Bede has often been accused of a hostile or ungenerous attitude towards the British church (which may roughly be said to comprise the Britons of Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria-Strathclyde). And it is true that hard sayings are to be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica.1 Failure to convert, or even try to convert, the invading Anglo-Saxons is only part of the story.2 Another element, to be considered here, lies in the calculation of Easter.3 In 716 the last of the Irish communities, Iona, had conformed to the Roman practice, but the Britons did not follow suit until 768, so that in Bede‘s experience there was a substantial body of believers who disagreed not over the major issues of faith and doctrine but, principally, about the date of Easter and how to find it. Bede‘s tribute to Aidan, a disciple of Iona who died in 651, is somewhat marred by a reference to this problem.4 Why, after eighty years, should it still rankle? I shall suggest that the Britons were felt to be wrong-headed because, among other things, they were ignoring an observable fact.

Jewels have always fascinated man. They have been admired simply for their beauty – their depth of colour and their different propensities for catching and reflecting light. The combination of these qualities, rare in nature, has encouraged the attribution to them of many magical and medical powers. The rareness of gems and the distance and inaccessibility of the places from which many are obtained have caused them to figure curiously in legends and travellers' tales. The Anglo-Saxons appreciated the beauty of jewels, as their jewellery shows. Nor were they without interest in precious stones they could not possess; but it has been hard for modern readers to discover what their ideas about them were. The mid-eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, contains what is by common repute the oldest vernacular lapidary in western Europe. No edition has distinguished its sources accurately or analysed the process of its composition. It has been difficult, more generally, to see how the Anglo-Saxons' ideas fitted into those more widely current. There is no reliable published survey of lapidary writings between late antiquity and the late eleventh century.

Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston is the title of a short document in Old English which is extant in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 149–51, and London, British Library, Stowe 944, 34v–39r. These manuscripts are dated to the middle and the first half of the eleventh century respectively on the evidence of their script. A third copy was once in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii but was destroyed in the fire of 1731. The only scholarly edition is that of Felix Liebermann. The document mentions the resting-places of eighty-nine saints: all but one of these places are in England and all but ten of the saints were active in England. The usual formula is of the type, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Congarus confessor on Cungresbirig’ (37b), but in many cases the place is further defined by reference to some topographical feature, most often a river, as, for example, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Iohannes biscop on þare stowe Beferlic, neah þare ea Hul’ (5a).

In the second part of Beowulf (2200–3182) two crucial questions are posed, neither of which has ever been satisfactorily answered: precisely how is Beowulf related to Wiglaf and what is Beowulf's connection with the Wægmunding family? The fact that the poet himself does not provide a clear cut answer to either of the questions or indeed any kind of answer at all is as surprising as it is puzzling. Throughout the poem he takes pains to make family relationship clear, usually specifying it and repeating it when the relationship is particularly significant and sometimes mentioning it even when it is pointless. But in the final and climactic episode of the poem recounting how the aged hero Beowulf fights his last battle and meets his death, accompanied only by one loyal and fearless follower, his young kinsman Wiglaf, the poet is content to leave their relationship obscure.

A not infrequent observation in criticism about Old English Christian poems holds that a body of diction which was inherited from a Germanic, military and heroic past forced the poets to describe Christian characters inappropriately in terms belonging to the ideals of a warrior society. In my opinion, this is a simplistic assumption which needs to be challenged, particularly in relation to Cynewulf's Juliana, where, I believe, it has been positively misleading. For instance, in her edition of this poem Rosemary Woolf states that its traditional diction might be explained either as Cynewulf's calculated glorification of Christian story or as his mere deference to convention:

The Battle of Maldon is usually taken by modern scholars to be a reasonably accurate account of the way in which the battle developed. While not everyone today would necessarily agree with Gordon's statement, ‘the account of the battle in the poem, in so far as its statements can be checked, is accurate in every particular’, it nevertheless remains indicative of a not uncommon attitude. This attitude has been accentuated both by such fantasies as that of the late Professor Tolkien, who invented a poetic aftermath for the poem, and by attempts to localize the site of the battle following the indications provided in the poem. Reviews of Byrhtnoth's generalship also presuppose that the poem presents a realistic account of the battle, so that tactical decision can be evaluated. Some voices have been raised against taking the poem's account too literally, and many commentators now tend to assume a general, if not a detailed, accuracy. Most would perhaps agree with Professor Cross when he writes ‘the poet has selected from, elaborated on, and presumably omitted from a knowledge (not necessarily detailed) of the real events to suit his own purpose as distinguished in the poem’. Even this presupposes that the author was using historical evidence as the basis of his poem.

It is basic to Ælfric's style in the Lives of Saints that he does not aim at word-for-word translation of his Latin sources; ‘nec ubique transtulimus verbum exs verbo, sed sensum ex sensu’ is his governing principle in the Lives, as in his homilies. This is so, for instance, in a brief example from the Life of St Oswald, when Ælfric is recounting some of the miracles associated with the place where Oswald fell in battle; he speaks of the horseman who passed by, Bede has at this point: ‘Tulit itaque de puluere terrae illius secum inligans in linteo’, and the Old English Bede reads: ‘Genom þa þære moldan dæl in þære stowe, gebond in his sceate.’

When Henry VIII‘s Antiquary, John Leland, died in 1552, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called his Collectanea Volume iii of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin–Old English glossary entitled ‘Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico‘. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from Ælfric‘s Glossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. Although (excluding a Latin–Old Cornish version) the Glossary is extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts – two more manuscripts being known from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century transcripts – this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of the Glossary; it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne‘s edition of the Collectanea in 1715 was in fact the first printing of any version of Ælfric's Glossary (although not recognized as such); and it demonstrates the need for more attention to Leland's Collectanea by both medieval and Renaissance scholars.

Three eleventh-century English coin types bear legends on the reverse field which are customarily interpreted as forms of the Latin word pax, ‘peace’. The earliest is the Pacx type of Edward the Confessor, which takes its name from the letters p-a-c-x distributed in the four angles of a cross (see fig. 2a); the second is the sole, Pax, type of Harold II, which has the legend pax disposed horizontally within an inner circle (see fig. 2b); and finally there is the Paxs type of William I, which has four annulets within the angles of a cross, each containing one letter of the legend paxs (see fig. 2c). The issue of a type conveying ‘peace’ could be, and has been, regarded as a political gesture arising from specific circumstances, but it is difficult for a historian to understand why such a gesture should have been made on the three occasions in the eleventh century indicated by numismatic chronology – at the beginning of the reigns of Edward and Harold, and again two decades after the accession of William.

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.

During the last century there were vigorous arguments between architectural historians about whether any buildings had survived from before the Norman Conquest. Although as early as 1817 Thomas Rickman had given reasoned proof that at least a few stone buildings had survived, many writers followed John Henry Parker in maintaining that the Anglo-Saxons built only in wood and that all their buildings had vanished. But by the end of the century careful study had established over a hundred stone churches with features which could be claimed as Anglo-Saxon, and Baldwin Brown listed 182 in the first edition of his masterly treatise in 1903 and 238 in the second edition of 1925. In spite of more than a century's study of these churches, it still remains difficult to give precise dates to more than a few; in the great majority of cases it can be asserted only that they were built before the Norman Conquest and in some others only that their builders had not yet adopted the Norman style.

Many medieval manuscripts are composite volumes, made up of a number of self-contained units which elsewhere I have called ‘booklets’. Such a unit originated as a small but structurally independent production containing a single work or a number of short works. Two of the earliest surviving examples, dating from the late eighth century, were produced on the continent. Each is a single gathering now bound with other gatherings into a codex: Merseburg, Stiftsbibliothek 105, fols. 85–105, containing Alcuin's Vita S. Vedasti and some of his homilies, and St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek 567, pp. 135–53, containing aVita S. Lucii. There is a fold in the centre of every page of both these quires, made after the text had been copied and not present in the other quires with which they are now bound. In both instances the completed quire was folded so that the verso of its last leaf became the outer pages or ‘cover’ of the resulting booklet. This ‘cover‘ is more soiled than the other pages in the quire, suggesting that the booklet once circulated independently of the other quires in the manuscript into which it is bound.

In the period from Alfred's reign to the Norman Conquest scribes and artists in southern England once more achieved a high standard in bookmaking, comparable to the brilliant tradition which had been established in both the north and the south in the eighth century. Some codices survive which are rough in execution, written on poorly prepared membrane by unskilled hands, but the majority – by no means chiefly service books produced for ecclesiastical and royal patrons – demonstrate that by the end of the tenth century a large number of scribes understood the techniques of careful preparation of membranes and inks, had mastered the letter-forms of two scripts, Caroline minuscule and Anglo-Saxon square minuscule, and were disciplined to follow consistently a hierarchy of scripts for the openings of texts and major divisions, chapter titles, incipits and explicits. What remains must be only a fragment of the production of Benedictine monks and nuns, secular clerks and lay scribes. But however incomplete and unbalanced the evidence, the over-all level of accomplishment cannot be doubted.