The traditional image of the stable Anglo-Saxon village as the direct ancestor of the medieval village is no longer tenable in view of growing evidence for settlement mobility in the early and middle Saxon periods. Indeed, it now appears that most ‘nucleated’ medieval villages are not the direct successors of early, or even middle Saxon settlements, and that nucleation itself appears to be a remarkably late phenomenon.

As in other societies, adultery was a punishable offence among the Germanic peoples. Although it is a topic which has commanded considerable attention, it has been given attention not so much because it deals with family law and its significance to social history, as because it concerns the treatment of women. But closely related to the question of women, of course, is that of how men view each other. Even as early as Tacitus, evidence exists that Germanic women were treated with respect, and were subject to the protection or mundium of male relatives. Although exaggerated, the account in the Germania gives us some understanding of the role of Germanic women in respect of betrothal, marriage and family life. But it also leaves us with questions to which we most likely will never find answers.

Although it is a precious and rare material testament to the introduction of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England, the Liudhard medalet (pl. I) has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. It is scarcely known to art historians. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the emblem on the reverse of the issue, and to offer an hypothesis on its meaning. Discovered ‘some years’ before 1844 with other gold coins – looped for suspension as if for a necklace of medalets – and jewellery in or near the churchyard of St Martin's, Canterbury, and published in 1845, the medalet recently has been convincingly assigned to a group of grave goods deposited c. 580–90. Besides the coin in question, the group included an Italian tremissis of Justin II, a Germanic tremissis of unsure origin, a Merovingian solidus struck by Leudulf at Ivegio vico and two tremisses from southern France, the first from Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, the second from Agen. Today these objects are in Liverpool, and Philip Grierson has persuasively argued for the inclusion of a Merovingian tremissis in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, as once forming part of the deposit. Most likely all the coins of the Canterbury group were issued during the second half of the sixth century.

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.

Cultural archaism is often thought of as a natural concomitant of oral tradition, and by extension, of a literature that is influenced by oral tradition. In the case of Old English poetry, archaism might include residual pagan religious beliefs and practices, such as the funeral rites in Beowulf or the use of runes for sortilege, and certain outmoded aspects of social organization such as the idea of a state dependent upon the comitatus for military security. An example often cited is the adaptation of heroic terminology and detail to Christian topics. The compositional method in Cædmon's ‘Hymn’, for instance, is regarded by many scholars as an adaptation of panegyric epithets to the praise of God, although N. F. Blake has noted that heroic epithets in the poem could have derived their inspiration from the psalms. In The Dream of the Rood, the image of Christ mounting the Cross as a warrior leaping to battle has been regarded variously as evidence of an artistic limitation imposed by oral tradition, or as a learned metaphor pointing to the divine and human nature of Christ and to the crucifixion as a conflict between Christ and the devil. The martyrdom of the apostles is represented as military conflict in Cynewulf's Fates of the Apostles, Christ and his apostles as king and comitatus in Cynewulf's Ascension, and temptation by devils as a military attack in Guthlac A; these illustrate a point made by A.B. Lord concerning the nature of conservatism in oral tradition: ‘tradition is not a thing of the past but a living and dynamic process which began in the past [and] flourishes in the present’.

In his oft-quoted study of indirect discourse (dependent statements, dependent desires and dependent questions) in Old English, J.H. Gorrell concludes the section on ‘the use of the auxiliaries’ by observing in his statistics an increasing frequency of their use in the period, which he relates to the loss of distinctive subjunctive inflexions:

The conclusions to be drawn from these statistics are very evident … Regarding CP., Or., Boe., and Bede as representatives of Alfredian prose and AH., Boe. [sic], W., and BH. as types of the language of the later period, the above statistics show that the relative proportion of the subjunctive to the auxiliary forms in the former period is as 3 to 1, while at the time of Ælfric the proportion is as 2 to 1. This postulates, therefore, a growing tendency in the language to make use of the auxiliary constructions, and this tendency was fostered by the gradual breaking-down of the old subjunctive forms, until in course of time the periphrastic constructions almost entirely replaced the inflectional forms.

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.

Solomon and Saturn II, the second verse dialogue between Solomon and Saturn in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 422, has long enjoyed a rather dubious reputation as an exotic work. In part, the poem suffers a guilt by association with the two other Solomonic dialogues in the manuscript, both of which are fanciful treatments of the powers of the Pater Noster. Kemble's 1848 edition of Solomon and Saturn II formed part of an ambitious survey of the sources and analogues of the later, Latin Solomon and Marculf dialogues. Although the subject matter of Solomon and Saturn II ranges widely from bizarre monsters to proverbial wisdom, Menner's 1941 edition influenced the modern reception of the work by presenting the poem in a predominantly ‘oriental’ context. Menner's learned introduction to both the Solomon and Saturn verse dialogues focused on the mass of exotic legends associated with Solomon. In his opinion, both Solomon and Saturn poems were ‘dependent on lost Solomonic Christian dialogues in Latin’.

Aside from its Old English gloss, the Lambeth Psalter has largely been ignored. Yet this manuscript furnishes valuable evidence about Latin learning in late Anglo-Saxon England, specifically at Winchester. And it can lay claim to be the most important surviving witness to psalter scholarship from this period.

The metrical version of psalms LI–CL, known as the Paris Psalter, is a pedestrian and unimaginative piece of poetic translation. It is rarely read by students of Old English, and most Anglo-Saxonists make only passing reference to it. There is scarcely any literary criticism written on the text, although some work has been done on its vocabulary and metre. I hope to show in this article, however, that its stylistic peculiarities mark an important stage in the disintegration of the Old English poetic mode, and that analysis of these may go some way towards answering the difficult questions which surround the manner and the cause of the style's disappearance at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. In particular, I shall examine this poet's selective use of the poetic diction normally associated with the form, and the impact of this selectivity on the systems of rank and formula.

The so-called ‘Three Utterances’ exemplum, which tells of the exclamations of a good and a bad soul to the angels or demons who lead them to heaven or hell at the moment of death, was adapted independently by three Anglo-Saxon homilists. Versions of this legend survive in an Old English Rogationtide homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 114, 102v–105v, in a homily Be heofonwarum and be helwarum in London, British Library, Cotton Faustina A. ix, 21v–23v, and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 302, pp. 71–3, and in a Lenten homily in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 85/86, fos. 25–40. In 1935 Rudolf Willard published a study of the exemplum, with a detailed comparison between the three Old English versions, an Irish version, and a single Latin version in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, lat. 2628 (s. xi). Two years later Willard published a second Latin version from Oxford, University College 61 (s. xiv). Other texts of the Latin sermon have subsequently come to light.

Cambridge, St John's College 42 (B. 20) is a Latin manuscript, dated as twelfth century and tentatively placed at Worcester. It contains 136 folios, closely written in double columns of forty-five lines each, in which a range of abbreviations has been used. By these means a quantity of material has been presented, including two collections of homilies/sermons, a calendar, extracts from the works of named authors and miscellaneous smaller items. The most notable of the sermons for Anglo-Saxonists is a new text of Archbishop Wulfstan's Latin composition, De Anticristo, but it keeps company with other anonymous sermons, some of which are variant texts of sermons copied or composed in English manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon historical period. The manuscript needs a closer study than those done by M.R. James, who catalogued the anonymous items without identification, or by H. Schenkl, whose catalogue is incomplete although it includes some identifications. Identification of the anonymous items, with notice of parallel texts in other manuscripts where possible, helps to confirm the date of the manuscript, suggests that its place of origin was Worcester, and allows speculation on the canon of Wulfstan's Latin writing.

The importance of the hoard found in the excavations in the Forum at Rome in 1883, just outside the the House of the Vestal Virgins, has long been recognized by Anglo-Saxon numismatists, for it is the largest recorded source for the coinage of Æthelstan and Edmund. Archaeologists, art-historians and epigraphers have, however, failed to appreciate the significance for Anglo-Saxon studies of the pair of silver tags found with the coins (pl. VIII), bearing between them the name of Pope Marinus, despite their having been illustrated (in uncleaned condition) by Christopher Blunt in his 1974 account of the hoard. The tags themselves are described and discussed here by Dr James Graham-Campbell and their inscriptions by Dr Elisabeth Okasha, both working from photographs kindly made available to us by Dottoressa Silvana Balbi de Caro, of the Museo Nazionale in Rome, through the agency of Dr Michael Metcalf.