Ever since the question of the origin of the Old English dialects was first raised, Bede's brief account of the Anglo-Saxons' tribal origins (HE 1. 15) appears to have been a stumbling block as much as a help. Considering that scholars have been investigating the dialect origins for almost a century now, with a very limited set of data supplemented by varying degrees of insight and imagination, one may wonder whether the present body of facts warrants yet another approach. It seems, however, that not all possible sources of information have been tapped. The admittedly marginal material which I propose to examine here may perhaps serve to place the whole question in a somewhat different perspective from that which has been usual so far.

Various attempts have been made by Anglo-Saxonists to deal with the Old English colour vocabulary but the subject remains far from clear. In the present article I shall try to show some of the reasons why this is so and offer a re-interpretation of the Old English colour words as a system, treating the Anglo-Saxons simply as a standard ethnographic corpus of anthropological data and therefore amenable to the techniques applied to those present-day communities that are the concern of the anthropologist.

Nothing is more characteristic of the Dark Ages than the ease with which the barbarians assimilated Latin culture. Within a century of Augustine's mission to the pagan English, ‘a barbarous, fierce and unbelieving nation’ who ‘paralysed [him] with terror’, Ceolfrith had attempted to make Jarrow a second Vivarium and Northumbria could boast scriptoria with an uncial hand superior to the contemporary products of Rome herself. No less striking is the career of a barbarian prince like Cædwalla, who emerged from the forests of Wessex on a pilgrimage to Rome, where he was baptized in St Peter's and had his epitaph written in classical metres by the archbishop of Milan. Yet the Christianity which thus introduced the Saxons to Mediterranean classicism did not cut them off from their native cultural inheritance. The Northumbria which produced the Codex Amiatinus was also the home of Cædmon and of the Lindisfarne Gospels, whose rich mixture of Roman and barbaric elements exemplifies the Saxons’ success in turning vernacular poetry and insular art to Christian themes.

In medieval literature there are a number of examples of a type of writing which provides an outline of Christian cosmology and Christian history. These works deal, usually briefly, with the following: God and his creative powers, the creation, the fall of the angels, the creation and fall of man, biblical history, the redemption, Christ's life, the crucifixion, the descent into hell, the resurrection, the ascension, and the second coming and last judgement. The subjects vary somewhat; the fall of man and his redemption are of central importance, and some outline versions are reduced to these essentials.

The range of cultural assumptions underlying Old English poetry and the sentiments and sources which inspired it, not to mention the methods of composition – oral or written – are subjects of vigorous dispute. Much that was once considered indigenous and Germanic is now being revalued in the light of Latin analogues and works accepted for a century as secular are being treated by many as Christian doctrinal discourses. Since the intellectual milieu is so uncertain a basis for interpreting controversial poems, other approaches are needed. One that suggests itself is the exploration of idea-complexes. When a theme or situation recurs in a number of poems, in widely differing contexts, patterns of association can be isolated and analysed. The theme of exile, for example, is a centre of a cluster of ideas. Another is the concept of the hall: what is looked to for safety and what is feared as a threat to that security make apt points of departure for a study of a culture's major assumptions. Moreover, because the hall is the focus for conflicting attitudes, the array of associations proves useful to a more general understanding of the nature of Old English poetry.

My article begins in true medieval fashion with a retraction. A few years ago I argued that The Wanderer and The Seafarer involved two imaginary speakers rather than one. Ever since the publication of this argument I have been assailed by doubts of its validity, not only because most persons whose judgement I trust in such a matter have been either politely noncommittal or vociferously hostile, but because I myself, in returning again and again to the poems, have been less and less convinced that their texts would support my reading. The decisive moment came, I think, when I read P. L. Henry's strong reinforcement, from the Celtic side, of Dorothy Whitelock's view of The Seafarer as the monologue of a religious ascetic who had chosen exile on and beyond the sea for the love of God – a peregrinus pro amore Dei of a sort well known in the British Isles from before Bede's time to Alfred's wherever Celtic Christianity had taken root. In thus returning to Professor Whitelock's interpretation I found myself completely convinced of its superiority. Since that time I have altogether abandoned my former view of The Seafarer, and with it my view of The Wanderer also, and I welcome the opportunity to say so.

Cynewulf's dependence on Gregory the Great's Ascension Day homily for the structure and much of the subject matter of Christ II has been acknowledged since 1853. After commenting in some detail on the gospel text for the day (Mark xvi. 14–20) Gregory devotes the final third of his homily to more general reflections – ‘ut aliquid de ipsa tantae solemnitatis consideratione dicamus’ – on the theme of the elevation of human nature in the Lord's ascension: ‘Ascendente vero Domino, est humanitas exaltata.’ Though Cynewulf takes his lead from these general reflections of Gregory at every point, a comparison of poem and homily shows that in doing so he substitutes his own theme of God's continuing presence with man since the ascension in his gifts of grace. This article concerns this thematic change and its implications for the relationship of Christ II to Christ I and Christ III.

King Alfred's preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, explaining how and why he made this translation from the original of Gregory the Great, ends thus:

Siððan ic hie geliornod hæfde, swæ swæ ic hie forstod, ond swæ ic hie andgitfullicost areccean meahte, ic hie on Englisc awende; ond to ælcum biscepstole on minum rice wille ane onsendan; ond on ælcre bið an æstel, se bið on fiftegum mancessa.

Madden's note on the flyleaf of BM Cotton Otho B. xi introduces the scholar to the remnants of a most interesting manuscript: ‘Previous to the fire of 1731 this MS. consisted of 231 leaves. In 1734 Oxley reported it as “burned”, and Planta says “Desideratur”. A description of its contents when perfect is given by Dr. Smith in his Catalogue 1696 and more in detail by Wanley in his Cat. libb. Septentr. apud Hickes, p. 219.’

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.

Ælfric's Colloquy is, of course, first and foremost, a dialogue between a master and his pupils to give practice in the use of Latin at a conversational level. The pedagogic intention of the work is evident from the interlocutors' habit of lingering over commonly used words in various grammatical forms: for example, in a few opening lines (2–11) the deponent loqui appears as loqui, loquimur, loquamur and loqueris, together with the noun locutio, and within a little more than fifty lines (66–119) we find seven forms of the verb capere, two of them occurring four times each and one twice. Yet, equally certainly, this colloquy has more to it than just schoolboy exercises in declensions and conjugations. It has escaped the oblivion that has been the lot of its more humdrum fellows who – to use Garmonsway's personification – were assigned the rôle of literary Cinderellas, labouring ‘in obscurity in monastic classrooms to help boys learn their lessons’. It has long been acclaimed for its realism and for its ‘sociological picture of the occupational strata’ of Anglo-Saxon society; and, in our own day, Stanley B. Greenfield has called attention to its literary merits, ‘its fine organization and structure, dramatic in effect, with its pairing and contrasting, for example, of the king's bold hunter and the independent, timid fisherman…and with its lively disputation toward the end about which occupation is most essential’. In the present study I hope to demonstrate that it also draws on a background of ideas and that its longevity is partly due to this ingredient.

The purpose of this article is to describe the architectural evidence contained in a ninth-century poem which has recently been published in a new critical edition. The poem relates to a Northumbrian abbey dependent on Lindisfarne and its content provides some welcome additions to the present small number of contemporary descriptions of churches and their fittings. The poet, who was a member of the community, describes in some detail two churches of the abbey as well as a greater church which he saw in a vision. The poem is dedicated to Egbert, bishop of Lindisfarne 803–21, who would presumably be familiar with the abbey; and this dedication therefore serves not only to date the poem within the first quarter of the ninth century but also to indicate indirectly that it should be free from the wilder exaggerations that have sometimes brought discredit on contemporary descriptions of buildings.

A number of years ago it was observed by the present writer that the later issues of King Edward the Elder's two substantive types (Brooke 12 and 13) can be distinguished from the earlier by the fact that they are struck on relatively spread flans. The diameter of typical pieces with the Cuerdale provenance for example is 20–1 mm, while pieces which have very close affinities with the earliest coins of Athelstan have a mean diameter in the region of 22–3 mm. It was further noticed that the coinage of Plegmund, archbishop of Canterbury, exhibits a neat dichotomy between pennies which conform in style and module to late, but not the very latest, coins of Alfred the Great and pennies which patently are contemporary with the later, but not the earlier, coins of Edward the Elder. The hypothesis was further advanced, and seems now generally accepted, that the Canterbury mint was closed as a consequence of the two-pronged Viking attack on Kent in 892 and opened again at least a year or two before the death of Plegmund. It follows that the inception of the last phase of Edward's coinage falls likewise at least a couple of years before the archbishop's demise, an event which is uniformly dated in the numismatic literature to 914. Nor can numismatists altogether be blamed for their consistency in accepting without demur a date proposed without any indication of controversy by so respectable, and indeed magisterial, a work of reference as F. M. Powicke and E. B. Fryde, Handbook of British Chronology.

The fourteenth-century compiler of the saga of Edward the Confessor, Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, supplemented his material on the king with history, anecdote and legend on various topics. His final chapter contains an account of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium after the Norman Conquest. No historian doubts that this event took place. There is fairly full documentation from Byzantium itself and the accounts of the Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic and the hagiographer Goscelin are not unknown. But in general the medieval chroniclers in England make no reference to it and the scholars who have worked on Játvarðar saga, perhaps insufficiently aware of supporting Byzantine evidence, have tended to dismiss the account as a fabrication. Gudbrand Vigfusson calls it ‘an extraordinary story’. Professor Jón Helgason writes, with a characteristic touch of fine disdain, that ‘the saga concludes with the episode of Earl Sigurðr of Gloucester, who after the Conquest left England, together with other English malcontents, and with the Greek emperor's consent settled in a country six days' journey north-east of Constantinople. Here they gave the towns such English names as London and York. The source of this far-fetched story is unknown.’ H. L. Rogers says no more than ‘evidently a similar tradition was known to the Anglo-Norman Ordericus Vitalis’.

There is a great text in the Welsh laws that tells us that a man who killed another, and who wished to make proper amends, paid one-ninth of his victim's blood-price to the offended kindred. His mother and father paid another ninth, and his brothers and sisters a further ninth again. The remaining two-thirds was to be found by the kindred to the seventh degree – some recensions say the ninth – and two-thirds of that in turn was to come from the paternal kin, one-third from the maternal. The blood-feud group in other words was ego-centred, differed from individual to individual, and was elaborate in structure. Descendants of the great-grandparents of great-grandparents on both sides would be involved.

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.