Anglo-Saxonists have been able to use Dr N. R. Ker's admirable Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon for over twenty years now, but so far no comprehensive catalogue or list of Latin manuscripts written in, or imported into, Anglo-Saxon England has been available, although a great deal of information on these manuscripts can be found, much of it in widely scattered publications. I have been collecting such information for some time with the intention of making it more complete and, if possible, eventually publishing a bibliographical hand-list of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. In order to create a sound basis for such a project it has seemed advisable to circulate a preliminary list, or search-list, of English manuscripts up to 1100 (including those with texts or glosses in Old English). The present list is therefore of a provisional sort. Its publication will, I hope, serve several purposes. One is to help me to learn of manuscripts and manuscript fragments of Anglo-Saxon origin or provenance which are not generally known and not yet recorded in my list. I shall therefore be most grateful for any information concerning addenda and corrigenda. (For my address, see above, p. ix.) I hope to publish a supplement in due course.

Like his illustrious grandfather, Alfred, King Athelstan (924–39) combined a distinguished and successful career as soldier and statesman with more overtly intellectual pursuits. He restored monasteries, established new bishoprics and was an extremely generous benefactor of churches throughout England. William of Malmesbury reports a view allegedly shared by his twelfth-century contemporaries, that ‘no one more just or more learned ever governed the kingdom’. William's assessment has been endorsed by modern historians. Stenton, for example, wrote of Athelstan that ‘in character and cast of mind he is the one West Saxon king who will bear comparison with Alfred’. As in the case of Alfred, we are moderately well informed concerning Athelstan's military exploits and political achievements from early chronicles. But whereas we also have sound evidence for the literary enterprise of Alfred's reign both in the pages of Asser and in the surviving Old English translations which were executed under Alfred's sponsorship, we have no comparable evidence for the reign of Athelstan. Here the contemporary evidence is limited to a couple of Latin letters addressed to the king, a series of royal diplomas issued in his name and a miscellany of (largely incomprehensible) Latin verse. In face of this pitiful collection of contemporary evidence scholars have seized upon a poem quoted at some length by William of Malmesbury, have declared it a near-contemporary document and have used it to fill the void in the historical record – without ever having examined the poem's credentials to authenticity and antiquity with care. I propose to examine the miscellaneous Latin verse contemporary with Athelstan's reign presently; but since the poem quoted by William of Malmesbury has loomed so large in previous discussions of the reign, it may serve as an appropriate point of departure.

Slaves were an integral and numerically important part of English society in the Anglo-Saxon period. They appear in the earliest English law code promulgated between 597 and 616 by Æthelberht of Kent; nearly half a millennium later at the beginning of the Norman age their continued widespread presence in English society is attested by Domesday Book. Yet they do not seem to have excited much attention from scholars. The longest treatment in print remains that by Kemble, which was written over a century ago. Stenton in his magisterial survey of Anglo-Saxon England made only four references to them. Some other recent histories, however, have discussed slavery in more detail. Professor Whitelock rightly included slaves in her analysis of the social classes of England up to the time of the Norman Conquest. H. P. R. Finberg took this further in his agrarian history of Anglo-Saxon England by dividing the society into three chronological periods and examining the regional variations within England during those periods. Both works mention the slave trade. This receives a more detailed discussion in H. R. Loyn's economic and social history. But the evidence on slavery in England is mostly fragmentary and in widely scattered sources. Inevitably general histories of the period but skim the surface. Only by patiently assembling all the evidence, as Professor Verlinden has been doing for many years in his studies on slavery in continental Europe, can knowledge about this significant element in English society be advanced.

A wall-painting at Nether Wallop church, Hampshire (SU303365), recently conserved, is here discussed and related to its architectural context. Previously thought to be of the thirteenth century, it is for the first time attributed to the ‘Winchester School’ of late Anglo-Saxon art, and a late-tenth-to-early-eleventh-century date is suggested for it.

Lines 18–32 of the Old English Advent, formerly known as Christ I, have suffered severely from the overflow of a mug of beer, or perhaps cider, that someone set down on the first extant page (8r) of the Exeter Book. Efforts to recover the readings of this passage have taxed the eyes and ingenuity of a number of scholars since 1830, when N. F. S. Grundtvig made the first transcription of the entire volume. A greatly improved text, the first and last to be based on freshly available photographic evidence in addition to renewed examination of the manuscript itself, was included by G. P. Krapp and E. V. K. Dobbie in their edition of the Exeter Book in 1936; but inherited misreadings have not been entirely eliminated either from this or from the slightly improved texts that have appeared since that date. The present article was prompted by a desire to correct a small but disturbing error that was first observed by S. K. Das, whose able exposition of it, published in 1937, has been overlooked by everyone who has had occasion to edit the poem since that time. But some other improved, partly conjectural readings in the same passage, though published, have not been adequately explained, and a fresh study of the manuscript together with the best photographic evidence has revealed some small inaccuracies that have remained unnoticed in all our texts. Thus what was originally conceived as a brief note has grown into something more complicated, involving a number of readings and a sketch of the slow process by which several generations of scholars have approached, little by little, a complete recovery of the passage as it stood before it was so nearly obliterated.

The principles of Old English prose syntax are on the whole well understood, but there is no general agreement about verse syntax. There are many reasons why verse syntax should differ, at least in some respects, from the syntax of prose. The Old English poetic tradition is known to have been conservative, and it is therefore possible that certain ancient syntactic patterns, obsolete in prose, might have survived in verse. The more ‘rhetorical’ purposes of verse might have made it necessary to call extensively on usages either rare or unknown in prose. Above all, the metre might have exercised such a constraint on the syntax that certain syntactic patterns could not be used at all, or could be used only in favourable circumstances. Such general considerations would no doubt be accepted as plausible by all students of Old English poetry, but there is still no agreement about how they may have operated in detail: the result is that any attempt to judge the style of an Anglo-Saxon poet is frustrated at every turn. It is impossible to tell how far his usage is the result of choice, how far the result of constraint; there is no way of judging how skilful he is in avoiding such constraint, or of assessing the ingenuity he exercises in saying what he wants to say in spite of the difficulties imposed by the metrical form; there is no way to tell how far his variations from prose usage are dictated by ‘rhetorical’ motives. Judgement is necessarily limited in this way until there is an agreed analysis of verse syntax.

In part I of this study I concluded that some of the most unusual characteristics of Grendel and his mother (and their ambience) bear a striking likeness to, and may derive from, concepts of a race of cannibalistic giants descended from Cain in an ancient Jewish pseudepigraphical Noah book or (if, as some think, there was no Noah book) pseudepigraphical traditions designated as Noachic. I now take up the second question posed at the beginning of my part I, namely, what knowledge that such a race (or races) survived the Flood is the poet likely to have had? It is a real question, for, after all, if all mankind and all living creatures – except the prescribed Noah contingent – were destroyed by the Flood (Genesis vi and vii), without some authority the Beowulf poet would not have come to the belief that some of Cain's evil progeny had survived. We should not doubt the reality of that belief. For one thing, we can be confident that he believed in the physical actuality of monsters. They formed part of the repertoire of medieval belief, especially evident (though not exclusively so) when mystical–popular–folkloristic impulses asserted themselves. In the Middle Ages monsters were not regarded as imagined fictions, nor understood as spiritual–metaphorical symbols. Secondly, to suggest that in deriving his monsters from Cain the Beowulf poet was ‘merely employing a metaphor for the society of reprobates’ and that ‘it is unlikely that Grendel was identified with the race of Cain with any save figurative intent’ is surely inadequate. The narrator's two statements about the line of descent from Cain to Grendel and his mother are neither vague nor obliquely hinted; on the contrary, they are markedly definite.

In ‘Second Thoughts on the Interpretation of The Seafarer’, John C. Pope gracefully retracted his earlier suggestion that The Seafarer and The Wanderer contain ‘dramatic voices’ and, in the process of retraction, generously acknowledged my own challenge to his two-speaker theory. In this later essay Professor Pope makes a number of illuminating comments about problems in The Seafarer: I feel especially enlightened by his evidence and argument that the phrase gifre ond grædig (62a) is apt for the bird-soul (the hyge-anfloga) of the speaker contemplating what is spiritually good, conveying ‘precisely the overwhelming desire, comparable to the fierce greediness of a bird of prey but purified by its object, that the seafarer feels for what he is about to name as “Dryhtnes dreamas”, “the joys of the Lord”’.

The purpose of this article is to analyse the different categories of the lexical and syntactic variation which is common to two unpublished manuscripts of King Alfred's translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis, Cambridge, Trinity College R. 5. 22 (717), fols. 72–158, and Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 2. 4, referred to henceforth as T and U respectively. These manuscripts are an obvious choice for the following reasons: the relationship of the tenth- (or early-eleventh-)century T to the eleventh-century U (almost certainly written at Exeter) can be at least tentatively established as far as the history of the transmission of the test is concerned; the work has the status of royal origin and one can therefore expect it to have been treated with due respect by later copyists; and the work is of considerable length. My study is based on a complete collation of both manuscripts, since, in any analysis of this kind, numerical weight of evidence lends conviction to the conclusions, but the material, because of its quantity, cannot be presented here in its entirety. What I have attempted to do is to demonstrate, with selected examples as evidence, the clear pattern of variation that emerges. It is hoped that as a result some light is thrown upon linguistic developments within West Saxon and upon the scribal practices involved in the copying and recopying of earlier texts in late Old English times.

The new bibliography by Stanley B. Greenfield and Fred C. Robinson of the entire body of publications on Old English literature provides the occasion for reviewing not so much the bibliography itself as the subject it covers. This article is, of course, not a brief history of Anglo-Saxon studies from the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII's reign to the 1970s. It is a highly selective exemplification of some of the changing aims and achievements of scholars when they went to the vernacular records in prose and verse that survive from Anglo-Saxon times.

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.