In a ninth-century manuscript now in St Gallen (Stiftsbibliothek, 254) are found three Latin poems in three different metres dedicated by a poet who names himself as Lutting, in memory of his master Bede who, according to the first of the poems, died in AD 681 (and cannot, therefore, have been the much better known Bede of Monkwearmouth–Jarrow). In the St Gallen manuscript the poems are transmitted alongside Cuthbert's Epistola de obitu Bedae; judging from the language of Bede's ‘Death Song’ which it contains, the Epistola was copied from a Northumbrian exemplar, and the same is apparently true of the three Latin poems. The fact that the names of Lutting and his master Bede are found near to each other in the Durham Liber Vitae raises the possibility that they were together at Lindisfarne; and detailed metrical analysis indicates that two of the poems follow Hiberno-Latin metrical practice in significant ways, which also points to the Irish cultural milieu of Lindisfarne. In an Appendix, the poems are edited for the first time, with translation and commentary.

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.

This article presents the evidence for the Anglo-Saxon ethnic name Hwicce borne by a people of the south-west Midlands, and reviews previous unsatisfactory attempts to explain it. It appears to be probably of British Celtic origin, and an etymology in two variants, consistent in etymological meaning with that of other early ethnonyms, is suggested.

This article maps the textual transmission of the Vita S. Aegidii to identify the routes of its reception in Anglo-Saxon England. It shows how the Mass of Giles in Leofric's Missal offers new evidence of Leofric's links to the Liège area. The collation between the Old English Life of St Giles and the critical edition of the Latin source indicates first that the Life was translated from a Latin copy related to Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reginensis 497, containing a palimpsest of the Old English Orosius; second, it highlights the continuing exchanges between the Trier region and England in the eleventh century; and third, it applies inter-lingual transmission in order to understand translation practice. A new edition and translation of the Latin vita are included.

The verb forgytan is used reflexively six times in the extant Old English corpus, and all six instances are found in King Alfred's translation of Gregory the Great's Regula pastoralis. As the translation adopts from its Latin source the concept of what I call ‘completely reflexive forgetting’ (the forgetting of one's self), it adjusts the concept for an Anglo-Saxon audience by reimagining and reconfiguring the logistics of the mind and its mechanisms of perception. Completely reflexive forgetting is thus imagined as the process by which a ruler ceases to perceive himself from within (as God always does) and begins perceiving himself from without (from the perspective of his subjects), thereby slipping into a perpetually totalizing state of self-concealment.

When we forget, something doesn't just slip away from us. Forgetting itself slips into a concealing, and indeed in such a way that we ourselves, along with our relation to what is forgotten, fall into concealment.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)’

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct the form of affirmative replies in the English spoken in England in the period 500–800. Examination of the extant texts shows that the two forms of the Old English word for ‘yes’, i.e. gea and gyse, are distinguished functionally, in that the former is used to reply to positive utterances and the latter to negative utterances. It is not clear, however, where the word gyse comes from. It has no cognates in other Germanic languages and the two main existing proposals for its etymology are problematic in several respects, and also fail to explain its functional patterning in the texts. We suggest a new, more plausible, etymology for gyse and use it to reconstruct the positive response system of proto-Old English. Apart from solving the puzzle ofgyse's origins, our proposal has two wider implications. The first is methodological, in that we demonstrate the value in historical reconstructive work of paying close attention not only to grammatical, phonological and semantic factors but also to the pragmatics of the forms being postulated. Secondly, the attested Old English data show a correlation that has been observed more widely through cross-linguistic comparison, i.e. the existence of a designated response item to negative utterances coupled with the existence of ‘high’ clausal negation. Drawing on our reconstruction of the emergence of gyse in proto-Old English, we suggest that one possible source of cross-linguistic correlations of this kind is diachronic development, in this case grounded in properties of day-to-day interaction in discourse.

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.

Scribal errors involving proper names appear throughout the manuscript of Beowulf. The scribes misrecognized names, converted them into common nouns of similar appearance, and spaced them into units that reflect incomprehension. This study assesses the implications of these errors for the engagement and awareness of the scribes, then considers their bearing on the dating and editing of Beowulf. The proper name errors reveal that the scribes were unfamiliar with the heroic-legendary traditions constituting Beowulf. The collective presence of these errors supports the probability that the extant manuscript of Beowulf is a copy of a centuries-old poem, not of a recent composition.

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.

In 2010 a new late Anglo-Saxon seal matrix was found in Hampshire. The seal die is copper-alloy and engraved on both sides. On the obverse, it portrays and names a man called Ælfric, while the reverse is decorated with acanthus ornamentation characteristic of the later tenth- and eleventh-century ‘Winchester’ style. Unlike any other surviving English matrix of this period, it carries the remnants of gilding once applied across the surface and would thus have appeared to be made of gold. It is only the fourth known surviving Anglo-Saxon seal matrix, and the first to come to light in almost forty years.

It has traditionally been assumed that the so-called Agnus Dei penny of iEthelred the Unready (978–1016) depicts the dove of the Holy Spirit on the reverse. It is argued here that it may depict an eagle rather than a dove, so that the obverse alludes to the forgiveness of sins as described at Isaiah XL.1–2, while the reverse alludes to the effects of hope in the Lord subsequent to this forgiveness as described at Isaiah XL.29–31. Hence the coin may have been intended to proclaim the hope of Æthelred that, once the English have won the forgiveness of the Lord, they will ‘take wings as eagles’ and rout the Viking foe. If that was the case, however, the issue was quickly abandoned when it became clear that this would not in fact happen.

Archbishop Robert of Jumieges interests historians of Anglo-Saxon England chiefly for his role in offering the crown to William of Normandy and in the conflict between King Edward and Earl Godwin in 1051–2. Before now, very little was known of his movements after his flight from England that September, but the discovery of an early source placing him in Paris casts new light on his activities. Part 1 examines the source and proposes a date for the event Robert attended. Part 2 challenges current perceptions of his career and offers a new interpretation of its significance in view of his movements in exile.