The fifth-century Italian manuscript of Jerome's Commentary on Ecclesiastes, Würzburg, Universitätsbibliothek, M. p. th. q. 2, which M. Adriaen takes as the base of his recent edition, is interesting to English scholars on various counts. On ir it bears a very early Old English inscription, in Anglo-Saxon majuscule which Lowe and Bischoff date c. 700:

Cuthsuuithae. boec.

thaerae abbatissan.

(‘a book of Cuthswith the abbess’). In all probability this was written in England itself rather than at an Anglo-Saxon centre on the continent, in view of the chronology of the English missions. The commentary is in ‘a beautiful bold uncial of the oldest type’, but six leaves of the manuscript's original 114 (fols. 10, 13, 63, 68, 81 and 82) were replaced by leaves of a thicker parchment, in England according to Lowe and Bischoff. It is not known why this was necessary, nor where the text was taken from. Lowe dates the writing of these later leaves to the seventh century. He observes that they were ‘written, if one may judge from the syllable-by-syllable copying, by a scribe for whom Latin was an alien tongue and who was not completely sure of his uncial characters’. D. H. Wright remarks that their example of an English scribe ‘doing his unequal best to reproduce the unfamiliar letter forms’ is not a very helpful illustration of the relationship of English uncial to Italian models, ‘for the script he writes has no style of its own, and therefore no future’. The main interest of the manuscript in the history of English uncial is as an illustration of foreign models which were available; it is, in Lowe's words, ‘the oldest extant uncial manuscript that was at hand to serve as a model in an English scriptorium’.

This collection of Old English royal records is found in four manuscripts: London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian B. vi; London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, vol. 1; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 183; and Rochester, Cathedral Library, A. 3. 5. The present paper aims both to provide an accurate, accessible edition of the texts in the first three of these manuscripts and to discuss the development of the collection from its origin to the stages represented by the extant versions. We owe to Kenneth Sisam most of our knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Saxon genealogies. Although his closely argued discussion remains the basis for any approach to these sources, it lacks the essential aid to comprehension, the texts themselves. It is perhaps this omission, as much as the difficulty of the subject and the undoubted accuracy of many of his conclusions, that has occasioned the neglect from which the texts have suffered in recent years.

Two major concerns of recent Beowulf criticism have been (1) to establish the extent to which the poet used his pagan heroic narrative to shadow forth Christian meaning and (2) to establish the exact attitude of the poet towards his hero and towards the social institutions and mores of his hero's day – which, as we know, was several centuries before the poet's own. A nexus of such considerations has been the last word of the poem, lofgeornost: in the concluding lines the poet reports that the mourning Geats said that

…he wære wyruldcyning[a]

manna mildust ond mon(ðw)ærust,

leodum liðost ond lofgeornost. (3180–2)

There have been arguments on the basis of other contextual uses of lofgeorn that this word for ‘most eager for praise’ must have an unfavourable connotation here in Beowulf and hence carry the implication of a moral flaw in the hero, though these arguments have not, in my opinion, been convincing. But even if we accept a favourable connotation in this instance, since Beowulf's warriors would hardly be speaking ill of their fallen chieftain during his funeral rites, we still have the problem of deciding whether the poet himself was being sympathetic towards the warriors' view, or whether he was taking an ironic stance or attitude towards that praise from his undeniably Christian outlook.

There is a well-known resemblance between the heroic behaviour described in the Germania and in The Battle of Maldon: in his account of the martial code of honour of the Germanic tribes Tacitus says, ‘ Iam vero infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo ex acie recessisse’, whilst in Maldon the poet has the followers of Byrhtnoth affirm one after the other that it would be a disgrace to leave the battlefield now that their lord lies dead. For a long time it was assumed that this resemblance reflected historical fact, ties of loyalty and heroic aspirations having remained unchanged over 900 years. A more plausible modification of this view has been that, whilst the society of the tribes in first-century Germany had to be firmly distinguished from that of the Anglo-Saxons in tenth-century England, Old English poetry archaically preserved some of the ideals of conduct that characterized a much earlier form of society. But more recently still the harking back to Tacitus by students of Anglo-Saxon history and literature has been shown to be fallacious, originating in the ethnic romanticism of German scholars in the late nineteenth century. Nevertheless the long-standing view that there is a particular resemblance between the Germania and The Battle of Maldon cannot be lightly abandoned. Indeed the more one becomes aware that there is no evidence that the obligation of a retainer to die with his lord was a pervasive ideal in Germanic society which could well have lived on into tenth-century English life or literature, the more striking and curious the resemblance becomes. My aims in the present article are first to demonstrate the apparently total lack of historical or literary–historical continuity between the Germania and Maldon and second, nevertheless, to seek an explanation for a resemblance which is too remarkable to be dismissed as pure chance.

A writer can put direct speech into the mouths of the characters within his story or he can report their speech indirectly, and his use of different methods of presenting or suggesting their speech is one of his most potent means of creating characterization and of controlling the effect of his story. In general the character who is given direct speech is more dramatically effective, more ‘real’, than the one who is represented through indirect speech; on the other hand, the many gradations within the broad category of ‘indirect speech’ allow the writer much more scope in the variety of function and the subtlety of effect that can be created. This is as true of early writers as of the modern novelist, and Ælfric is one who was clearly aware of the potentiality of both direct and indirect speech in reinforcing the message which he wished to bring home to his audience. This can be illustrated especially well from the saints' lives which he derived from Bede, where the source is more exactly known than it usually is and where comparison is possible not only with the Latin but also with the earlier Old English translation.

Several studies in recent years have contributed to the discovery that the early-sixth-century sermons of Caesarius of Arles had considerably more influence on Old English literature than had been realized. The extent of that influence may not be fully apparent even now, partly because many of the recent studies discuss examples in isolation, each in its own context, and partly because many of the earlier studies cited certain anonymous Latin sermons which have been only later identified as the work of Caesarius. My aim here is to offer new evidence for Caesarius's influence on five Old English texts and to recapitulate the evidence for his influence upon the corpus of Old English literature as a whole.

I list newly found additional leaves of six manuscripts already described in 1957 (12, 73, 79, 81, 139 and 332). New leaves of 12 were to be expected: probably there are still more to find. The other five are all ‘principal manuscripts’ (Catalogue, pp. xv–xix), but the new leaves of 139 do not contain any English. 73, 79 and 81 are binding fragments: new fragments like this are likely to turn up from time to time. On the other hand the new leaf of 332, also a binding fragment, is a surprise. How does it come to be associated with a leaf of 73 inside a binding made not earlier than 1636? Were these leaves taken over from an earlier binding, the work of the binder of SP. 4 and SP. 260 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, who used the strips of 73 now at Corpus (Catalogue, p. 122) ? And does 332 have some connection with Archbishop Parker? Neither supposition presents difficulty. 332 remained at Worcester until the seventeenth century, but it is more than likely that John Joscelyn, Parker's Latin secretary, examined it at Worcester (cf. Catalogue, p. lii). Did he excise the leaves containing this sermon for the common of a confessor and convey them to Parker and were they then abandoned as being mere duplicates of what Parker already had in 41 and 43?

Junius II in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, is the only one of the four principal manuscripts of Old English poetry to be illustrated. The pictures are important not only because they form one of the most extensive sets of Genesis illustrations of the early Middle Ages but also because the text which they illustrate is a composite one, 600 lines of which were translated into Old English from an Old Saxon poem probably of the second quarter of the ninth century. By tracing the sources of these illustrations one can throw light on the history and transmission of the text as well as on the history of manuscript art in the late Anglo-Saxon period.

The Parker manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 173, is generally recognized to be the earliest surviving copy of the compilation known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It cannot be the original since it contains various scribal errors including dislocation in the chronology, yet its physical characteristics reflect all the major divisions in the text recognized by modern scholars: it seems to reflect the nature and sometimes even the format of the various exemplars from which it was copied. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to these and other palaeographical features and to survey some of the questions arising from them.

This discussion of Anglo-Saxon coinage attempts to look beyond the detail of numismatic classification in order to consider the relationship between the underlying variations and the economic life of the times. Those parts of it which deal with the classification of the coinage and analyse the observed metrology are intended to be a critical summary of the numismatic research carried out in the past thirty years. Other parts, in which I seek to relate the metrology to such documentary evidence as is known to me – and thus trespass across the vague dividing line between numismatics, of which I have some knowledge, and economic history, of which I have little – are aimed at stimulating awareness and discussion of the problems involved. Finally, a section is devoted to numismatic methods because it is important that their use and limitations be generally understood.

When this article appears, a decade will have passed since the publication of Continuations and Beginnings, edited by E. G. Stanley, a collection of studies in Old English literature, three of which deal with aspects of Old English prose. Each of these essays is a superb and expert summary of recent scholarship by someone who has made major contributions in this field; and they may, therefore, serve as an approximate terminus a quo for main sections of the present survey of the état des questions which are of current concern in the study of Old English prose. One hears from time to time more-or-less facetious attempts at explication of the title Continuations and Beginnings and I hope not to have compounded an issue by playing on that heading myself. I take Stanley to have meant that the essays he edited are intended both as summaries of the achievements of English philologists who studied the prose of the Anglo-Saxons in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and as pointers to newer trends. By my title I mean to convey that I am concerned here primarily with current trends.