An article I published in 1967 on place-names derived from OE wīchām aroused interest among philologists, historians and archaeologists, and it continues to be quoted. This response suggests that the material is of genuine significance; but some of the conclusions drawn in 1967 are now in need of revision. The aim of the present article is to offer some further thoughts about OE wīchām and to draw attention to some other types of place-name which may have a similar historical significance. The place-name elements camp and funta are particularly promising and some names which contain port and ecles deserve consideration. All the names discussed are plotted on fig. 1 (p. 6).

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.

Eduard Norden's great book Die antike Kunstprosa is grounded on first-hand acquaintance with an astonishingly wide range of literature, both from classical antiquity and from the Middle Ages. But at the authors of Anglo-Saxon England Norden does seem to have drawn the line. ‘The two great writers, Aldhelm and Bede’, he says, ‘write, like all Anglo-Saxons, a stylistically uncultivated (verwildertes) though grammatically correct Latin.’ There is no need to labour the point that Aldhelm and Bede are not to be mentioned thus cavalierly in the same stylistic breath: we are all familiar today with the distinction between the ‘hermeneutic’ Latin of the one and the ‘classical’ Latin of the other. But at least Norden could not fall victim to another widely accepted doctrine that purports to explain the origin of that distinction: the doctrine that Aldhelm's style was influenced by Ireland, Bede's by the continent of Europe. I doubt if this is true even of Bede. But my present business is with Aldhelm; I shall try to show that his literary origins are not to be found in Ireland. At the same time I shall be challenging Norden's claim that his Latin was uncultivated. I shall suggest, indeed, that its cultivation was of a kind that Norden himself would have been uniquely qualified to analyse.

The practice of the late classical grammarians of providing copious lists of frequently archaic and obscure examples of the parts of speech was subjected to varying treatment at the hands of their medieval adapters. Some omitted these lists altogether; some substituted commoner examples current in ecclesiastical vocabulary; others incorporated the classical material almost unaltered into their own works. The ars grammatica Tatuini, a lengthy treatise by the Mercian scholar Tatwine, archbishop of Canterbury from 731 until his death in 734, contains extensive lists drawn from such authors as Charisius and Phocas. Early in the textual tradition of all the surviving copies of this work several of the examples in the first, de nomine section were supplied with glosses, five in Latin and eighteen in Old English. Although they have been mentioned several times, no commentary on them, nor even an adequate transcription of them, has been published. Yet the glosses – particularly those in Old English – are of considerable interest, not only for their contribution to Old English lexicography, but also for the glimpse they afford of one aspect of the study of Latin in early-eighth-century England.

Although Beowulf scholars have now generally accepted Frederick Klaeber's emendation … Finne / [ea]l unblitme (1128b–9a), the meaning of unblitme has remained in some doubt. Professors Dobbie and Rosier have held that unblitme means literally ‘without casting of lots’ and by extension ‘without choice”, Dobbie explaining that Hengest, ‘having no choice, was forced to remain with Finn’ and Rosier affirming that he did so ‘entirely with lack of choice’. Their view of unblitme has for some time gone unchallenged. But lately Professor Fry has dissented, contending briefly that ‘“without casting of lots” should produce just the opposite of “having no choice”. Casting lots throws the result up to chance, and so un-blitme should logically mean “not by chance”, that is “voluntarily”.’ There can be little question, I think, that Fry is right in rejecting the older view of unblitme. To take unblitme to mean ‘having no choice’ is to equivocate on the word ‘choice’. Any hlitm, ‘casting of lots’, would imply ‘choice’ in the sense ‘decision pursuant to lots and not to one's desires’. But the translation ‘having no choice’ means much more than this; it means ‘unwillingly‘free choice, choice pursuant to one's desires‘.

In the past few years a real advance has been made in the appreciation of Cynewulf's shortest signed poem, the Fates of the Apostles, extant in the Vercelli Book. For most of the century and more since this poem was first published critical opinion has been almost unanimously unfavourable about its literary merit and until recently scholarly attention has been limited mainly to textual and source investigations. Today, however, illuminating studies, such as those by James L. Boren and Constance B. Hieatt, have made us aware of the poem's subtleties of image and structure. In particular, now that we have begun to apprehend the depth of the poem's meaning, I believe that we can use this understanding to gain further insight into the thematic concerns of Cynewulf's other three signed poems. This can be achieved, I suggest, through recognizing how the basic theme of the Fates reappears as a motif linking Cynewulf's epilogues.

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.

The Liber Vitae of Durham is a well known and frequently studied document. Now preserved in the British Library, London, under the press-mark Cotton Domitian vii, it consists of a list of benefactors to St Cuthbert's community, or, at least, of those for whom the prayers of the community were solicited. The names were written in alternate lines of gold and silver in the early part of the ninth century, and very little was added for two centuries or more. Then, between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, many other names were written in, and the book was even occasionally used as a kind of register for documents. An important exception to this generalization consists of the name aeðelstan rex added at the top of 12r in a mid-tenth-century hand which attempts to imitate some of the features of the original script. King Atheistan (924–39) was remembered as a great benefactor to St Cuthbert's and it is fitting that he should have been thus commemorated.

One of the most crucial and problematic periods in the history of English medieval art is the tenth century. Already in the first half of the century there were signs of renewed artistic activity after the comparatively barren period of the ninth century when the Viking invasions rent the fabric of Anglo-Saxon society. But a full revival did not occur until the second half of the tenth century under the impetus of monastic reform and strong royal support. It was then that English artists created the so-called ‘Winchester Style’, which was to exercise a powerful influence in England and also on the continent for more than a century. Despite the research of many scholars, most notably Homburger and Wormald, there are still many more questions than answers about the sources and development of tenth-century English art. Among the most important works from this time are the Anglo-Saxon drawings and initial which were added to the so-called Leofric Missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 579). Through a consideration of their style, technique, ornament and iconography I hope to take a step towards a clearer understanding of this period of artistic renaissance.

Sermo Lupi ad Anglos has attracted far more attention by its subject matter than have other Wulfstan sermons, because its apparent topicality is of interest to students of the Old English period. Like all Wulfstan's sermons, though, it has been chiefly esteemed for its forceful oratory – it is this sermon, indeed, which is responsible for his reputation as a fiery orator in the Old Testament vein. Most readers have praised it more enthusiastically than Sir Frank Stenton did, when he stated that it ‘makes its effect by sheer monotony of commination’. But even its admirers have regarded it as little more than a stringing together of the nation's sins and tribulations which impresses by the horrific accumulation of detail. Such a view, it will be argued, is a drastic oversimplification. The Sermo Lupi presents a number of closely related themes, and the catalogues are but one aspect of the development of these themes. Certainly the seemingly inexhaustible fashion in which Wulfstan heaps up specific instances of the nation's iniquities and misfortunes contributes much to the force of his indictment, but the sermon is neither formless nor repetitive. On the contrary, it is the most skilfully and tightly constructed of all his sermons.

The item which Napier printed as no. xxx in his collected edition of the homilies of Archbishop Wulfstan and which is extant complete only in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 113, written at Worcester in the third quarter of the eleventh century, has long been recognized as a compilation in which a few sentences of undoubted Wulfstan authorship are fitted into a remarkable patchwork of extracts from pseudo-Wulfstan and tenth-century anonymous writings. Karl Jost has stated that the opening and concluding sections consist of extracts from the Institutes of Polity and from Napier's homilies xxiv, xlvi and ii, while in the middle section he has identified parallels to two Vercelli homilies, nos. iv and ix, and to Napier xlix, which also occurs in the Vercelli Book as homily x. He has speculated that for another passage the compiler may have drawn upon an earlier version of a text now surviving in London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, but he missed a parallel with Vercelli xxi which had been noted by McIntosh. What in effect Jost and others have shown is that in a ‘scissors and paste’ homily in which no more than a few sentences can be ascribed to the compiler (and these perhaps only because he took them from books since lost) we find extracts from a considerable number of works. The purpose of this article is to examine again the sources of the compilation, to show that very probably more than half of it was drawn from a single codex similar to the Vercelli Book, and to illustrate the influence Wulfstan's writings and style had on its author.

The Old English æcerbot charm, whichs is preserved in London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. vii, in a hand of the first half of the eleventh century, has always attracted a good deal of attention, since it is one of the few surviving texts which unquestionably reflect the influence of Anglo-Saxon paganism – pagan religion, not merely pagan magic, if one can make the distinction. Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon paganism is so limited, particularly in comparison with the rich corpus of myth and heroic legend preserved in Old Norse-Icelandic, that inevitably scholars give close attention to any text which reveals something of it. So far as the æcerbot charm is concerned, this has meant a preoccupation with distinguishing between pagan elements and Christian accretions. For instance, in Stopford Brooke's translation of lines 30–42 quoted by Storms in his edition, ‘old’ pagan parts of the prayer are printed in italics and ‘new’ Christian ones in roman print. Storms doubts the possibility of drawing a hard and fast line in all cases, but his quite lengthy commentary on the charm as a whole shares the same fundamental concern.

In this, my third article on the sources of Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, the fourteenth-century Icelandic saga of Edward the Confessor, I hope to cover all the material that I have not dealt with previously. In my first article, on the hagiographical sources, I suggested that the saga writer used two specific texts, a service book containing the lections for St Edward's day and the Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais. In my second one, on the saga's version of the Anglo-Saxon emigration to Byzantium, I showed that this account was very closely related to the one in the anonymous and unpublished Chronicon Laudunensis. Here I wish to show the full extent of the saga's debt to CL. In doing this I also need to show how the saga writer used Scandinavian sources, a range of material that he acknowledges when he refers us to what is said í æfi Noregskonunga. The specific saga which he has utilized most fully is that of Harald Hardrada, Haralds saga Sigurðarsonar. Since he was compiling JS in the fourteenth century, HS would have been available to him in a number of recensions. Extant ones include the early-thirteenth-century Msk and Fsk, both of which may have been utilized by Snorri Sturluson in Hkr later in that century. Some of the later manuscripts of Hkr, such as Eirspennill, include interpolations and there are compilations, such as the fourteenth-century Hulda, which combine material from Msk and Hkr. The evidence indicates that the compiler of JS knew HS in more than one of these redactions.

A number of recent scholarly publications hint that students of Old English are coming to believe that knowledge of medieval liturgies might provide keys for unlocking some of the secrets of literary monuments. A prospectus for such pursuits is set out by the Reverend Cyril L. Smetana in a forthcoming article on further ramifications of the use of the homiliary of Paul the Deacon by Ælfric: It has long been recognized that the Anglo-Saxon poets were influenced by the liturgy and that hymns, homilies and antiphons inspired some of the best poetry.

The discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship-burial in the summer of 1939 opened a window on the early Anglo-Saxon world through which we have all since been looking. But the view has inevitably been blurred until now, lacking the precise definition which only the publication of the definitive study could provide. The first of the four volumes of this most eagerly awaited and often anticipated account has now appeared: it is an offering worthy of its subject, comprehensive, generous in detail, splendidly produced.