Of all the services held in a saint's honour in the course of his or her feast-day, mass was the most important: and central to the mass were the prayers invoking the saint's intercession said by the celebrant. Together with the canon, these ‘proper’ prayers – by the ninth century normally a collect (collecta), secret (super oblata or secreta), preface (prefatio) and postcommunion (ad complendum or postcommunio) – formed the backbone around which chant and readings were arranged, and they were gathered together in the sacramentary, the book used by the celebrant alone. Further forms might be provided as ‘alternatives’ (aliae orationes); for the conclusion of mass (super populum); and occasionally, for vespers of the day before the feast and of the feast itself (ad vesperas), but generally speaking, these are rare. As ‘informal’ cults became formal, or prize relics came to hand, so the need for new suites of prayers arose. These could be composed afresh, ‘borrowed’ from existing saints' masses (an easy option, necessitating little more than the insertion of the new saint's name in the relevant prayers); or if the precentor's creative powers failed him completely, they could be taken from the ‘commons’, that is, from the series of ready-made masses contained in almost every medieval sacramentary or missal for a ‘confessor’, a ‘martyr’ or a ‘virgin’, and so on. Some houses attracted the services of gifted writers; other seem not to have been so fortunate. It is my intention to analyse here the genesis and dissemination of a mass from a house of the former class which throws interesting light on the liturgical links between England and the Continent in the eighth century.

The episode of Beowulf's fight with Grendel is followed almost immediately by brief accounts of two very different heroic careers – those of Sigemund and of Heremod – sung by a minstrel-thegn of Hrothgar, apparently in praise of the hero, as the celebrating Danes race their horses back from Grendel's mere. This narrative sequence invites us to contextualize Beowulf's first great exploit in a broader frame, but the poet does not make explicit the precise nature of the comparisons between these three figures. The critics, however, have broadly agreed that the link with Sigemund compliments Beowulf, whilst the parallel with Heremod contrasts with the hero and with Sigemund. E. G. Stanley comments that the poet ‘perhaps … perceives the hero of his poem at this point as being all that, in descriptions known to him, made Sigemund glorious and all that Heremod was not’. F. C. Robinson agrees that the meaning of this section ‘is never spelled out, but the implication is clear: Beowulf is like Sigemund, unlike Heremod’. The contrast between the ‘sustained heroic exploits’ of Sigemund and the downfall of Heremod is, for R. E. Kaske,. ‘the basic theme of the whole Sigemund-Heremod passage’, and this interpretation is, he thinks, ‘hardly open to question’. The purpose of this article is to re-open the question of the nature of the relationship between Sigemund and Beowulf.

When Old English studies were in their infancy in the seventeenth century, scholars such as Franciscus junius (1591–1677) had very little to study in print. With no grammar and no dictionary (until Somner's in 1659) they had to teach themselves the language from original sources. Junius, whose interest in Germanic studies became active in the early 1650s, was so proficient, not only at Old English, but also at the cognate languages that he became virtually the founding-father of Germanic philology. Over the years Junius made transcripts in his own distinctive imitation-Anglo-Saxon minuscule script of many Old English texts, transcripts that have subsequently proved invaluable, especially where the original manuscripts have been damaged or lost.

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.

Old English prefixed verbs are numerous. At times prefixes are used to convey different shades of meaning, but often the meanings seem, in context, not to convey definite distinctions in sense. Prefixes and prefixed verbs must have been important in Old English, judging from their numbers and morphological distinctions, but most prefixes had adverbial and/or prepositional counter-parts, and verbs with adverbs or prepositional phrases (whether preposed or postposed to verbs) could be used alongside prefixed verbs.

When writing about the tenth-century ecclesiastical reform in England thirteen years ago, Eric John rightly pointed out that ‘the tenth and early eleventh centuries are the least studied and most taken for granted periods of both English and Continental history’. But today, this contention is no longer true: investigation into different aspects of the monastic revival has resulted in a considerable number of special publications. In particular, the millennial celebrations marking the deaths of the leading reformers, Æthelwold (d. 984), Dunstan (d. 988) and Oswald (d. 992), have been accompanied by a reassessment of their activities and achievements, the fruits of which are assembled in three collections of essays by experts in a variety of fields. The renewed interest in the reform era has naturally drawn scholarly attention to the primary sources which provide first-hand information about the thought, aims and strategies of the reformers. Among such documents, the Regularis Concordia (henceforth RC) plays a major part as an object of historical and liturgical research; besides, it has turned out in recent years that the Latin text and especially the Old English interlinear gloss of the consuetudinary also offer important material for the philologist and the historical linguist.

The work entitled Libellus quorundam insignium operum beati Æthelwoldi episcopi, in both of the manuscripts in which it is preserved as an independent text, is an account of how the endowment of Ely Abbey was accumulated in the years following the refoundation of the abbey in 970, and how it was defended in the difficult times which followed the death of King Edgar in 975. The Libellus was produced by an Ely monk writing early in the twelfth century, who says in the prologue to the work (LE, Appendix A) that Hervey, first bishop of Ely (1108–31), suggested to him the project of translating into Latin certain vernacular records concerning Æthelwold, bishop of Winchester (963–84), the founder of the monastery, to supplement the vita composed by Wulfstan Cantor. The text includes verses in praise of Æthelwold, and in praise of the village of Downham: similarities in vocabulary and metre to a metrical vita of St Æthelthryth composed by a monk of Ely called Gregory, also during the time of Bishop Hervey, suggest that the author of the Libellus was probably the same man. The Libellus has long been known as a work in its own right, but it has been printed as such only once, over 300 years ago, and it has been accessible to scholarship primarily in the form in which it was incorporated into bk II of the twelfth-century history of Ely Abbey known as Liber Eliensis, whose compiler used it as the basis for his own account of the refoundation of the abbey and its fortunes during the succeeding decades.

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 303 (hereafter CCCC 303) is an extensive mid-twelfth-century vernacular manuscript produced at Rochester from a variety of Old English source materials. According to the medieval foliation, forty-four leaves are missing at the beginning of the codex and an indeterminate number at the end. As extant, CCCC 303 comprises seventy-three texts which are arranged according to the Temporale and Sanctorale for the church year (the first complete homily is for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany), thus showing that an initial plan of the contents was decided upon by a compiler. Godden distinguishes five groups of texts in all, the last such group being relevant here. This final portion of the manuscript (pp. 290–362, from the middle of quire 19 to the end of the final quire 23) contains twelve texts designated by Godden as ‘Miscellaneous items, mainly by Ælfric’. The first nine of these ‘miscellaneous items’, however, seem to be linked by their suitability for the Lenten period and their emphasis on sin, repentance and prayer. It is within this part of the codex, at pp. 338–9 (between the Ælfric texts De oratione Moysi in media Quadragesima and Quomodo Acitofel 7 multi alii laqueo se suspenderunt), that the Latin formula for excommunication and a unique Old English parallel text are copied as the eighth item in this particular group.

St Anskar, a monk of Corbie and Corvey, is often referred to as the ‘Apostle of the North’. In 826 he was attached to the retinue of Harald, king of Denmark, upon the king's baptism at the court of Louis the Pious; Anskar was sent to evangelize first the Danes, who were an increasing threat to the northern border of the Empire, and then the Swedes of the Mälar region, whose rulers may have hoped for imperial favour. If the mission of Anskar and his immediate successors had significant and enduring effects beyond his death in 865, however, they have so far failed to make themselves known to historians. The see of Hamburg-Bremen, of which Anskar was the first archbishop, had indeed been given responsibility for the northern mission-field, and successive popes renewed their theoretical support for this goal; but activity, let alone success, was not conspicuous for many years thereafter. The conversion of the Scandinavian peoples had to wait, and when it came the impetus was not from Hamburg-Bremen alone. Rather, the story of the Christianization of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the later tenth century through the eleventh is one with a significantly English cast and an English script, although the German church – and maybe others – never quite withdrew from the stage. Scandinavian historians have long been concerned with this missionary activity of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, but it has attracted undeservedly less interest and attention on this side of the North Sea.

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.