TWO SCRAPS OF parchment, each about 3½ inches long and an inch high (90 × 23mm and 95 × 22mm respectively), were presented publicly for the first and perhaps last time as Lot 1 at an auction at Sotheby's in London on July 8, 2014. They were described as
The West Saxon Gospels, two fragments from a gospel book, in Anglo-Saxon, manuscript on vellum [England (probably south-west England), second half of the Tenth Century (c. 960–80)]
One fragment has parts of John 8:52–53 on the recto:3
ne bið he næfre dead;
[Cwyst þu þæt þu sy mærra þon]ne ure fæder Abraham.
[…he will never be dead; / Are you saying that you are greater than our father Abraham?]
And part of John 9:2 on the verso:
leorningcnihtas hine a[xodon 7 cwædon; Lareow. hwæt syngode]
þes oððe his magas þæ[t]
[…disciples asked him and said, ‘Teacher, who sinned, / this one or his parents, that…’].
The second fragment, in the same hand and ink and approximately the same size, has the remains of a single line from John 8:54 on its recto:
min Fæder is þe me [wuldrað. be þam ge cweðaþ þæt he sy ure god]
[It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say, ‘he is our God’].
The blank space below the line and the somewhat elongated descenders of f, s, and þ indicate that this was the last line on the page; the verso is blank.
The fragments, recently discovered in an unidentified private collection outside the United Kingdom, were reused as endbands in a sixteenth-century English binding; the second fragment is still attached to a scrap of binding with some stitching. The two fragments were sold for £128,500 (about $200,000 at the time) to a private collector in the United States.
These fragments are important for numerous reasons. The first is their rarity. Very few new manuscripts of Old English [hereafter OE] are discovered these days, and still fewer go on the auction block. The Sotheby's fragments may well be the only newly-found OE to emerge for public sale for many years to come. For this reason alone, they are worth close consideration, despite their small size.