Although the classic comparison of monks to bees owes its enduring success chiefly to the Vita S. Antonii, one of the most interesting developments of that simile is found in the prose treatise De uirginitate by Aldhelm of Malmesbury. In his writings, Aldhelm demonstrates familiarity with most of the conventional similes – monks are like bees in their industry, their intelligence, their chastity, and so on – but he also insists that monks are like bees in their ‘voluntary solidarity’ and obedience to leadership. This is a novel claim, one that I will argue Aldhelm makes by introducing a theme known from other Christian (and pagan) literature into his advice to nuns. The present article will describe the traditions incorporated by Aldhelm into his claim that monks, like bees, are obedient to a fault. In this way, this article will offer a broad view of the literary heritage to which Aldhelm's treatise belongs and in which it should be interpreted. This will entail an assessment of which sources Aldhelm likely knew. While this assessment is indebted to the excellent notes by Rudolf Ehwald (as indeed all scholarship subsequent to Ehwald must be),it will not be bound by Ehwald's conclusions. In some instances, I will posit sources not mentioned by, and perhaps not detected by, Ehwald; in others, I will with trepidation suggest refinements to Ehwald's work. It is hoped that on these grounds the article will be useful to students both of late antique monasticism and of Anglo-Saxon England. Since this is the goal of the article, it will be convenient to begin each section with an excerpt from Aldhelm and follow it with the relevant antecedents; each section will then be concluded with a return to Aldhelm; this will allow us to appreciate the distinctiveness of Aldhelm's contribution. The article itself will be concluded with an overview of the comparisons and of the relationship between the earlier writings and Aldhelm's.

Although the lexicon has frequently been used in discussions of the dating of Old English poetry, little attention has been paid to the evidence that poetic simplexes offer. One exception is an article by R. J. Menner, who noted that Beowulf and Genesis A share three poetic words, apart from compounds, that are not found elsewhere: freme ‘good, valiant’, gombe ‘tribute’, and secg ‘sword’. Menner used these words as part of an argument for an early date of Genesis A, an argument which hinged, in part, on lexical similarities between this poem and Beowulf, which he assumed was early. Although such an a priori assumption is no longer possible, evidence provided by the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes is nonetheless useful for demonstrating the presence of a connection between two or more poems. Such a connection may be a matter of date or dialect, or it may indicate that the poems were the products of a single poetic school or subtradition. Unfortunately, we know little, if anything, about poetic subtraditions, and the poetic koiné makes the determination of the dialect of individual poems a complex and subtle matter that requires a much wider variety of evidence than poetic words can provide. However, the limited distribution of certain poetic simplexes can serve as an index of the poetic conservatism of the poems in which these words occur. This conservatism could be due to a number of factors: genre, content (that is, heroic legend vs biblical or hagiographical), style, or date of composition. As will emerge in the course of this discussion, the most straightforward explanation for this conservatism is that the poems which exhibit it were composed earlier than those which do not. Other explanations are, however, possible, and the evidence of poetic words is hardly sufficient by itself to determine the dating of Old English poems. But by focusing on patterns of distribution that centre upon Beowulf, we can examine what certain words may tell us about the conservatism of this poem and of those poems which are connected to it.

The critical history of the Old English charms is replete with examples of scholars claiming that the charms are pagan remnants with a thread-bare Christian garment covering ancient pre-Christian rituals. Other scholars, more interested in combing the charms for magical elements, have viewed them as even more primitive than a pre-Christian religion and have instead treated them as Germanic magic. The first two of three texts found in London, British Library, Royal 12. D. XVII, more commonly known as Bald's Leechbook, certainly do not fit this description. In this manuscript, we find medical referencebooks produced by a team of compilers, perhaps as part of the intellectual renaissance sponsored by King Alfred. Evidence in the manuscript also suggests that the Anglo-Saxons had considerable access to Latin sources of medical learning and also had a well-developed native medical knowledge.

In his discussion of the formal structures characteristic of Ælfric's ‘rhythmical prose’ style, John C. Pope prints the following passage from Ælfric's homily on Cuthbert, calling attention especially to the pointing, given as it appears in Cambridge, University Library, Gg. 3. 28 (?Cerne, s. x/xi):

Ac an ðære fugela. eft fleogende com.

ymbe ðry dagas. þearle dreorig.

fleah to his foton. friðes biddende.

þæt he on ðam lande. lybban moste.

symle unscæððig. and his gefera samod.

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).

The Taunton Fragment (now Taunton, Somerset, Somerset County Record Office, DD/SAS C/1193/77) consists of four leaves containing portions of brief expositions or homilies on the pericopes for four successive Sundays after Pentecost. In the Fragment, brief passages in Latin regularly alternate with the Old English translations of these passages. The manuscript to which the four leaves once belonged was written probably at some point around or after the middle of the eleventh century in an unknown (presumably minor) centre in Anglo-Saxon England. Until recently, the existence of the Taunton leaves had escaped the notice of Anglo-Saxonists; the texts which they contain are printed here for the first time. It will be obvious that eight pages, half of which are in Old English prose, add in no negligible way to the corpus of Old English. Through analysis of the texts in the second part of this article, I hope to show that their contribution to our knowledge of various kinds of literary activity in Anglo-Saxon England is significant indeed, and that the linguistic evidence they present has no parallel elsewhere in the corpus of Old English.

According to the treatise which he presented as a New Year's Gift to King Henry VIII in January 1546, the English antiquary John Leland (c. 1503-52) received ‘a moste gracyouse commyssion’ from the monarch in 1533 ‘to peruse and dylygentlye to searche all the lybraryes of Monasteryes and collegies of thys your noble realme’. As he travelled from monastery to monastery he compiled lists of books, some brief, some considerably more thorough. Leland had a strong interest in pre-Conquest writings and his lists testify both to lost exemplars of known texts and to otherwise unattested writings from the early period. His principles of selection were not always consistent, however, and on occasion he omitted manuscripts of historical or literary interest which he must have seen: in no sense was he setting out to be a cataloguer as such. Ultimately his enterprise was a bibliographical one and he envisaged a volume in four books, De uiris illustribus siue de scriptoribus Britannicis, of which ‘the seconde is from the tyme of Augustyne, unto the aduente of the Normanes’. The original draft of the De uiris illustribus was composed around 1535/6 – it was in part a response to Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia published in Basel by John Bebel in 1534 – but after this burst of activity there was a gap of almost ten years before Leland's next major phase of composition.

This supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), and the two supplements which appeared in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983) and 21 (1992). It contains twenty-nine entries and includes all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions that have come to my notice since the publication of the second supplement. I have personally examined all the existing inscriptions included in this third supplement, with the exception of 233 Sleaford and 240 ‘in deo’ ring, both of which are in private possession.