David Williams has recently argued that medieval representations of the monster give humans an image of divinity, but one which can never be totally understood or described. Positive theology, the via positiva, attempts to take what is known of divinity and then to derive more precise statements about the nature of God; it attempts to contain God in human thought and language. The via negativa, by contrast, forces humans to discard the idea of any positive knowledge about God, since reason and language are inadequate to the task of containing or describing a being so totally other to humans. Alexander the Great, the narrator of the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, experiences such a negation in his campaign in India; he attempts to describe the wondrous beings and races which he encounters with his army, and his narrative of conquest functions as a metaphor for containing the encountered world in thought, description and mental order. However, he is resisted at every turn by natives, monsters and classical divinities; he is forced to realize that his reason and his force are incapable of containing divine power as manifested in the natural world of India.

It is well known that the extant corpus of Old English literature preserves only a proportion of the vocabulary that once existed. In some instances, terms for concepts that must have been familiar to the Anglo-Saxons have been lost without trace; in others, they may be reconstructed from non-literary forms of evidence such as the place-names coined by early settlers in the areas now known as England and southern Scotland. The main dictionary of place-name terminology, Smith's English Place-Name Elements of 1956, includes many entries for words which are otherwise either unattested, or attested only with other meanings. Animal names in particular constitute an area of vocabulary which is under-represented in literary sources but common in place-names, and for which toponymic evidence often proves crucial. Old English animal names unattested in the extant literature but included in English Place-Name Elements are *bagga ‘badger’, *bula ‘bull’, *ean ‘lamb’, *gæten ‘kid’, *galt ‘pig, boar’, *græg ‘badger’, *hyrse ‘mare’, *padde ‘toad’, *padduc ‘frog’, *pigga ‘young pig’, *stedda ‘horse’, *tacca and *tagga ‘teg, young sheep’, *tige ‘goat’, *todd ‘fox’ and *wiðer ‘ram, wether’. Those identied more recently include *brun ‘pig’ and *wearg ‘wolf ’. As the English Place-Name Survey progresses, providing detailed coverage of the country's toponyms in a series of annual volumes inaugurated in the 1920s, further examples may be expected to come to light. The aim of this article is to offer a new addition to the corpus.

The Regula S. Benedicti was known and used in early Anglo-Saxon England, but it was not until the mid-tenth-century Benedictine reform that the RSB became established as the supreme and exclusive rule governing the monasteries of England. The tenth-century monastic reform movement, undertaken by Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald during the reign of Edgar (959–75), sought to revitalize monasticism in England which, according to the standards of these reformers, had ceased to exist during the ninth century. They took as a basis for restoring monastic life the RSB, which was regarded by them as the main embodiment of the essential principles of western monasticism, and in this capacity it was established as the primary document governing English monastic life. By elevating the status of the RSB as the central text of monastic practice in England and the basis of a uniform way of life the reformers raised for themselves the problem of ensuring that the RSB would be understood in detail by all monks, nuns and novices, whatever their background. Evidence of various attempts to make the text accessible, both at the linguistic level and at the level of substance, survives in manuscripts dating from the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries; the most important of these attempts is a vernacular translation of the RSB.

St Benedict wrote his Rule for monastic communities in the first half of the sixth century. It must have reached England in the course of the seventh century and was translated into Old English prose by Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester, in about 970 at the request of King Edgar and Qeen Ælfthryth. Æhelwold was one of the leaders of the tenth-century Benedictine reform in England and his translation of the Rule is among his major contributions to the reform movement. Moreover the Old English Rule holds a key position in the history of the development of Old English language and literature. Manuscripts of the text must have been numerous from the tenth century to the twelfth century and even the thirteenth. Scholars like William of Malmesbury, Lawrence Nowell, John Jocelyn and Francis Junius took an interest in the Old English Rule, but, except for a chapter printed from BM Cotton Faustina A.x by Thomas Wright in 1842, the text was not easily accessible until Arnold Schröer published his edition in 1885, followed in 1888 by his introduction discussing date and authorship, the relationship between the manuscripts and some linguistic points. Comparatively little work seems to have been done on the Old English Rule since then except for Rohr's Bonn Dissertation of 1912 and Professor Gneuss's supplement to the 1964 reprint of Schröer's edition. Rohr, in an investigation of the phonology and the inflexional morphology of the manuscripts of the Old English Rule, was able to show that the language of all of them is basically late West Saxon, while Gneuss gave a survey of what is known about the Old English Rule and the Latin Rule in Anglo-Saxon England; he also pointed out the difficulties involved in an attempt to identify or reconstruct the Latin exemplar which Æthelwold used. In this article I shall consider four topics which seem to me essential for our understanding of the Old English Rule: the question of Æthelwold's exemplar; the relationship between the manuscripts of the Old English Rule; Æthelwold's aims and techniques in his translation; and the vocabulary of the Old English Rule, with special reference to recent research in Old English word geography.

It is by no means universally agreed that Lindsey was ever a kingdom or had kings. Stenton, in what is still the most thorough discussion of Lindsey, expressed his doubts on the matter but then dismissed them; there are other scholars who retain theirs. Of those listed, for example, in the supposedly royal genealogy (not a regnal list) of Lindsey, none apart from the last named, Aldfrith, is known to have been a king; some of them may indeed have ruled, but Lindsey would be unique if power had always been transmitted by direct royal primogeniture. Certainly our almost total ignorance of Lindsey's history is a considerable obstacle to viewing it as a fully developed kingdom; but that absence of evidence is no doubt largely due to its early subordination to Northumbria and Mercia by turns. Bede's description of it, whatever else he neglected to tell us, as prouincia and its meriting a bishop both point to the conclusion that Lindsey was indeed a kingdom, but one of those which succumbed early on to aggrandizing neighbours.

1973 is an auspicious year for the study of the charters of the pre-Conquest period. At the time of writing, the publication of Professor A. Campbell's Anglo-Saxon Charters I, The Charters of Rochester is imminent. This is the first volume in a series in which the entire corpus of pre-Conquest charters is to be edited with full critical apparatus, with detailed analysis of their diplomatic, palaeographical, topographical and linguistic features and with extensive glossaries and indices. Professor Campbell's volume is part of a collaborative enterprise organized by a committee of The British Academy and The Royal Historical Society. When the series is complete, historians will no longer need to reiterate W. H. Stevenson's famous dictum, ‘It cannot be said that the Old English charters have yet been edited.’ One significant feature of the scheme deserves to be noted here; each volume will cover the charters of an archive that was in existence towards the end of the Old English period. Thus there will be one volume for Rochester, another for Christ Church, Canterbury, another for Exeter, another for Burton Abbey, and so on. Small archives will be grouped together with others from the same region or diocese to form suitable volumes. In this way the organization of the edition will itself reveal the local character of Anglo-Saxon charters which is so marked throughout their history. It will also bring to light the work of forgers for individual churches developing their claims to particular lands and rights by means of charters of apparently widely differing dates.

A tenth-century ‘orientalist’ fantasy informs the poetic dialogues of Solomon and Saturn and serves to screen certain anxieties about the cultural identity of the English people. By placing these poems in the context of other vernacular works circulating in the tenth century, I would suggest that anxieties about the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, the stability of kingdoms and the efficacy of religious faith were likely to have been prevalent at the time when the poems were preserved in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422. The Solomon and Saturn poems address these anxieties by displacing any lack of knowledge, political stability or faith onto the Eastern and pagan figure of Saturn and the Chaldean people he represents, while English readers are encouraged to identify with the ideals and behaviours of the Christian figure of Solomon. In this way, the poems construct a degraded East as a support for English, Christian culture.

England was a wealthy country at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, as P. H. Sawyer has reminded us; wealthy enough to tempt the Vikings to repeated raids and to pay them enormous sums in tribute while still maintaining a prosperous economy. It was also, increasingly, a country whose wealth was expressed in terms of money rather than other kinds of assets. There was an enormous volume of silver coinage in circulation, continually renewed and replaced by a veritable army of moneyers. Rents, taxes and fines were defined in monetary terms and apparently paid in that form, even by the peasantry. In land charters the traditional rhetoric asserting that grants are being made from affection, loyalty, reward for service or piety remains, but increasingly frequent references to sums of money suggest that a market in the buying and selling of land was developing. Archaeological evidence points to a steady shift away from such traditional manifestations of wealth as rings and ornamented swords and towards the expression of wealth in coinage. The growth of an urban society of artisans and traders within the largely defensive structures of the burhs initiated by King Alfred presumably played its part in these developments. All this was a stage in the gradual movement from a society in which wealth had been manifested in land and military equipment, granted to individuals in recognition of service and often held for one lifetime only, to one in which wealth was expressed in terms of money and acquired as a permanent possession through commercial activities; but the effect seems to have been particularly marked in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In recent years a number of books and articles has appeared in which new and contradictory claims have been made about the compilation of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius II. In view of these contradictions it is necessary to re-examine the manuscript and to set out what information can be gained from it and what can reasonably be inferred from that information.

Since the fifteenth century pride and covetousness have bedevilled the study of Norwich's origins – pride in its medieval splendour and size, and covetousness of the antiquity of its rivals in the English urban hierarchy. Modern hypotheses about the city's origins have been coloured by those of earlier antiquarians to a considerable extent, and so some notice must first be taken of them.

Augustine, Jerome, Bede, Gregory, Smaragdus and Haymo, the exegetical authorities acknowledged by Ælfric in the Latin preface to the Catholic Homilies, frequently used etymologies as one of their techniques for penetrating the words of the biblical text in order to arrive at their spiritual essence. To the modern student of language their interpretations often seem arbitrary, even bizarre, but the idea that there was an intimate connection between the signifying name and the person, place or thing signified was well established within the scriptural canon and was extended and confirmed by the cumulative authority of the exegetes themselves. It was Isidore of Seville, in his Etymologies, who provided the most systematic definition of this tradition of etymologizing. As he explained it, it was a method for determining the true essence of the thing designated by the process of penetrating its appellation, since all things and all activities which were named ‘secundum naturam’ (as opposed to those arbitrarily named ‘secundum placitum’) were designated by those words which had etymologies enshrining the very quality or idea so designated. Given this definition, with its underlying philosophical and linguistic assumptions, it is easy to understand why etymologies were exploited in Christian exegesis and teaching. It was accepted that biblical names were in the category ‘secundum naturam’ since they were God-given or at least divinely sanctioned, and the rationale and method of their penetration had the advantage of harmonizing closely with the general interpretative process that was employed.

The nominal compound and the correlative genitive combination occupy a major position in the vocabulary of Old Germanic poetry; a poet composing in any of the several languages was free to draw upon the basic stock of Primitive Germanic or West Germanic compounds or, because then as now the Germanic languages were compounding languages, to create his own compounds according to his need or skill. But, despite all the volumes that have been written about the morphology, relationships and classification of the compounds, both in Common Germanic and in the several languages, we still do not fully comprehend the nature, the semantic types, the full meanings of individual compounds or, above all, the uses to which the various poets put their compounds for informative and aesthetic purposes.

In August 1979 a large sculptured stone was discovered, broken and upside down in a pit immediately outside the eastern window of the Anglo-Saxon crypt of the church of St Wystan at Repton in Derbyshire (pl. V). The scenes depicted on the two surviving faces of the stone are without direct parallel in Anglo-Saxon sculpture and have so far eluded definitive interpretation. The purpose of the present article is to place on record a detailed description of the stone, and some preliminary thoughts on its date and possible significance, in the hope that wider discussion may lead to a more satisfactory understanding of what must be, on any judgement, one of the more important surviving examples of pre-Conquest sculpture.

The critical history of the Old English charms is replete with examples of scholars claiming that the charms are pagan remnants with a thread-bare Christian garment covering ancient pre-Christian rituals. Other scholars, more interested in combing the charms for magical elements, have viewed them as even more primitive than a pre-Christian religion and have instead treated them as Germanic magic. The first two of three texts found in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. XVII, more commonly known as Bald's Leechbook, certainly do not fit this description. In this manuscript, we find medical referencebooks produced by a team of compilers, perhaps as part of the intellectual renaissance sponsored by King Alfred. Evidence in the manuscript also suggests that the Anglo-Saxons had considerable access to Latin sources of medical learning and also had a well-developed native medical knowledge.

An article I published in 1967 on place-names derived from OE wīchām aroused interest among philologists, historians and archaeologists, and it continues to be quoted. This response suggests that the material is of genuine significance; but some of the conclusions drawn in 1967 are now in need of revision. The aim of the present article is to offer some further thoughts about OE wīchām and to draw attention to some other types of place-name which may have a similar historical significance. The place-name elements camp and funta are particularly promising and some names which contain port and ecles deserve consideration. All the names discussed are plotted on fig. 1 (p. 6).

Scholarly understanding of the reign of Edward the Confessor is hampered by doubt surrounding the date, authorship and purpose of the Vita Ædwardi regis, its chief biographical source. This article rejects readings that see it as a work written after the Conquest, arguing instead that it was begun in 1065–6 and tried to foresee what would happen in that time of upheaval by optimistic inspection of precedents from Godwine family history, tempered by anxious reflections on pagan Antiquity. Through the prophetic insights of history it finely balanced Edith's hopes and fears. The second part of the article considers evidence that helps us to identify an author.

‘Many tribulations and hardships shall arise in this world before its end, and they are heralds of the eternal perdition to evil men, who shall afterwards suffer eternally in the black hell for their sins.’ These words, composed by Ælfric in the last decade of the tenth century, reflect a preoccupation in the late Anglo-Saxon Church with perdition and the infernal punishments that awaited sinners and heathens. Perhaps stimulated in part by anxiety at the approach of the millennium, both Ælfric and Wulfstan (archbishop of York, 1002–23) show an overt concern with the continuation of paganism and the evil deeds of mankind in their sermons and homilies. Their works stress the terrible judgement that awaited sinners and heathens and the infernal torment to follow. The Viking raids and incursions, during the late eighth to ninth and late tenth centuries, partially inspired the great anxiety apparent in the late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical leadership. Not only were these events perceived as divine punishment for a lack of religious devotion and fervour in the English people, but the arrival of Scandinavian settlers in the late ninth century may have reintroduced pagan practice and belief into England.

The so-called ‘Sunday Letter’ (otherwise entitled the ‘Heavenly Letter’, the Carta Dominica or the ‘Lettre du Christ tombée du ciel’) is extant in Latin and many vernacular languages and has already attracted a considerable explicatory literature. As is well known, the ‘Sunday Letter’ purports to be a letter from Christ himself, written variously in his own blood, with a golden rod or by an angel. It falls on to one of the principal shrines of Christendom (frequently Rome, Jerusalem or Bethlehem) and passes into the hands of the clergy. The letter urges strict enforcement of the observance of Sunday, accompanied by dire threats for those who fail to comply. ‘Sunday Lists’ (also known as the ‘Benedictions of Sunday’ or the dignatio Diei dominici), sometimes lengthy, are inserted within some of the extant examples of the ‘Letter’. These enumerate notable scriptural events which occurred, or are said to have occurred, on Sunday, in order to strengthen reasons for veneration of the day. Recent publication of individual, and isolated, ‘Sunday Lists’ from early Hiberno-Latin manuscripts has suggested that a survey of available and new material and a reconsideration of the relationship between the ‘Sunday Lists’ and the ‘Sunday Letter’ would be useful.

The Anglo-Saxons' awareness of their cultural and racial affiliation with their continental cousins is well attested, as is their interest in the earliest migrations of their ancestors to the British Isles from the homelands of northern Europe. The founding figures who led the migrations from Europe across the North Sea had names which were preserved by oral tradition well into the Christian period, and the names of these founders of Anglo-Saxon dynasties entered the historical record when Christian missionaries introduced the technology of writing among the Anglo-Saxons.

The last works which Bede lists in the catalogue of writings at the end of the Historia Ecclesiastica are his grammatical treatises, and he groups them together, indicating a unity of genre or function:

Librum de ofthographia alphabeti ordine distinctum.