An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

Dr W. Urry discovered Canterbury Cathedral Library, Add. 25, containing portions of book iv of Bishop Werferth's translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, about thirty years ago and its text is printed here for the first time. N. R. Ker has described the manuscript and his account should be consulted. After a personal inspection I agree with his description in all particulars save one: the first legible letters on 3r are e of lic (Hecht 313.20), not cíged wæs (313.21). Ker dates the manuscript s. x ex. and believes that it is probably a fragment of an item in the medieval catalogue of Christ Church, Canterbury, and that it has been damaged by fire and used as a wrapper.

The Lenborough hoard has produced the twenty-third coin struck from Agnus Dei dies, which is also the second known mule of an Agnus Dei obverse with a Last Small Cross reverse. It is illustrated in Gareth Williams's preceding article as Fig. 7 (p. 304). This specimen adds to the small group of English finds of Agnus Dei pennies, which previously consisted of three single-finds. Lenborough is therefore the first ever English hoard to contain an Agnus Dei coin, mule or otherwise. The presence of just one penny of the type in an assemblage of almost 1,000 coins of Æthelred II (with a large proportion of the total consisting of the types either side of Agnus Dei) reinforces the rarity of the issue. Detailed research into the hoard may unveil more about the circumstances behind its composition, including the chronological profile of the Last Small Cross element, and thereby add to the general picture of the context in which Agnus Dei was produced.

The central theme in both versions of the Old English Boethius is the Christian conversion of the soul. In the prosimetrical version, this theme is highlighted further in the metra through the poetic trope of the human soul figured as a star to reinforce the teaching in the prose passages. In the course of the metra, the trope increasingly focuses on the inner life of the man engaged in earthly affairs as he strengthens his moral resolve and his divine affiliation through meditation. Repetition and variations of the trope in Metres 5, 10, 20, 22 and 23 represent the soul's shift from despair to understanding.

A careful consideration of a ‘scribble’ in English in the margin of a page of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, a ninth-century Latin manuscript, yields a number of important conclusions: that the English material is homiletic, that it was written before the Latin, that the manuscript is certainly of Northumbrian origin and the English shows traces of Northumbrian dialect, and that therefore at least one vernacular homily in Old English was available for copying in Northumbria in the ninth century. It also adds to the evidence that a group of homilies in the Vercelli Book were drawn from an early and a non-West Saxon source-book.

In 1891, Germain Morin identified a set of brief, anonymous Latin sermons that he controversially attributed to Alcuin’s Anglo-Saxon pupil named ‘Witto’ or ‘Wizo’ in Old English, ‘Candidus’ in Latin. The texts in question are of considerable interest but have remained unprinted and thus scarcely known. The present article offers an edition of them, based on all the known manuscripts, as well as a translation and commentary. An introductory discussion reviews the state of scholarship on Candidus’s career and writings, then examines in detail the content and sources of the four texts, the evidence supporting their attribution to Candidus, and some points of comparison between the items here edited and other Latin sermons produced at Carolingian centres in the early ninth century.

This article examines the connections between Asser's Life of King Alfred and the tenthcentury Welsh poem Armes Prydein Vawr. It studies the use of the place-name Santwic ‘Sandwich’ in Armes Prydein, and presents evidence that this form derives from a written source. An investigation of the sources containing this place-name before the late tenth century raises the distinct possibility that Asser's Life was the source drawn upon by the Welsh poet. Examination of the context in which Sandwich occurs in Asser and Armes Prydein highlights striking similarities in usage, strengthening the argument for a connection between the two texts. Further correspondences between these works are noted before discussing the potential implications of this new finding for our understanding of Asser (and his reception) and Armes Prydein more generally.

The article argues from an empirical study of the alliterative and metrical characteristics of the speeches of Genesis A that the poet made a concerted attempt to differentiate between the spoken language of God and that of mortal speakers. In particular the analysis shows that divine language is highly patterned, alliteratively ornate and unusually hypermetric. The most extreme effects are generated by the genres of benediction and malediction. The evidence shows that the poet was also able to use the rules of his poetics effectively for rhetorical ends. An attempt is made finally to link this characterising of the divine voice with the Biblical vox tonantis.

The first scholars interested in Anglo-Saxon had to learn it by direct contact with original sources. Work on a dictionary preceded that on a grammar, notably through the efforts of John Joscelyn, Archbishop Parker's Latin Secretary. Like Parker, Sir Henry Spelman (1563/4–1641) found that many of his sources for early English history were in Anglo-Saxon. Consequently he encouraged the study of Old English by establishing a Lectureship in Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge University and worked closely with its first (and only) holder, Abraham Wheelock. Together with Wheelock's pupil, William Retchford, and possibly drawing on some earlier work by Joscelyn (since lost), these scholars attempted to formulate the rudiments of Anglo-Saxon grammar. This pioneering work, basically a parts-of-speech grammar, survives in three versions, two of them incomplete. In this article I discuss the contents and methodology used and present for the first time an edited text of the first modern Old English grammar. It was a remarkable achievement.

This article, which builds on an older publication of the author’s, argues on the basis of nautical, linguistic and logical evidence that some widely accepted opinions on the meaning of the Old English words in the title cannot be upheld any further.

This article provides an analysis and edition of newly discovered fragments of an Old English glossed psalter in the Regional Archive of Alkmaar, the Netherlands. These fragments once belonged to the same ‘N-Psalter’ as fragments earlier found in Cambridge (Dietz 1968), Haarlem (Derolez 1972), Sondershausen (Pilch 1997; Gneuss 1998) and Elbląg (Opalińska et al. 2023). The article provides analyses of the language and textual affiliations of the Old English gloss and aims to reconstruct the provenance of the fragments and the N-Psalter as a whole. The annotated edition includes appendices with collations of the Latin and Old English texts of other extant glossed psalters.

This piece identifies an extension to the lesson of the Exeter Book poem The Whale. The work not only admonishes its audience to guard against temptation masquerading as virtue, but also indicates how one may go about doing so. The selection of the whale as a subject places the poem within an extensive biblical and patristic tradition concerning sea creatures that was well represented in Anglo-Saxon England. Specifically, the allusions present in The Whale identify discretio spirituum as the essential skill needed to avoid disguised temptation, and point to Pride as the weakness most capable of leading Christians astray.

The reception in Anglo-Saxon England of Prudentius's Psychomachia has been well studied. In an earlier article I concentrated on the textual tradition and touched only briefly on the important aspect of Psychomachia illustrations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts; in the present article I treat the illustrations more fully. Psychomachia illustrations have been studied previously, most thoroughly by Stettiner and Woodruff, and they are also referred to by Katzenellenbogen and Norman. None of these examinations is completely satisfactory as far as the Anglo-Saxon illustrations are concerned. Both Stettiner and Woodruff examine all, that is both continental and Anglo-Saxon, illustrated Psychomachia manuscripts, and their primary aim is to establish stemmata and to determine generic relationships between the various manuscripts. Of necessity this procedure leads away from a scrupulous examination of individual manuscripts and their illustrations. In other words, by being concerned more with the generic similarities of the illustrations, Stettiner and Woodruff pay less attention to the differences (though they do not ignore them altogether). Moreover, they concentrate on the illustrated manuscripts and neglected the evidence which non-illustrated manuscripts can provide. Katzenellenbogen and Norman, in turn, are interested in the Psychomachia and its illustrations exerted on the sculpture and painting of later centuries, and only briefly refer to the Anglo-Saxon Psychomachia Illustrations thus still remains a necessity.

A notable addition to our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon manuscript fragments with Old English interlinear glosses has been made in a contribution by Professor Herbert Pilch of Freiburg to the recently-published Festschrift for Anatoly Liberman,1 and I hope to show that the leaf he describes and edits has deserved closer inspection.

Despite the recent increase in attention given to Archbishop Wulfstan and his writings, the so-called ‘Laws of Edward and Guthrum’ – a lawcode forged by the archbishop in the opening years of the eleventh century – has received little analysis since Dorothy Whitelock’s 1941 study established the churchman as its true author. My article seeks to fill this gap firstly by expanding on Whitelock’s article. I show that many more of the text’s clauses function as antecedents to Wulfstan’s later legislation than those she identified in her important article. Second, I argue that §10 of the code, a clause not repeated in the archbishop’s later legislation, surely still held legal authority given Wulfstan’s prescriptions for non-lethal punishment in some cases. Finally, I posit that Wulfstan’s attribution of the code to Alfred, seen in its opening, reflects the archbishop’s value of him as a king worth emulating.

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.

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.

For part I see ASE 1 (1972), 23–44. Information about the conventions and abbreviations used is given ibid. pp. 24–6.