Several dry-point glosses were added to the Lichfield Gospels during the tenth or eleventh century, apparently recording the names of members of the pre-Conquest community at Lichfield. We consider the relationship of these glosses to the list of Anglo-Saxon names on p. 141 of the Gospels, and discuss parallels from elsewhere in the Insular world.

Two Old English versions of a sunshine prognostication survive in the mid-eleventh century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 391, p. 713, and in a twelfth-century addition to Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 115, 149v–150r. Among standard predictions promising joy, peace, blossom, abundance of milk and fruit, and a great baptism sent by God, one encounters an enigmatic prophecy which involves camels stealing gold from the ants. These gold-digging ants have a long pedigree, one which links Old English with much earlier literature and indicates the extent to which Anglo-Saxon culture had assimilated traditions of European learning. It remains difficult to say what is being prophesied, however, or to explain the presence of the passage among conventional predictions. Whether the prediction was merely a literary exercise or carried a symbolic implication, it must have originated in an ecclesiastical context. Its mixture of classical learning and vernacular tradition, Greek and Latin, folklore and Christian, implies an author with some knowledge of literary and scholarly traditions.

The main contents of the Bosworth Psalter (BM Add. 37517; henceforth cited as B) are on palaeographical grounds commonly assigned to the last quarter of the tenth century. It is thus the oldest surviving English manuscript in which all the important texts of the Benedictine Office – psalter, canticles, hymns and monastic canticles – have been placed together. These texts are preceded by a calendar of slightly later date. Parts of the psalter and six of the canticles were glossed in Old English very early in the eleventh century and there are Latin additions contemporary with the Old English gloss – a short litany, prayers and mass-texts. Finally some psalms were heavily annotated in Latin in the twelfth century. B, still bound in its original oak covers, is of considerable interest on several counts. Early English psalters supply a very good text of the Psalterium Romanum, and B is one of those which appear in the apparatus of Weber's new edition. The hymnologist appreciates B as the oldest representative of the ‘New Hymnal’ in England. And the art historian values it both for its initials to the psalms, which display a style different from that of the contemporary Winchester School, and for the full-page figure of Christ on 128v. Hence any light that can be thrown on the place of origin of this manuscript is important to several disciplines.

During Cnut’s two decades on the throne, his English court was the most vibrant centre in the North for the production and performance of skaldic praise poetry. Icelandic poets composing for earlier Anglo-Saxon kings had focused on the predictive power of royal ‘speaking’ names: for example, Æthelstan (‘Noble-Rock’) and Æthelred (‘Noble-Counsel’). The name Cnut presented problems, vulnerable as it was to cross-linguistic gaffes and embarrassing associations. This article reviews the difficulties faced by Cnut’s skalds when referring in verse to their patron and the solutions they devised. Similar techniques were used when naming other figures in the king’s vicinity. The article concludes with a look at two cruces in an anonymous praise poem celebrating Cnut’s victory in battle in 1016/17 against the English. Both onomastic allusions — to a famed local hero and a female onlooker — seem to poke fun at the ‘colonial’ pronunciation of Danish names in Anglo-Scandinavian England. Norse court poetry was nothing if not a combative game.

It has long been accepted that royal households in the pre-Viking period subsisted on annual renders of food, sometimes termed feorm, from the free peasantry. This model of royal support is historiographically fundamental, in the sense that it is built into the foundations of much current thinking not just on the economics of kingship, but on its origins, and on the process of ‘manorialization’. This article argues that the texts which are conventionally read as references to these general-purpose food supplies are in fact concerned with feasts. This is apparent when we scrutinize both the content of food lists – which are so dominated by animal protein as to be inconsistent with the stable isotope evidence for elite diet examined in our companion article – and the contexts of documentary references to feorm and (in Latin) pastus. The article concludes with a review of the potentially far-reaching implications of this finding.

Among the fragments in the Newberry Library listed by Michael Masi in 1972,1 his item no. 15 was described as ‘ninth century’ and ‘insular’. When I examined them, the two leaves of this fragment proved to contain portions of three letters of Alcuin, written to Charlemagne in the late 790s.2 Copies of these letters are found in several ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts, but the only copy hitherto known to survive from Anglo-Saxon England is an elegant volume now in the library of Lambeth Palace, bound as the third part of manuscript 218, from the library at Bury St Edmunds.3 Both the Newberry fragments and Lambeth 218 deserve consideration both on palaeographical grounds and for what they reveal about the literary interests of Anglo-Saxon England. This study explores the circumstances in which they were produced, copied and read, in an effort to restore to them ‘the place, the traditions, the influences, the sources which explain the various aspects of its composition and contents; its destination and its purpose; the people who were involved’.4

Hereward ‘the Wake’ is renowned as one of the leaders of the English resistance to the Normans in the late 1060s and early 1070s. His involvement in the resistance is noted by all main sources, even though the extent to which he was responsible for actions in Ely and Peterborough remains to be elucidated. He is listed as a pre-Conquest Lincolnshire landholder and tenant in Domesday Book, which is the only contemporary source to mention, but not date, his outlawry. Hereward's career as an outlaw is shrouded in mystery, due to the lack of detail in contemporary sources and also to the rise of stories incorporated in the Gesta Herewardi (The Deeds of Hereward), written in the twelfth century, which claim that he went as a mercenary to Cornwall, Ireland and Flanders. Two sections of the Gesta Herewardi are devoted to his exploits in the county of Flanders, and there is a curious third passage describing his relationship to Gilbert of Gent, the richest post-Conquest Flemish settler in England, who is said to have been Hereward's godfather. The purpose of this article is to take a fresh look at these passages and to assess them in the light of sources written on the Continent which seemingly confirm the Gesta sections on Flanders.

In the years c. 928 to 935, sole responsibility for the production of Latin diplomas was entrusted to the royal draftsman known to modern scholarship as ‘Æthelstan A’. The documents he produced are entirely different from any previous example of the Anglo-Saxon diploma. Not only does he modify the very form of the diploma, but he writes in a Latin style that is marked by its sophistication, ostentation and learning, a kind of Latin that was a forerunner to the so-called ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that dominates Anglo-Latin literature of the mid-tenth century and beyond. Never before had the royal diploma's rhetorical properties been exploited to such a degree and it seems no coincidence that these documents appeared following King Æthelstan's momentous political conquest of the North in 927.

The Old English account of the passion of St Vincent of Saragossa survives only in one late manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33, written in the second half of the twelfth century. This manuscript contains a large proportion of saints' lives by Ælfric, belonging mainly to his two series of Catholic Homilies and his later collection known as the Lives of Saints. The passion of St Vincent, from its alliterative style, reveals itself also to be the work of Ælfric. Since it was appended by W.W. Skeat to his edition of the Lives of Saints, it has generally been treated as part of the Lives of Saints collection, although there is no evidence that Ælfric himself ever added it to that set.

In his account of the contents of the second volume of London, British Library, Cotton Otho C. i, Kenneth Sisam drew attention to an unpublished sermon on the sins of the tongue to which he gave the title Evil Tongues. The sermon is written in the same hand as the two texts which precede it in the manuscript – an Old English version of St Jerome's Vita Malchi monachi captivi (henceforth Malchus) and a translation of a letter by Boniface (Wynfrith) on an anonymous priest's vision of the next world (henceforth Wynfrith's Letter) Sisam was unable to identify a source for the Evil Tongues sermon, but close parallels for most of the Old English text are found in anther work by Jerome, the exposition of Ps. CXIX in his Tractatus in Psalmos.

Cultural archaism is often thought of as a natural concomitant of oral tradition, and by extension, of a literature that is influenced by oral tradition. In the case of Old English poetry, archaism might include residual pagan religious beliefs and practices, such as the funeral rites in Beowulf or the use of runes for sortilege, and certain outmoded aspects of social organization such as the idea of a state dependent upon the comitatus for military security. An example often cited is the adaptation of heroic terminology and detail to Christian topics. The compositional method in Cædmon's ‘Hymn’, for instance, is regarded by many scholars as an adaptation of panegyric epithets to the praise of God, although N. F. Blake has noted that heroic epithets in the poem could have derived their inspiration from the psalms. In The Dream of the Rood, the image of Christ mounting the Cross as a warrior leaping to battle has been regarded variously as evidence of an artistic limitation imposed by oral tradition, or as a learned metaphor pointing to the divine and human nature of Christ and to the crucifixion as a conflict between Christ and the devil. The martyrdom of the apostles is represented as military conflict in Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles, Christ and his apostles as king and comitatus in Cynewulf's Ascension, and temptation by devils as a military attack in Guthlac A; these illustrate a point made by A.B. Lord concerning the nature of conservatism in oral tradition: ‘tradition is not a thing of the past but a living and dynamic process which began in the past [and] flourishes in the present’.

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.

The editorial history of Old English poetry has known two extremes in its attitude to the transmitted manuscript readings. Whereas Franciscus Junius in his Caedmonis Monachi Paraphrasis Poetic a Genesios ac Praecipuarum Sacrae Paginae Historiarum, abhinc annos M.LXX. Anglo-Saxonice Conscripta & nunc Primum Edita (Amsterdam, 1655) aimed essentially at reflecting the readings of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11, and was by and large successful in transcribing what the manuscript offered, by the middle of the nineteenth century at the latest an entirely different approach had become predominant. By then it had become clear that our manuscripts are by no means authors' originals; in the course of transmission numerous errors have crept into them. Since it was undeniable that in the copying process errors had occurred it was considered imperative to try to restore the original versions.

The pilgrimage to discriminate the styles of Anglo-Saxon architecture on which Dr Harold Taylor embarked with his late wife Joan some fifty years ago was brought to a majestic conclusion in 1978 by the publication of the third volume of Anglo-Saxon Architecture (hereafter AS Arch), the first two volumes of which appeared in 1965. It is a work in the mainstream of English antiquarianism, reaching back to the days of Camden, Aubrey, Stukeley and Horsley, and is to be compared in our own time only with Pevsner's The Buildings of England.

The ‘Old English Vision of Leofric, Earl of Mercia’ was first printed in a philological journal in 1908. It contains extremely interesting information about the arrangement and furnishings of two major Anglo-Saxon churches, Christ Church, Canterbury, and St Clement's Church, Sandwich. The Visio Leofrici is the only testimony, written or (apparently) archaeological, to the existence of St Clement's before the Conquest; it confirms and deepens aspects of our exclusively documentary knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral at Canterbury, which was destroyed by fire in 1067. Thus, it is particularly unfortunate that the Vision of Leofric, which has had but slight attention from students of language, literature or religious visions, has attracted even less notice from archaeologists, art historians and students of medieval liturgy.

What remains of a single fragmentary folio, consisting of a vision from Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, is discussed from the palaeographical and philological points of view. The writing of the fragment is placed within the context of Insular books written on the Continent, probably Werden, in the first half of the ninth century. Visual identification of script is made with another contemporary half-leaf. The three fragments are regarded as débris of a book of excerpts gathered from various writers. The formation of the collection as a whole is considered as reaching back behind the extant fragments to a lost eighth-century Insular source.

In his Catalogus of British writers, John Bale's account of the tenth-century scholar, Frithegod, includes incipits for two hymns, of which the first, on Mary Magdalen (‘Dum pietas multimoda’), was long thought lost. In fact it is not lost, but has simply become uncoupled from its author's name, and is transmitted anonymously in three manuscripts of French origin, and in some Spanish liturgical books, whence it was first printed in 1897. Frithegod's authorship is suggested by Patrick Young's seventeenth-century catalogue of Salisbury Cathedral manuscripts. Young noticed two ‘carmina Frethogodi’ at the end of what is now Dublin, Trinity College 174 (a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Salisbury legendary), giving the incipit of the first as 'Dum pietas multimoda’. After Young had catalogued TCD 174, the page with the hymns must have become detached, and cannot now be traced. Frithegod may have composed the hymn while still at Canterbury, and then perhaps took a copy back to his native Auvergne, given that it ended up in an English manuscript but also circulated in France. Although the circumstances of composition are beyond recovery, I suggest that the hymn was originally intended not for the cult of Mary Magdalen (it was used thus in France), but rather to accompany the penitential rituals of Maundy Thursday. The article includes a text and translation of the hymn.

This article rethinks the current assessment of the relationship between Goscelin of Saint-Bertin and his one time pupil Eve of Wilton, suggesting that the difference in their ages was less than André Wilmart assumed and that Eve was not an oblate of Wilton but a girl entrusted to the convent for education and safe-keeping. Drawing on the liturgical evidence for consecrations in Anglo-Saxon England and on the rhetoric of Goscelin's Liber confortatorius the article argues that Goscelin describes Eve's consecration (not oblation as Wilmart and others assume) and suggests a date around 1078 for the ritual. An appendix follows detailing surviving manuscript evidence for the consecration of nuns in Anglo-Saxon England.