The Taunton Fragment: a new text from Anglo-Saxon England

Extract

The Taunton Fragment (now Taunton, Somerset, Somerset County Record Office, DD/SAS C/1193/77) consists of four leaves containing portions of brief expositions or homilies on the pericopes for four successive Sundays after Pentecost. In the Fragment, brief passages in Latin regularly alternate with the Old English translations of these passages. The manuscript to which the four leaves once belonged was written probably at some point around or after the middle of the eleventh century in an unknown (presumably minor) centre in Anglo-Saxon England. Until recently, the existence of the Taunton leaves had escaped the notice of Anglo-Saxonists; the texts which they contain are printed here for the first time. It will be obvious that eight pages, half of which are in Old English prose, add in no negligible way to the corpus of Old English. Through analysis of the texts in the second part of this article, I hope to show that their contribution to our knowledge of various kinds of literary activity in Anglo-Saxon England is significant indeed, and that the linguistic evidence they present has no parallel elsewhere in the corpus of Old English.