappers. Twelve of these, with some fragments of a thirteenth, are now in the British Library under three different shelfmarks (Loan 81, Add. 37777 and Add. 45025).

Scholarship is divided over whether there existed a tradition of recreational hunting in Anglo-Saxon England, in addition to pragmatic forms of venery, and the extent to which it was altered by the Normans after the Conquest. However, hunting scholarship has hitherto neglected the detailed account of a recreational royal deer hunt in the Vita S. Dvnstani. By analysing this account, which describes a hunt resembling a typically ‘Norman’ chasse par force de chiens, I reassess the evidence for the nature of hunting in laws, charters, and the archaeological record. I posit that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy hunted in a similar manner to the Normans, and that hunting was a socially inscribed pursuit, legally restricted to the ruling classes long before 1066. This argument supports the definition of the disputed charter term haga (‘enclosure’) in certain instances as an Anglo-Saxon hunting park. Finally, I suggest the existence of a specialized Anglo-Saxon hunting dog developed specifically to hunt large quarry in the ‘Norman’ manner.

To a greater extent than other saints' lives, Guthlac A is a poem about a land dispute. Through contextualizing the central ‘battle for the beorg’ within Anglo-Saxon practices of land tenure, this article shows that Guthlac A represents the spiritual conflict between Guthlac and the devils as a land dispute between unworthy tenants who have been given temporary tenure of the land and a warrior of God who is granted permanent tenure as his reward for faithful service. By portraying the devils' loss of the beorg and Guthlac's acquisition of it through the framework of Anglo-Saxon customs of land-holding, the poem dramatizes replacement doctrine, the teaching that the number of the saved would equal the number of fallen angels and replace them in the heavenly kingdom.

Aside from its Old English gloss, the Lambeth Psalter has largely been ignored. Yet this manuscript furnishes valuable evidence about Latin learning in late Anglo-Saxon England, specifically at Winchester. And it can lay claim to be the most important surviving witness to psalter scholarship from this period.