Connections between Andreas and Beowulf have been the subject of much scholarly discussion. This article contributes to this discussion by arguing that the account of the Mermedonians’ discovery of and response to the loss of their prisoners in Andreas fitt X, which corresponds to chapters 22–3 of the poet’s putative Latin source, has been deliberately recast in ways intended to recall the account in fitt II of Beowulf of Grendel’s first attack on Heorot and the reactions of the Danish community. The connection argued for here is based not on verbal correspondences, but on embedded structural and thematic parallels. The Andreas-poet emerges as a careful and sophisticated reader, notable for their specifically literate and textual engagement with Beowulf. This observation has implications not only for our appreciation of the Andreas-poet’s art, but also for the transmission of Beowulf and for our understanding of Old English poetic practices more generally.

The metrical sections of the Old English Boethius have traditionally been regarded as little more than mechanical versifications of the relevant portions of the entirely prose version. This article, however, argues that The Metres of Boethius present an ambitious psychological discourse. The adaptations made during the versification process allow the poet to expand upon the prose source and place greater emphasis on the care of the inner mind. The model of the mind in the Metres owes much to the tradition of vernacular poetry, in which the mind is a separate, wilful part of the self, in need of restraint. Yet the Metres are also indebted to the tradition of their ultimate Latin source, in which the mind has the ability and, indeed, the responsibility, to monitor its own inner depths. This article demonstrates that the Metres-poet engages with both traditions, crafting a strikingly original model of the mind.

This article proposes ‘military standard’ or ‘banner’, OE segn, as the solution to the problematic Exeter Book Riddle 55 (Ic seah in healle…). The solution addresses each of the clues offered by the riddle-poet, using an object with attested sociocultural significance to the early English people. In so doing, it attempts to resolve several longstanding critical questions surrounding the riddle, and highlights some of the sociocultural insights to be gained from this riddle-solution pair.

Bald’s Leechbook, the most famous of the Old English medical collections, derives its name from a colophon in Latin hexameter verse that occurs on the final folio of the collection. Previous scholarly attention to the colophon has been nearly entirely directed at discerning the relationship of two named figures (Bald and Cild) and their role (if any) in the creation of Bald’s Leechbook. Yet given the rarity of verse colophons in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and the unusual placement of this text at the end of a technical work in Old English, these verses also deserve study for their place within the larger genre of poetic colophons and framing texts from Anglo-Saxon England. This article examines for the first time the form of the colophon and its character as a work of Anglo-Latin verse as well as its relationship with the vernacular prefatory tradition associated with King Alfred.

This article offers a new appraisal of the Scandinavian evidence relating to Beow – a figure who surfaces in a range of Anglo-Saxon sources as a member of the famous Scylding dynasty. The well-known appearances of Beow in Old Norse genealogical material and in the composition known as Kálfsvísa are first reviewed, along with their evolving status in the critical history of Beowulf. New evidence is then adduced from the text known as Bjarkarímur, which attests to a more extensive Scandinavian tradition surrounding Beow than has previously been acknowledged. The expanded dossier of Old Norse evidence pertaining to Beow allows, in turn, for reflections on the development of traditions surrounding this figure in Anglo-Saxon England, and the manner of their transmission to Scandinavia.

The established view of the Viking-Age Northumbrian Church has never been substantiated with verifiably contemporary evidence but is an inheritance from one strand of ‘historical research’ produced in post-Conquest England. Originating c. 1100, the strand we have come to associate with Symeon of Durham places the relics and see of Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street from the 880s until a move to Durham in the 990s. By contrast, other guidance, including Viking-Age material, can be read to suggest that Cuthbert was at Norham on the river Tweed and did not come to Durham or even Wearside until after 1013. Further, our earliest guidance indicates that the four-see Northumbrian episcopate still lay intact until at least the time of Æthelstan (r. 924–39). The article ends by seeking to understand the origins of the diocese of Durham and its historical relationship with both Chester-le-Street and Norham in a later context than hitherto sought.

Viking invasions and settlements left substantial legacies in late Anglo-Saxon England, attested in legal texts as a division between areas under Dena lage and those under Ængla lage. But how legal practice in Scandinavian-settled England functioned and differed from Anglo-Saxon law remains unclear. III Æthelred, the ‘Wantage Code’, provides critical evidence for legal customs being practised in the Danelaw at the close of the tenth century. An investigation into the code’s peace protections re-examines the argument for occurrences of communal liability in England before the Normans. Wantage’s restrictions on access to law and the need to ‘buy law’ suggest a departure from English conceptions of rights. Provisions on proof in legal cases, including a ‘jury’ of thegns, denote alternative measures of the truth. These analyses depict a Danelaw legal culture that reflects viking army origins, a Scandinavian preference for informal dispute-settlement (‘love’) and the concerns of a landholding Anglo-Scandinavian elite.

A further example of an Agnus Dei penny recently surfaced at a London auction.1 It was found in 2018 by a metal-detectorist, in south Lincolnshire. It is the twenty-second recorded example struck from Agnus Dei obverse and reverse dies, and takes the total of surviving specimens, including the two known mules with the Last Short Cross type, to twenty-four. The new coin is well preserved, without piercing, mounting or pecking, but is chipped between two and five o’clock. Both the mint, Leicester, and the moneyer, Æthelwig, are already known for the Agnus Dei type;2 it is in fact a die-duplicate of the other known coin of Æthelwig.3 The new coin brings the number of known examples for Leicester to four, and adds a second example for the moneyer. Allowing for the chip, the weight of 1.46g is consistent with the c. 1.75g noted for more complete examples.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 190 (CCCC 190) contains an Ash Wednesday entry into public penance and a Maundy Thursday reconciliation of penitents as well as two Old English sermons translated from them. The sermons were added to the manuscript at Exeter during Bishop Leofric’s tenure (1050–72), and the rites were recopied into one of his pontificals, London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A. vii, where the Ash Wednesday service was also revised into a unique, previously unrecognized, standalone rite. This article examines the manuscript evidence for Leofric’s interest in these unique rites and sermons, and suggests that they might have been useful to him in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Because of their uniqueness and proposed historical relevance to post-Conquest Exeter, the article concludes with editions of the rites from Vitellius A. vii and the sermons from CCCC 190, which are printed together for the first time.

The Historia translationis S. Augustini (1098 × 1100), composed by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin as part of a hagiographical cycle for St Augustine’s Abbey, contains several previously overlooked allusions to St Dunstan’s vision of heavenly virgins. I argue that Goscelin drew upon the Dunstan legend to justify Abbot Scotland’s renovation work on St Augustine’s between 1072 and 1087. The article first of all considers how the oratory of the Anglo-Saxon abbey was presented as a locus of divine praise in the first known hagiography of Dunstan. I then show how Dunstan’s eleventh-century hagiographers at Christ Church cathedral responded to the original vision by crafting competing narratives of heavenly choirs. Finally, an analysis of the Historia translationis reveals how Goscelin reappropriated the legend, depicting the oratory, and the crypt that came to replace it, as the abode of celestial spirits whose praise echoed the community’s liturgical devotions.