Colonizers bring with them their ‘empires of time’, in Anthony Aveni's evocative phrase; along with new laws, new configurations of power, and new economic relationships, colonization often involves the imposition of a new temporal discipline. The British, for example, began building clock towers in India shortly after the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. These were meant to remind the natives of the power of the British Empire and to instill in them the Victorian virtue of punctuality; they were symbols of British authority and admonishments to the natives whose non-British sense of time led them to be characterized as lazy or morally deficient. The clock towers, some of which drew violent protest and vandalism, have been described as a kind of ‘reverse Panopticon’, asserting authority by pulling the gaze of others inward. The same description might apply to any tool imposed upon a population to discipline and constrain the inner life of its members, from new dress codes to new calendars.

In a broadly similar, though presumably less violent way, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity introduced the need for and the possibility of a new precision in time measurement and temporal observance, just as it introduced new social hierarchies, new centers of power and authority, and new standards of learning. The agrarian society of the early Anglo-Saxons was built around families, tribes, and land; their experience of time would have been determined by the rhythms of this way of life: planting and harvesting, calving and milking and slaughtering, winter and summer, the tides at sea, sunrise and sunset. The structure of daily life for farmers, herders, seafarers, and craftspeople would have followed the contours of these rhythms of nature; their larger sense of time would have arisen from long observation of the motion of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky.

To be sure, the church was also part of this agrarian world and equally subject to the rhythms of nature. But Christian observance required a qualitatively different experience of time, one dependent on social context rather than the natural environment. Christian time is a complex network of interlocking daily, weekly, and annual cycles, the sanctorale with its commemorations, the temporale with its great observances of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost, all superimposed on the natural rhythms of the day, month, and year.

None of the practices by which modern science defines itself – the collection of empirical data, the formulation of explanatory hypotheses, rigorous testing, replicable experiments – existed in any systematic form in early medieval England. There was no scientific community founded on these shared principles and no institutional structure dedicated to ‘science’ that certified its practitioners and upheld its standards. The philosophical postulates on which post-Newtonian science rests, such as the assumption that physical laws are uniform and consistent across time and space, were not formulated and would not necessarily have been accepted. Neither the empiricism of Aristotelian natural science nor the methods of Euclidean geometry – the reduction of the irregular realia of experience to a brilliantly clear chain of axioms, postulates and proofs – was available to the Anglo-Saxons. For these reasons most histories of science, tracing the roots of a modern idea, pass quickly over a period so apparently alien to their interests.

And yet the mental habits on which science depends – curiosity, speculation, the trial-and-error of experimentation, the application of experiential knowledge to the manipulation of the material world – certainly existed in Anglo-Saxon England, as they have existed in most times and places. If scientific texts were generally scarce, traditional knowledge and skills were plentiful. Whatever skills and knowledge individuals may have possessed, improved and transmitted, however – in agriculture, engineering, metallurgy, astronomy or physiology – do not seem to have existed within a theoretical framework, or rather their theoretical framework was not generally an object of inquiry in itself. Much of this knowledge served as a means to a practical end – how to build, grow, cure, tell time; it might be characterized as craft rather than science, ‘knowing how’ rather than ‘knowing why’ or ‘knowing about’. The separation of craft and industry from the centres of education and the learned traditions where classical texts were known foreclosed one of the most fruitful venues of exchange for the development of a scientific method in later centuries.

The texts known to Anglo-Saxon studies as ‘prognostics’ comprise, by scholarly consensus, approximately forty to fifty items of various lengths in Latin and Old English. They are a diverse and somewhat loosely defined group, including such things as predictions based on the day of the week on which something occurs, predictions based on natural phenomena such as thunder or wind, lists of lucky and unlucky days in the year (sometimes called ‘Egyptian’ days), lunaria or calendars for the lunar month listing good and bad days for illness, bloodletting, childbirth, or the interpretation of dreams, alphabetical lists giving the meaning of objects seen in dreams (the Somniale Danielis), and numerological devices for predicting the outcome of an illness. Prognostics differ from most later systems used to obtain knowledge of future events in the fact that they are calendrical rather than astrological—that is, their predictions are derived not by calculating the positions and influences of the stars and planets but by observing the cycles of days, months, and years.

While prognostication or prediction appears to be a universal human activity found in virtually all cultures, surviving Anglo-Saxon texts labeled ‘prognostics’ derive from continental Latin sources rather than native Germanic traditions; they are in that sense works of science and learning rather than folklore or popular belief. It is generally thought that prognostics originated in a late-classical Hellenistic milieu; most of the texts represented in T are found in Greek versions, but since these versions are often later than the earliest surviving Latin copies, one can only presume that the texts were translated from Greek into Latin and not vice versa.

London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, an eleventh-century manuscript miscellany from Christ Church, Canterbury, has attracted the notice of many scholars, most of whom have been drawn to the series of texts at the beginning of the manuscript (fols. 117–73 and 2–27), including two impressive full-page drawings and glossed copies of the Benedictine Rule and the Regularis Concordia. Helmut Gneuss describes this carefully presented series of interrelated texts as ‘a compendium of the Benedictine reform movements in Carolingian Francia and in tenth-century England’; Robert Deshman has argued that the very sequence of texts is ‘laden with meaning’. Few studies, however, have looked in detail at the series of eighteen prognostic texts which follow the Regularis Concordia in the manuscript (fols. 27v–47r), even though most of these are in the same hand and appear to have been arranged with equal care. This book presents a critical edition and study of these texts, as well as four related texts on 65r.

Prognostics have generally been regarded as texts on the cultural periphery, either a kind of popular folklore or learned pseudo-science, out of place in the monastic culture in which they circulated and of only marginal importance to the histories of the various disciplines—medicine, astronomy, computus—among whose texts they are preserved and with which they share a common purpose. Consequently there has been little study either of the transmission and textual histories of individual texts or of the cultural and intellectual contexts in which these texts were read and used.