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The Old English quasi-legal text Be wifmannes beweddunge (‘On the betrothal of a woman’) is a key source for understanding how marriages were contracted in late Anglo-Saxon England. This paper will use the nine clauses of Be wifmannes beweddunge as a window into a broader discussion of the Anglo-Saxon betrothal and wedding process. It will consider in turn the issue of licit and illicit unions, the economic and legal terms of the betrothal agreement, and the development of Christian wedding rites. It will argue that Be wifmannes beweddunge is fundamentally concerned with the legal, financial, physical and social protection of women within marriage. Moreover, it will argue that this text offers evidence for a gradual Christianisation of betrothal and wedding customs in late Anglo-Saxon England.

This paper aims to demystify the concept of bookland, and to suggest that it matters less for understanding what was distinctive about early England than historians have often supposed. The first part emphasises diplomas as beneficiary-led symbols of culture and status rather than instruments of royal policy. As the primary monastic context faded during the ninth century, so did the distinctive aspects of bookland. By c. 950, bōcland could translate fundus or simply terra, and thereafter diplomas had little effective function beyond signalling the status of landowner and thegn: bookland was absorbed into straightforward allodial possession. In the second part, it is argued that large areas of eastern England never had lay bookland tenure at all, though there was a limited extension of diploma use into parts of the east midlands after c. 940. Rather than a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon charter tradition, we should envisage distinct traditions in the south and west reflecting Italian, Frankish and Brittonic influences. Eastern England, by contrast, faced the North Sea, Scandinavia and the Low Countries: like other English regions it had a high monastic culture during c. 670–800, and that could have included diplomas, but its main documentary tradition is likely to have been more vernacular and decentralized.

Two rules of the metrical grammar of theBeowulfpoet are the subject of this paper. One concerns the variation of stress on the prefixun-; the other pertains to the alliteration of compounds. The two are correlated. The paper rests on the premise that the ‘metre’ of an Old English poem is only one function of a set of regularities that make it something we call verse rather than prose. Separately these regularities may be described as ‘rules’; taken as a group, the rules comprise a metrical grammar. Each Anglo-Saxon scop absorbed such a grammar during the course of long immersion in the poetic tradition of his culture. No two scops' metrical grammars could have been exactly alike; in addition to individual differences, there must have been regional and dialectal variations, although the poetic tradition ensured remarkable uniformity over a wide area and a considerable period of time, and only at the end of the Old English period, with let us sayThe Battle of Maldon, are significant changes manifest. Further investigation would therefore be needed to determine to what extent the rules here described apply to other grammars.

The literature on watermills is extensive, and includes many papers on what is usually called the ‘horizontal’ mill, that is to say mills with a horizontal wheel and a vertical shaft, as against those with a vertical wheel and a horizontal shaft. It is here proposed that the type under discussion in this paper, sometimes called the ‘Norse’ or ‘Greek’ mill, should be called the ‘horizontal-wheeled’ mill, and the other the ‘vertical-wheeled’ mill.

In the preface to F. M. Stenton's collected papers Lady Stenton notes that the publication ofAnglo-Saxon Englandin 1943 marked the culmination of a life-time spent largely preparing for and writing a book in which ‘place-names, coins and charters, wills and pleas, archaeology and the laws of the Anglo-Saxons were all for the first time adequately used to produce a balanced narrative, supported by Domesday Book and the twelfth-century charters which made it easier to understand the earlier material’. Indeed, with the exception of archaeology, Sir Frank had been actively engaged in all these fields of research, as is revealed by the list of his published works, and it seemed unlikely at the time that it would ever be necessary to make major adjustments to the view of the Scandinavian settlements that he presented. Only twelve years had passed, however, when voices of dissent began to arise and the first of three papers that were to herald two decades of controversy about the Vikings in England was published. The present review examines the most significant contributions to the ensuing debate and considers whether it has, in fact, been necessary to depart substantially from the views held by Stenton.

In a paper in Anglo-Saxon England 3 N. F. Barley has drawn attention to the richness of Anglo-Saxon colour vocabulary, which, he suggests, emphasized the light–dark axis of colour perception to a greater degree than does our own, in which hue is differentiated and then qualified adjectivally, pale, dark, etc. It is interesting to examine actual Anglo-Saxon artifacts with his observations in mind. The main sources for our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons' use of colour are the illuminated manuscripts of which the earliest surviving are of the seventh century. We have only one small fragment of wall-painting, the recently discovered mural at Winchester datable to c. 900. There is a considerable amount of metal-work and jewellery, of which the Sutton Hoo find, a seventh-century burial hoard, is the most spectacular, and there are some embroideries of the early tenth century found in the tomb of St Cuthbert, now at Durham. There are also literary descriptions of works of art, especially church furnishings. The paucity of surviving material and the lack of descriptions of identifiable objects are obvious disadvantages. In addition there has to be considered the extent to which the use of colour changed and developed over the period c. 650–1050. In this paper some examples of manuscript illumination will be discussed.

A hoard of 5,248 silver pennies discovered at Lenborough in Buckinghamshire in December 2015 is one of the largest hoards of Anglo-Saxon coins ever found. Although the deposition of the hoard cannot be precisely dated, it must have been buried in the latter part of the reign of Cnut (1016–35). The hoard was wrapped in lead sheet, establishing without doubt that it represents a single deposit, but contains distinct parcels of coins from the reigns of Æthelred II (978–1016) and the latter part of the reign of Cnut, with a clear gap in between. The cataloguing of the hoard is ongoing, but this paper provides a preliminary description and interpretation of the hoard. While the hoard contains few coins of particular numismatic interest, it is argued that the hoard potentially provides important information for the administration of the late Anglo-Saxon coinage, and for changing patterns of monetary circulation in the reign of Cnut.

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct the form of affirmative replies in the English spoken in England in the period 500–800. Examination of the extant texts shows that the two forms of the Old English word for ‘yes’, i.e. gea and gyse, are distinguished functionally, in that the former is used to reply to positive utterances and the latter to negative utterances. It is not clear, however, where the word gyse comes from. It has no cognates in other Germanic languages and the two main existing proposals for its etymology are problematic in several respects, and also fail to explain its functional patterning in the texts. We suggest a new, more plausible, etymology for gyse and use it to reconstruct the positive response system of proto-Old English. Apart from solving the puzzle ofgyse's origins, our proposal has two wider implications. The first is methodological, in that we demonstrate the value in historical reconstructive work of paying close attention not only to grammatical, phonological and semantic factors but also to the pragmatics of the forms being postulated. Secondly, the attested Old English data show a correlation that has been observed more widely through cross-linguistic comparison, i.e. the existence of a designated response item to negative utterances coupled with the existence of ‘high’ clausal negation. Drawing on our reconstruction of the emergence of gyse in proto-Old English, we suggest that one possible source of cross-linguistic correlations of this kind is diachronic development, in this case grounded in properties of day-to-day interaction in discourse.

I The general theme of the conference was ‘Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination’.Three keynote addresses were delivered.Michelle P. Brown, University of London, ‘Imagining the Exotic: Insular Attitudes to the Cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East’.Anna Gannon, University of Cambridge, ‘A Debt and an Honour: New Approaches to Coin Studies’.Leslie Webster, British Museum, ‘Image, Identity, and the Staff ordshire Hoard’.The following thirty-seven papers were delivered.

I The general theme of the conference was ‘Anglo-Saxon Traces: Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð’. The conference was attended by 196 people.The following papers were delivered:Anton Scharer, ‘Objects of Royal Representation (in England and on the Continent)’Jennifer O'Reilly ‘The Topography of Islands in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica’Diarmuid Scully, ‘Among the Ruins: Bede and his Sources on the Geography and Built Environment of Roman Britain’Joshua Westgard, ‘Traces of Bede?: the Moore Continuations and the Transmission of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica’Richard North, ‘Revenue and Real Estate: Archbishop Wulfred and the Strange Case of Cynehelm’

The use of demonstrative behaviour in political communication in the tenth and eleventh centuries (for example, proskynesis to obtain pardon) has been examined extensively over the last two decades, especially with regard to Ottonian and Salian Germany. So far, however, there has been no attempt to study its operation in Anglo-Saxon England. This paper aims to do so, looking for examples in narrative sources of demonstrative piety, reactions to rebellion, arbitration, petition and so on, and exploring how far the Anglo-Saxons were influenced by their continental neighbours and how far narrative sources themselves might have transmitted ideas.

This paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early eleventh century (London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. xv and Cotton Vespasian A. xiv). The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England.

In a recent paper Michel Margue and Jean Schroeder have drawn a vivid picture of the intellectual life of the diocese of Trier in the time of Archbishop Egbert (977-93). They portray it as ‘a colourful and busy world of small and greater personalities, who give the impression of being constantly under way: budding students, renowned teachers, talented copyists or recognised authors who do not cease moving from place to place for the purpose of education and knowledge and who do not keep to the rule of stabilitas loci’. One of the greater personalities to whom Margue and Schroeder have drawn attention is an Englishman, Abbot Leofsige of Mettlach (c. 988-c. 993).

Two fragments of an important eleventh-century manuscript, missing for some years, were recently rediscovered by the staof Gonville and Caius College library. The manuscript is signicant both because of its attribution to the hand of ‘Eadwig Basan’, a major figure in the history of eleventh-century English script, and because it constitutes evidence for the use in late Anglo-Saxon England of a mass lectionary, a rare type of liturgical book. The fragments have now been assigned the class-mark 734/782a, in order both to associate them with and distinguish them from manuscript 734/782, a seventeenth-century paper catalogue of a bequest of books to the college, in whose binding they were originally preserved.

Recent research has focused attention on the ‘Lotharingian connection’, that is to say the close links between the English and German churches in the middle of the eleventh century. Its best known manifestation is the presence of a significant number of German (mainly Lotharingian) clerics at the English royal court. This phenomenon seems to have its origin in the reign of Cnut (1016–35), and the purpose of this paper is to shed light on two aspects of Cnut's contacts with Lotharingia. First, an explanation is advanced for Cnut's baptismal name, Lambert. Secondly, attention is drawn to a hagiographical source which provides evidence for a visit by Cnut to Cologne.

The subjects of this paper are four eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon gospel-books and their patron, Judith, countess of Flanders. Two of them, with their distinguished late Anglo-Saxon illuminations and their precious silver-gilt bindings, are among the more celebrated treasures of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. The remaining two, which are now preserved at the Hessische Landesbibliothek in Fulda, and at the Archives of Monte Cassino, may no longer have jewelled covers, but are still luxury books of the highest quality.

This paper presents an experimental attempt to investigate the social contexts of certain Old English vocabulary belonging to a particular semantic field, namely that of colour. Sociolinguistic studies are concerned with language variations between social classes, age groups, the sexes and other social groupings, so it is obvious from the outset that this sort of evidence will be difficult to retrieve from a dead language. However, in the case of this particular semantic field, textual information can often be augmented by comparative evidence from the colour semantics of living languages, and by the theories about colour term acquisition and usage developed by linguists and anthropologists.

In Lincolnshire as a whole, place-names which have Old Englishburh‘a fortified place’ as their generics fall into two distinct geographical groups (fig. 1). In the northern half of the county, the locations of these names suggest that a comprehensive system of defence was eventually created for the territory of the Lindisfaran. In the far south, the two isolated instances ofburhmay signal original strongholds of Middle Angles styled in The Tribal Hidage the Bilmigas (but who on place-name evidence are more correctly to be called the Billingas) and the Gyrwe. It is, however, theburhnames in that region defined as Lindsey in The Lindsey Survey of the reign of Henry I (1100–35) which are the focus of this paper.

Evidence concerning the position of women in Anglo-Saxon England, particularly during the early period, is sparse and often difficult to assess. Surviving law-codes constitute an important source of information, but due to their cryptic phraseology and sometimes archaic vocabulary they are notoriously open to misinterpretation. Two clauses from the earliest extant code, issued by King Æthelberht of Kent towards the beginning of the seventh century, are commonly treated as evidence of the independent status of divorced women in early Kentish society. So far as I am aware this view has never been challenged, although it remains uncorroborated by other sources and is by no means the only possible interpretation of the text. In this paper I wish to put forward an alternative reading.

In May 1909 a medieval wall-painting was discovered behind the fitted bookshelves of the Morley Library at Winchester Cathedral. A brief description was published locally at the time of the discovery, but neither the precise subject matter nor the date of the painting were established. Thereafter the wall-painting lay virtually forgotten until it was re-examined early in 1990 by the present writer. It now seems possible that the painting includes the earliest known representation of Winchester Cathedral in its original, Romanesque form, and that it also portrays an important artifact within that church: the reliquary of St Swithun. This identification is supported by the other scene in the wall-painting, which, it is argued, represents either the saint's burial in 862 or (more probably) his translation in 971. In the second part of this paper the history of the reliquary of Swithun is traced. This important and welldocumented artifact had been presented by King Edgar to the Old Minster in 971–4 and was transferred to the Romanesque cathedral in 1093. It is suggested that this major piece of Anglo-Saxon metalwork may have survived until c. 1450.

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.

The illustrated manuscripts of later Anglo-Saxon England are justly famed for their beauty. The expense lavished on the most elaborate of them is paralleled in Western Europe at the time only in late-tenth- and eleventh-century Germany. Neither France, Spain nor Italy can offer anything that is comparable to this sustained luxury production. Modern art-historical scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon material has not really attempted to explain this phenomenal industry beyond implying that the vast majority of these books were made in monastic scriptoria and for the use of the church. If this implication is correct, it begs the questions, ‘where did the money come from?’ and ‘whence the desire to spend it in this way?’ Perhaps the questions are not asked because the answers in general terms seem rather obvious. Expenditure on any particular luxury item is usually in part a question of fashion, and fashion in certain circumstances becomes a priority which determines that surplus money is directed towards its indulgence. Doubtless a response along these lines could be fleshed out by a discussion of the sources of income of the Anglo-Saxon church and of its aspirations to conspicuous display. But any exploration of monastic wealth and rivalry for prestige which attempts to explain book production at this period would be based on the assumption, and it is no more than an assumption, that the phenomenon is to be accounted for by ecclesiastical patronage. The arguments brought forward in this paper will be directed towards a different end: that many of the most famous English illuminated books of this period owe their creation to royal money, and that they were produced, sometimes without a particular recipient in mind, to be given as presents which would help cement allegiance to the crown and serve as an indication of the donor's piety. But what is the evidence for this upturn in the production ofde luxemanuscripts?

The following papers were presented, the first nine being on the theme of ‘England South of the Humber during the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Centuries’:H. R. Loyn, ‘What are the Issues?’

The problem to be discussed in this paper concerns the organization of those Viking armies which under the leadership of Swein Forkbeard and his son Cnut succeeded in conquering England in the second decade of the eleventh century: were the forces of these kings privately organized, like the ones operating in the ninth century, or were they state armies recruited on the basis of a public obligation on all free men to serve the king in war?

Crop-marks revealing an archaeological site at Sprouston (NT 758362), Roxburghshire, the subject of this paper, were observed and photographed from the air on 22 July 1964, but the character of the site did not become evident until further observations were made in August 1970. In the flying programmes of the Committee for Aerial Photography of the University of Cambridge Sprouston has been photographed from the air on fourteen subsequent occasions. The vertical and oblique photographs, III in all, in the University Collection, together with oblique photographs taken during the last few years by staff of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for Scotland, are the sole source of information about the site. No trace of any of the features to be described is ordinarily visible on the surface, as is only too apparent from walking over the ground.

A manuscript fragment containing part of ch. 47 of Bede's De Temporum Ratione has recently been identified in the State Papers Supplementary in the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane (London), where it has the reference SP 46/125, fol. 302 (see pl. I).1 It was added to the volume in which it is now to be found in June 1925, on the authority of C. S. B. Buckland, an Assistant Keeper of the Public Records, but no information appears to have survived about its source.

Almost exactly forty years ago, Evert Barger published his survey entitled ‘The Present Position of Studies in English Field Systems’. It is a measure both of his percipience and of an underlying stasis in this field of scholarly enquiry that, even after the academic dynamism which has characterized agrarian studies so much in the two most recent decades, Barger's paper is still, if suitably edited rather than completely recast, by no means entirely superseded. Indeed, in some respects large parts of the evidence, the research and the published sources on which he drew for his synthesis are not only as relevant today as they were in 1938 but could even be said to be more fashionable now.

Cambridge, Magdalene College, Pepys Library 2981 is a large album which Pepys described as ‘My Calligraphical Collection vol. 1’. It contains ‘Original Proofs of Antient Hand-Writing English & Forreign between the Years 700 & 1500’ in the form of fragments from manuscripts pasted down firmly on each of the album's paper pages. Notes are written round the margins of the pages and incorporate ‘the Opinion of that Eminent Critick in re Diplomaticâ, our Country-Man Mr Humphrey Wanley of Oxford, touching the different Ages, Characters & Countrys of yesaidPieces, in Return to my Enquiries from him on that behalf’.

In hisCeltic and Anglo-Saxon KingshipProfessor D. A. Binchy reconsidered the early (pre-Norman) Welsh law of succession and concluded that ‘it was recast after the Anglo-Saxon model’. In his view the matter turned on two questions which have an important bearing on both Welsh and English history. When did the ‘Common Celtic’ type of kingship, in which a successor could be drawn from a four-generation group, give way in Wales to a system in which ‘the reigning king nominates his successor, who will normally be his son and only in exceptional circumstances his brother or paternal nephew’, and in particular what is the evidence provided on this point by the Welsh laws? Was the Anglo-Saxon ætheling the model for this Welsh constitutional innovation? It is my purpose in the present paper to discuss the position of the ætheling in matters of royal succession during the Anglo-Saxon period. Consideration of the relevance of these findings to Welsh history and law will be reserved for an article to be published elsewhere.

Over a hundred years ago, T. O. Cockayne published hisLeechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, in which he edited the texts of all the medical writings in Old English he could find. It is massive in its scope, and no modern scholar is ever likely to produce its equal. Yet we, metaphorically standing on Cockaynes's shoulders, and equipped with aids provided by more recent research, are able to examine more closely than he could some of the special features of the field which he revealed to us. Its English substrata have been comparatively neglected, however, and therefore I propose in this paper to examine closely the relationships of the hundred or so medical remedies in Old English which have been preserved – usually in different manuscripts – in two or three versions so close that it is obvious, even on a superficial view, that they either derive from the same English original, or are copied the one from the other. These remedies usually begin by specifying the ailment for which they are recommended, and then go on to set out the ingredients and method of making the appropriate herbal concoction. Nearly all the repeated remedies are found at least once in theLeechbookmanuscript, now London, British Library, Royal 12. D. xvii, and so I will begin by describing it, and use it as the basis of the argument. Then I will describe briefly in turn the other manuscripts in which the remedies are found, discussing as I proceed those with minor parallels to Bald'sLeechbook; and then, separately and in detail, the important duplications in the two final manuscripts under consideration. It may thereafter be possible to draw some conclusions about the method of compilation of Bald'sLeechbook.

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.

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.