The Old English Life of St Neot has been generally dated to the twelfth century and dismissed as a late and derivative work. The article argues that it was written much earlier, in the first few decades of the eleventh century, and is both a significant example of late Old English hagiographic literature and an important witness to early legends about King Alfred and his posthumous reputation.

The relationship between the book and the body in the Middle Ages is complex and has been the focus of much recent attention. At a most basic level the dead, dismembered, yet living body of the book was united with the bodies of author, scribe, artist and reader in the act of reading. Medieval readers from the age of Augustine on left their marks in books in the form of glosses, personal comments, sketches, signatures, and the traces of kisses, caresses, or of simple repeated readings that have worn away parts of numerous illustrations. Michael Camille, in particular, has explored the sensual nature of the relationship between book and reader in the act of reading. Perhaps nowhere is this union of bodies so vividly enacted as in the works of the fourth-century Spanish poet Prudentius, whose poems remained extremely popular for centuries. They were copied, translated, rearranged and illustrated to suit the needs of a variety of patrons and readers across medieval Europe.

The article assesses the rhetorical uses of the main kinds of non-functional alliteration that are attested in Old English poetry, and gives complete lists of their incidence in all of the poems. Two main general types are isolated. Supererogatory alliteration does not depart from the known alliterative rules, and is deployed ornamentally with some freedom by at least some of the poets. Five sub-types are examined in turn: double alliteration in the a-verse, consonant cluster alliteration, alliteration which is continued across lines, patterned alternation of alliteration across lines, and enjambed alliteration (where the last stress of a line initiates the alliteration of the next). Secondly, licentious alliteration draws a line‘s final stress into alliteration in its own line. Four sub-types are considered: crossed, postponed, and transverse alliteration, and double alliteration in the b-verse. Whilst crossed alliteration appears quite freely, the primary alliteration of a line on the final stress is shown to be avoided almost completely. Most of the unusual uses of extra alliteration congregate in non-traditional or late poetry.

Old English manuscript poetry, including the text that we now call The Wanderer, remains close to its oral roots in its reliance on audible structures and traditional expressions, in its fluid relationship to other compositions and in its anonymity. It is not oral, however, and its existence in a manuscript is more than a physical fact. This change in medium has begun to affect the poetry's semiotics. Having lost the social context of oral performance, the poet attempts to provide a viewpoint in other ways. But this manuscript presentation does not share all the workings of a modern printed composition.

Some years ago I published a study of the moneyers' names from Edgar's reform of the coinage in the last years of his reign up to the death of Æthelred in 1016. Since then Dr Fran Colman has made a study of the moneyers of Edward the Confessor. The object of this paper is to complete the record of moneyers' names on the late Anglo-Saxon coinage by surveying the period when the Danish dynasty of Cnut and his sons ruled England. Although at this period personal names may no longer be directly indicative of nationality, and the relationship between the named moneyer and his stated mint may be in some cases fluid, nevertheless such a record can still provide a measure of cultural influence and the intensity of settlement.

‘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.

After Janet Bately's several articles and her recent edition of the Old English Orosius there is little need to analyse further what the Anglo-Saxon translator did to his source. The translator made substantial cuts in the Latin text: he deleted much of Orosius's commentary on the events he narrated, made a number of minor, probably accidental, omissions, rather surprisingly left out some details which should have interested the Anglo-Saxon audience, and carried out a wholesale chopping of events and entire sections, reducing his translation to perhaps one-fifth the length of its source. He also made some additions, primarily explanations of institutions and details which would have been obscure to his audience, but also circumstances and rationalizations taken from secondary sources or from his own whimsy. Finally, he made some changes in the organization of his source and altered Orosius's polemical tone to that of a more objective but still Christian world history. Given the large number of changes, it is important now to ask why the translator might have made such a thorough redaction, and to consider how his translation could have been an appropriate vehicle for the transmission of this standard authority to an Anglo-Saxon readership. We are not unfamiliar today with historical revisionism and the motives for it, and the practice reveals the culture of its modern practitioners; the present study seeks similar information about the culture of Alfred's age.

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.

A cursory glance at a map of Rutland shows a surprising lack of place-names containing Scandinavian themes. When Rutland's place-names are studied in historical detail, this dearth becomes truly startling, especially when we consider the geographical position of the county, lying as it does between the Danish boroughs of Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham and Stamford and surrounded by heavy Norse settlement in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and a not inconsiderable spread in Northamptonshire to its south.

This paper is offered in the hope that it will provide reliable evidence for those wishing to make use of episcopal dates during the century 850–950. The original editors of the Handbook of British Chronology were assured by experts that ‘until all the available charter-evidence had been critically sifted, it would be useless to try and revise the available lists of Anglo-Saxon bishops’, so they used for their lists the information available in W. Stubbs's Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1897) and W. G. Searle's Anglo-Saxon Bishops, Kings and Nobles (Cambridge, 1899). We are still far from the desired state of charter study, but a good deal has been done on this and related studies in the last few decades, and perhaps the time has come to look again at the bishops' dates. In many cases the episcopal witnesses can corroborate or impugn the genuineness of a charter, and it is sometimes the misfortune of the Anglo-Saxon historian, in using the appearance of a certain bishop to strengthen the validity of a charter, to find that the date of the bishop's episcopate is determined by the very charter in question. So the critical sifting of all the available charter evidence must include a study of episcopal dates – one cannot take place without the other.

A little over five per cent of surviving Anglo-Saxon charters contain some reference to money or purchase. These cover a multitude of transactions: gifts, sales, bequests, annual renders, and so on. They provide a valuable insight into Anglo-Saxon perceptions of wealth and a detailed view of one specific area of exchange. Gold and precious-metal objects emerge as especially prominent, at the expense of silver coin. The formulation of these documents, however, presents a number of obstacles to interpretation, particularly in that no definitive distinction between charters of gift and sale developed in Anglo-Saxon England. Diverse forms of transactions can be exemplified among them – outright purchase, payment for book-right (with or without an earlier claim to the land in question) and gifts to neutralize potential challenges of title – but these show little correlation with ‘price’ or with the complex social background to every act of exchange.

During 1981, excavation of a large sand and gravel pit in Tattershall Thorpe, Lincolnshire, revealed many traces of Neolithic occupation and three Roman pits (fig. 8). In the southwestern part of the site, a sub-rectangular feature, aligned approximately east-west (pl. IIa), was found to contain a large number of iron tools and other objects, including Roman coins and glass which initially caused the material to be reported as Romano-British. Subsequently, however, a few objects were identified as post-Roman, and they are enough to show that the material was buried in the seventh century or possibly a little later. Because the soil in the area is very acid, conditions for the survival of organic material were poor, but a few fragments of human bone were recovered nevertheless, and it is therefore assumed that the feature was a grave with an inhumation. The objects had been deposited in two discrete assemblages, at each end of the grave.

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.’

Dr W. Urry discovered Canterbury Cathedral Library, Add. 25, containing portions of book iv of Bishop Werferth's translation of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, about thirty years ago and its text is printed here for the first time. N. R. Ker has described the manuscript and his account should be consulted. After a personal inspection I agree with his description in all particulars save one: the first legible letters on 3r are e of lic (Hecht 313.20), not cíged wæs (313.21). Ker dates the manuscript s. x ex. and believes that it is probably a fragment of an item in the medieval catalogue of Christ Church, Canterbury, and that it has been damaged by fire and used as a wrapper.

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

The Lenborough hoard has produced the twenty-third coin struck from Agnus Dei dies, which is also the second known mule of an Agnus Dei obverse with a Last Small Cross reverse. It is illustrated in Gareth Williams's preceding article as Fig. 7 (p. 304). This specimen adds to the small group of English finds of Agnus Dei pennies, which previously consisted of three single-finds. Lenborough is therefore the first ever English hoard to contain an Agnus Dei coin, mule or otherwise. The presence of just one penny of the type in an assemblage of almost 1,000 coins of Æthelred II (with a large proportion of the total consisting of the types either side of Agnus Dei) reinforces the rarity of the issue. Detailed research into the hoard may unveil more about the circumstances behind its composition, including the chronological profile of the Last Small Cross element, and thereby add to the general picture of the context in which Agnus Dei was produced.

In April 1970 I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to examine Leiden, Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Vossius Lat. 4° 106, 25v, the page containing the text of the Leiden Riddle (see pl. I), under extremely strong early morning sunlight. Strong sunlight combines the advantage of ordinary light with, to a much lesser degree, the advantages of both infra-red and ultra-violet light whilst permitting a prolonged and close scrutiny of the manuscript. In sunlight some of the applications of reagent appear as opaque white, whereas in a photograph they appear as dark stains because the opaque white does not register adequately on the negative. In these conditions I was able to distinguish in the damaged parts of the text of the Leiden Riddle between traces of ink left upon the surface and stains left by the various reagents as well as other marks in the substance of the parchment itself. The following day I made an independent examination of the manuscript under ultra-violet light. Later by way of experiment a series of very hard prints was produced from photographs taken in ordinary light. Subsequently I compared the various readings and as a result of these examinations I offer a new transcription and notes on the more difficult passages.

A Vulgate fragment from the Book of Judges was published by Michelle P. Brown in 1989 under the title ‘A New Fragment of a Ninth-Century English Bible’. The depleted bifolium – one trimmed leaf with its ragged, conjoint stub – had been sold at Christie's of London on 2 December 1987 (lot 137) for a hammer-price of £24,000 through Quaritch's to Prof. T. Takamiya of Tokyo. But the manuscript from which it derives is already recorded: the remains of thirty-two further leaves are preserved in Düsseldorf, Universitätsbibliothek, A. 19, and were published in the 1971 Supplement of Codices Latini Antiquiores. Thirty-one of the leaves are more or less complete (some are conjoint), while the thirty-second consists of a top half only. Like the Tokyo fragment, they show all the signs of having been rescued from bindings; the trimming of many edges has created further minor losses of text throughout. They preserve text from each of the first seven books of the Old Testament.