This article argues that the power of the early Mercian kings from Wulfhere to Aethelbald, c.650-750, rested partly on their ability to exploit the growing economy which characterised this period; and that such exploitation provides a hitherto unacknowledged reason for the rise of Mercia to supremacy. The argument rests on the Mercian rulers' control of two particular places, London and Droitwich, the first the country's foremost port, the second a major industrial site concerned with the production of salt. After the growth of Mercian authority over both places has been traced, it is suggested that taxation of their activities may have resulted in substantial profits, via tolls in both centres and, in Droitwich, via a further levy on the manufacture of salt. The history of taxation on salt is traced back from the early modern period in order to see what light later practices shed upon those of the early middle ages. The article concludes by suggesting that the Mercian rulers were fortunate in exercising power at a time when economic growth, partly church-led, was open to royal exploitation and that those rulers had a conscious appreciation of the advantages so to be gained.

The Frankish Annals of Lindisfarne and Kent lie at the root of the ‘making of history’ in Anglo-Saxon England. They are brief ‘paschal annals’, recording mainly the accession or burials of Kentish and Northumbrian kings between 616 and 704, and are found in the margins of Easter tables in one Anglo-Saxon and six Frankish manuscripts dating from c. 740-c. 830. These annals are not well known, but they deserve close attention since they provide factual details not just of ‘what happened’ in early Anglo-Saxon England, but also how such historical data was collected, copied, and transmitted across generations. Crucially, the annals contain chronological details that are not found in any other source, not even in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, and they are a unique source for those details. The evidence points to the variety of formats and contexts in which precise chronological details were first recorded in Anglo-Saxon England, and shows that these annals are a very rare piece of independent evidence not just for the history of the seventh century, but also for the type of ‘raw material’ that was available to Bede at Jarrow in the early decades of the eighth.

Walter Walter Goffart 31 Temple Court New Haven, CT 06511203 787 4120 In closing the preface to the ‘Historia Ecclesiastica’ Bede mentions the possibility of disputed truth, refers to ‘common report’, and invokes the, or a, ‘vera lex historiae’, literally, ‘true law of history’. Oddly, Bede seems to be disclaiming responsibility for his mistakes. These lines continue to be ‘a crux much commented upon’. Bede clarifies the meaning of this ‘law’ in four passages featuring the adverb ‘simpliciter’. They allow us to see that the ‘truth’ he sometimes departs from is not the opposite of ‘error’, but simply reflects an historian's duty to convey what everyone at a particular time believed to be true.

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.

The metrical grammar of Beo 665a cwen to gebeddan is, for that poem, strikingly irregular: the verse is of Sievers Type A with a preposition and prefix in the first dip and yet displays single - rather than the expected double - alliteration. The Metres of Boethius, a text whose metrical grammar (unlike that of Beowulf) generates a number of similar examples of this licence, allows a better understanding of the structure and rhetoric of the Beowulf verse. In particular, these analogous exceptions show that the absence of the expected alliteration accentuates the semantic contrast of the two stressed elements of the verse.

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’: T. S. Eliot's metaphor in The Waste Land evokes the evanescent frailty of human existence and worldly endeavour with a poignancy that the Anglo-Saxons would surely have appreciated. Such a concept lies at the heart of Boethius's De consolatione Philosophiae, and perhaps prompted King Alfred to include this work amongst those which he considered most necessary for all men to know. Written in the early sixth century, Boethius's work was translated from Latin into Old English at the end of the ninth century, possibly by Alfred himself. It survives in two versions, one in prose (probably composed first) and the other in prose and verse, containing versifications of Boethius's Latin metres which had originally been rendered as Old English prose. It is the latter of these versions which will be the focus of my discussion here. Damaged beyond repair by fire and water, the set of fragments which contains this copy will be seen to epitomize the ideas imparted by the work in ways that Alfred could never have envisaged.

Laboratory in vitro testing of various remedies from the Old English Leechbooks and Lacnunga does not support previous assertions that Anglo-Saxon medical remedies would have been efficacious. For example, the remedy for a stye in the eye takes ingredients that individually have anti-bacterial properties and compounds them into a mixture with no effect on common bacteria. We conclude that Anglo-Saxon remedies were not likely to have cured the ailments for which they were prescribed and that researchers, rather than asserting the probable prowess of the Anglo-Saxon læce, should instead focus on what people in the time period believed would have helped them.

Of the three legends of virgin spouses in Ælfric's Lives of Saints, Julian and Basilissa would have been the least familiar to an Anglo-Saxon audience. Yet it is the most useful among the stories of chaste marriage and martyrdom for demonstrating how Ælfric uses them to emphasize the importance of constancy in the Christian faith. Altering verbally and structurally his Latin source, he rewrites Julian and Basilissa to model the asceticism and orthodoxy he feels are lacking among his flock. As odd a choice as the legend may seem, his selection suits his aim of rekindling the faith of the English laity with the Lives and is consistent with the larger goals of his programme of pastoral care.

In his Catalogus of British writers, John Bale's account of the tenth-century scholar, Frithegod, includes incipits for two hymns, of which the first, on Mary Magdalen (‘Dum pietas multimoda’), was long thought lost. In fact it is not lost, but has simply become uncoupled from its author's name, and is transmitted anonymously in three manuscripts of French origin, and in some Spanish liturgical books, whence it was first printed in 1897. Frithegod's authorship is suggested by Patrick Young's seventeenth-century catalogue of Salisbury Cathedral manuscripts. Young noticed two ‘carmina Frethogodi’ at the end of what is now Dublin, Trinity College 174 (a late eleventh- or early twelfth-century Salisbury legendary), giving the incipit of the first as 'Dum pietas multimoda’. After Young had catalogued TCD 174, the page with the hymns must have become detached, and cannot now be traced. Frithegod may have composed the hymn while still at Canterbury, and then perhaps took a copy back to his native Auvergne, given that it ended up in an English manuscript but also circulated in France. Although the circumstances of composition are beyond recovery, I suggest that the hymn was originally intended not for the cult of Mary Magdalen (it was used thus in France), but rather to accompany the penitential rituals of Maundy Thursday. The article includes a text and translation of the hymn.

A brief history of the tradition of birds as motifs on textiles is followed by a catalogue of the birds in the Bayeux Tapestry and a discussion of their function. The possible significance of identifiable birds (cocks, doves, peacocks, storks), the birds of Aesop's fables and the creatures in the border ‘bird scaring scene’ is analysed. The individuality, in colouring and position, of all the border birds is demonstrated and the apparent interest which many of them take in the action of the main register is highlighted to suggest that the border birds present a commentary on, and audience-participation in, the narrative.

The Bury Psalter (Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 12) is a famously beautiful copy of the Psalms with marginal line-drawings, made probably at Bury St Edmunds, and certainly for its use. Rebecca Rushforth discussses two hexametrical obits added to the calendar in the early twelfth century, and identifies them as referring to two descendants of the royal Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex: Christina, daughter of Edward the Exile; and her nephew Edgar king of Scotland (d. 1107), son of St Margaret and Malcolm Canmore.