In September 1890, Hendrik Logeman, professor of English and Germanic philology at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had the audacity to accuse no less a scholar than Henry Sweet of misleading his readers. Logeman based his accusation on an unfortunate remark Sweet had made in his edition of the Old English translation of Pope Gregory's Pastoral Care. For this scholarly edition, Sweet had wished to include the text of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. xi. However, having barely survived the Ashburnham House blaze of 1731, this manuscript had been almost entirely consumed by fire at a bookbinder's in 1865. As a replacement, Sweet had used Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 53, a transcript made by the seventeenth-century philologist Francis Junius (1591–1677) when the Cotton manuscript was still unscathed. Sweet praised Junius and emphasized the accuracy of the transcript by stating that Junius only ‘swerved from the path of literal accuracy in a few unimportant particulars’. Hendrik Logeman had collated the Old English glosses to the Benedictine Rule from Cotton Tiberius A. iii with a Junius transcript, Junius 52, for his 1888 edition, but he found, instead, that Junius failed to distinguish between 〈ð〉 and 〈þ〉 that he corrected his text without giving the reading of the manuscript, and that he added, omitted or transposed entire words.

The village recluse, avowed to remain in his or her cell, was a feature of the later medieval landscape, but in what circumstances did recluses and the notion of a distinct reclusive vocation emerge? Examining the earliest recluses identifiable, this article contends that reclusion as such, though not without precedent, gained popularity in England in the third quarter of the eleventh century and acquired a terminology (already current on the Continent) in its last third as an expression of the ascetic movement within the emerging parish.

The Codex ‘Lindisfarnensis’ (London, British Library, Cotton Nero D. iv, early eighth century) was glossed in Old English by the tenth-century priest Aldred. Aldred's colophon purports to give information about the eighth-century makers of the manuscript, at Lindisfarne. What is actually reliable about this highly literary colophon is Aldred's purpose in writing the gloss: to give the Evangelists a voice to address ‘all the brothers’ – particularly the Latinless. We propose new interpretations of three OE words (gihamadi, inlad, ora) misunderstood before. Aldred was learned; his sources extend from Ovid through the Fathers to contemporary texts.

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.

Starting with evidence from law-codes, this article traces how penance was increasingly integrated into later Anglo-Saxon legal culture, arguing that this process opened the way for ritualized acts of satisfaction to become a regular feature of contemporary dispute settlement. The rituals used in such contexts often borrowed symbols and concepts from the world of penance, with the central idea being that an offender who repented and humbled himself was worthy of pardon. A few detailed accounts of such settlements survive and to these we may add cases of restitution and political reconciliation, which witness a similar logic. Taken together, these suggest that the stark contrasts often drawn between English and continental (particularly German) disputing in these years are in need of some revision. Far from being ‘fiercely punitive’, later Anglo-Saxon justice was characterized by a complex mix of formalized punishments and more informal means of settlement, not unlike what is visible in the Ottonian Reich.

The enigmatic description of the columna nubis in lines 71b–92 of the Old English Exodus juxtaposes images of substances that shield God's people from their hostile environment; understanding the relations among these protective coverings requires cultural and literary knowledge not explicitly articulated in Exodus. Metaphors and typologies developed in Arator's sixth-century Historia apostolica and subsequently conventionalized in Bede's eighth-century Expositio actuum Apostolorum, texts used in the Anglo-Saxon monastic curriculum, provide an interpretative framework for the complicated accretion of images in Exodus. Using insights about metaphorical processing from cognitive science, this article argues that the Exodus-poet crafted a sophisticated tripartite conceit to generate a pastoral relationship with his audience, first by adapting metaphoric mappings from Arator and Bede and then by extending their domains with culturally specific entailments about how ships and tents functioned as protective covers in Anglo-Saxon material culture.

This article sets forth the contrast between the image of the horses in Beowulf and the image of Anglo-Saxon horses that can be derived from archaeology, historical narratives, wills, law codes and glossaries. It focuses particularly on the issue of colour, represented in the poem by the difficult word fealu and its derivative, æppelfealu. It argues that the horses described in Beowulf do not match up closely with Anglo-Saxon horses recorded in any century and that they would have struck the poem's tenth-century audience as very strange. This strangeness has implications for our understanding of Anglo-Saxon reception of the poem.

This article presents the first fruits of a long-term project which aims to identify all the landholders named in Domesday Book, and to build up a picture of English landed society before and after the Norman conquest. The first part describes the project's methods and illustrates them with a selection of short profiles of individuals whose careers add distinctive colour to the emerging picture. The second offers firstly an analysis of the social distribution of landed wealth in England in 1066 and 1086, quantifying the numbers of landholders in different groups defined by the amount of the land assigned to them in Domesday. We then turn to a spatial analysis of landed society, using maps to illustrate the geographical distribution of landholding. In doing so, we offer fresh perspectives on the transformation of English landed society in the aftermath of conquest.

This article examines new evidence and arguments relating to the political, strategic and historical context of the Burghal Hidage document and the burhs which it lists. This evidence can be best interpreted by reference to the thesis that the Burghal Hidage was a near-contemporary record of a complete system of burhs which gave King Alfred political and strategic control of the full extent of the West Saxon kingdom on both sides of the river Thames at a particular period. The burhs are seen as the instruments through which the submission of the populations of their associated territories to the king's lordship was consolidated. As such, their formation as a system is uniquely appropriate to the political and strategic circumstances obtaining in the late 870s. A possible context for the document is suggested as being the surviving ‘boundary’ section of a longer ‘charter of submission’, issued by King Alfred in the context of the affirmation of his re-established hegemony of the Kingdom of the West Saxons in the period 878–9.

Ælfric's Colloquy is, of course, first and foremost, a dialogue between a master and his pupils to give practice in the use of Latin at a conversational level. The pedagogic intention of the work is evident from the interlocutors' habit of lingering over commonly used words in various grammatical forms: for example, in a few opening lines (2–11) the deponent loqui appears as loqui, loquimur, loquamur and loqueris, together with the noun locutio, and within a little more than fifty lines (66–119) we find seven forms of the verb capere, two of them occurring four times each and one twice. Yet, equally certainly, this colloquy has more to it than just schoolboy exercises in declensions and conjugations. It has escaped the oblivion that has been the lot of its more humdrum fellows who – to use Garmonsway's personification – were assigned the rôle of literary Cinderellas, labouring ‘in obscurity in monastic classrooms to help boys learn their lessons’. It has long been acclaimed for its realism and for its ‘sociological picture of the occupational strata’ of Anglo-Saxon society; and, in our own day, Stanley B. Greenfield has called attention to its literary merits, ‘its fine organization and structure, dramatic in effect, with its pairing and contrasting, for example, of the king's bold hunter and the independent, timid fisherman…and with its lively disputation toward the end about which occupation is most essential’. In the present study I hope to demonstrate that it also draws on a background of ideas and that its longevity is partly due to this ingredient.

There is a lingering notion among Beowulf scholars, despite Chauncey Tinker's effort to dispel it eighty years ago, that the Beowulf manuscript is slowly but inexorably crumbling away in its modern home in the British Library. The gloomy news for a general audience is that the manuscript, ‘charred at the edges by the fire’ that decimated the Cotton Library in 1731, ‘continues to deteriorate year by year’. A scholarly audience gets the same impression from Norman Davis, who gives us a reproduction of an old transliteration beside new photographs of the manuscript. He says, ‘Zupitza's transliteration … has permanent value as a record of what he could see in the manuscript in 1880–2’, a comment that certainly implies that Zupitza was able to see more in the manuscript a century ago than we can see today. In fact, with the aid of modern artificial lighting, notably fibre-optic and ultra-violet light, we can see far more in the manuscript today than Zupitza was able to see in 1882.

In medieval literature there are a number of examples of a type of writing which provides an outline of Christian cosmology and Christian history. These works deal, usually briefly, with the following: God and his creative powers, the creation, the fall of the angels, the creation and fall of man, biblical history, the redemption, Christ's life, the crucifixion, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the ascension, and the second coming and last judgement. The subjects vary somewhat; the fall of man and his redemption are of central importance, and some outline versions are reduced to these essentials.

The item which Napier printed as no. xxx in his collected edition of the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan and which is extant complete only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, written at Worcester in the third quarter of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as a compilation in which a few sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remarkable patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century anonymous writings. Karl Jost has stated that the opening and concluding sections consist of extracts from the Institutes of Polity and from Napier's homilies xxiv, xlvi and ii, while in the middle section he has identified parallels to two Vercelli homilies, nos. iv and ix, and to Napier xlix, which also occurs in the Vercelli Book as homily x. He has speculated that for another passage the compiler may have drawn upon an earlier version of a text now surviving in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, but he missed a parallel with Vercelli xxi which had been noted by McIntosh. What in effect Jost and others have shown is that in a ‘scissors and paste’ homily in which no more than a few sentences can be ascribed to the compiler (and these perhaps only because he took them from books since lost) we find extracts from a considerable number of works. The purpose of this article is to examine again the sources of the compilation, to show that very probably more than half of it was drawn from a single codex similar to the Vercelli Book, and to illustrate the influence Wulfstan's writings and style had on its author.

One of the most crucial and problematic periods in the history of English medieval art is the tenth century. Already in the first half of the century there were signs of renewed artistic activity after the comparatively barren period of the ninth century when the Viking invasions rent the fabric of Anglo-Saxon society. But a full revival did not occur until the second half of the tenth century under the impetus of monastic reform and strong royal support. It was then that English artists created the so-called ‘Winchester Style’, which was to exercise a powerful influence in England and also on the continent for more than a century. Despite the research of many scholars, most notably Homburger and Wormald, there are still many more questions than answers about the sources and development of tenth-century English art. Among the most important works from this time are the Anglo-Saxon drawings and initial which were added to the so-called Leofric Missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579). Through a consideration of their style, technique, ornament and iconography I hope to take a step towards a clearer understanding of this period of artistic renaissance.

Several studies in recent years have contributed to the discovery that the early-sixth-century sermons of Caesarius of Arles had considerably more influence on Old English literature than had been realized. The extent of that influence may not be fully apparent even now, partly because many of the recent studies discuss examples in isolation, each in its own context, and partly because many of the earlier studies cited certain anonymous Latin sermons which have been only later identified as the work of Caesarius. My aim here is to offer new evidence for Caesarius's influence on five Old English texts and to recapitulate the evidence for his influence upon the corpus of Old English literature as a whole.

A single leaf may be a valuable witness to an early manuscript that does not otherwise survive, even when it raises as many questions as it answers. Such is the case of the first fragment in a collection of some 217 leaves and fragments of medieval manuscripts owned by the University of Missouri and housed in the Rare Books Department of the Ellis Library on the Columbia, Missouri, campus. This collection, titled Fragmenta Manuscripta, derives largely from that assembled in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century by John Bagford (d. 1716), an eccentric shoemaker-turned-bookseller. Bagford was, however, not responsible for the first two leaves in the collection. They were added to the collection by the trustees of Archbishop Tenison's School in preparation for sale on 3 June 1861. The first fragment and the second, an Insular leaf of not later than tenth-century date containing grammatical excerpts, had both been removed from the binding of another volume owned by the Tenison Library. That manuscript, now London, British Library, Add. 24193, a continental codex containing the poems of Venantius Fortunatus with replacement quires supplied in two tenth-century English Caroline minuscule hands, has attracted the attention of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, but the early Insular binding fragments removed from it have remained largely unknown.

The twelfth-century Textus Roffensis contains a collection of early English laws, of which the first is attributed to Æthelberht of Kent, who reigned c. 580–616. Although these laws remain to us only in a copy made some six centuries later, there are strong linguistic grounds, first proposed by Sievers and Liebermann, and recently elaborated on and expanded by myself, to assume that the text as we have it genuinely reflects a copy of an early original, albeit much changed by generations of scribal modernization. Yet problems of interpretation often arise, among them the difficulty in the definition of hapax legomena: words which occur in the corpus of Old English only in this text. One such term is contained in Æthelberht, ch. 12, which states: ‘Cyninges fedesl XX scillinga forgelde.’ This is presumably formulated along the lines of Æthelberht, ch. 8, which reads: ‘Cyninges mundbyrd L scillinga.’

There is basic agreement among scholars as to the meaning, if not the precise interpretation, of mundbyrd: most would agree with Bosworth's definition of ‘protection, patronage’. Along these lines, the clause can be interpreted as: ‘[For violating] the king's protection: 50 (of) shillings.’ Using this as a template, one might translate iEthelberht, ch. 12, as: ‘[For violating] the king's fedesl: let [the perpetrator pay] 20 (of) shillings.’

Old English manuscript poetry, including the text that we now call The Wanderer, remains close to its oral roots in its reliance on audible structures and traditional expressions, in its fluid relationship to other compositions and in its anonymity. It is not oral, however, and its existence in a manuscript is more than a physical fact. This change in medium has begun to affect the poetry's semiotics. Having lost the social context of oral performance, the poet attempts to provide a viewpoint in other ways. But this manuscript presentation does not share all the workings of a modern printed composition.

Ælfric, in the Preface to Genesis, comments about what we do not find in the first book of the Old Testament: ‘Seo boc ys gehaten Genesis, Þæt ys “Gecyndboc”, for Þam Þe heo ys firmest boca and spricÞ be ælcum gecinde (ac heo ne spricð na be Þæra engla gesceapenisse).’ Although he proceeds to explain what is contained in the opening verse, noting that creation ‘on annginne’ refers at once to the literal act of creation and, ‘æfter gastlicum andgite’, to Christ through whom all creation was formed, he makes no further comment here upon the angels. In other works, however, where the topic could be more appropriately introduced, Ælfric enthusiastically engages with the problem of angelic history. The sermon De initio creaturae, the Interrogationes Sigewulfi, the Exameron, the Letter to Sigeweard and the Letter to Wulfgeat all contain accounts of the angelic creation and fall. Because Ælfric is a writer actively concerned with orthodoxy and sound doctrine, we would do well to ask why he has such an interest in the angels–about whom such an authority as Bede would say almost nothing–and to investigate precisely how, and from what sources, he presents their extra-scriptural history.

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.