The Old English medical records are rich in materials which contain evidence for contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and other cultures. For example, in 1945 Howard Meroney collected the various loan translations of Irish words found in the medical charms in the Leechbook, Lacnunga and other Old English texts. It is an interesting exercise to speculate on how Irish charms such as these, in Old Irish, got into the Old English medical repertory in their pristine form, whereas most of the Latin medical charms were translated straightway into English. It is customary to suppose that the Anglo-Saxons picked them up from Irish teachers in their monasteries, but there may be other explanations. Recently, while I was reading the Hisperica famina (in Michael Herren's translation), I came across references to young ‘visitors’, students who wandered about the Irish countryside begging for food and shelter among the country people, with whom they had difficulty communicating; as one of them is made to say:

Who will ask these possessors

to grant us their sweet abundance?

For an Ausonian chain binds me;

hence I do not utter good Irish speech.

In a series of sketches by Elizabeth Gaskell, which appeared in Charles Dickens's weekly periodical Household Words between 1851 and 1853, the small Cheshire town of Knutsford was immortalized under the name Cranford. Mrs Gaskell, who had spent most of her childhood in Knutsford, knew the town and its inhabitants intimately and she returned to it as the setting for some of her later works, in which she called it ‘Eccleston’, ‘Dunscombe’ and ‘Hollingford’. Each of these four fictional names is convincing enough as the name of a small provincial town. Three of the names, indeed, are borne by settlements elsewhere in England, and the fourth, ‘Hollingford’, is close enough in form to the genuine names Hollington and Hollingworth to be acceptable. On her marriage, Elizabeth Gaskell had moved from Knutsford to Manchester and she exploited this commercial city, too, as the setting for some of her works. Her first published novel, Mary Barton (1848), actually bore the subtitle ‘A Tale of Manchester Life’, but in later works the city appears under the fictional names ‘Drumble’ and ‘Milton’. Milton is a name which occurs quite frequently in England, although never as the name of a large city. Drumble is an artificial name – presumably a portmanteau word containing the words drear and rumble, which antedates Lewis Carroll's first exploitation of this device in a handwritten version of the poem Jabberwocky from 1855. Elizabeth Gaskell is not the only author to have coined a fictional name for Manchester in the course of time. Charles Dickens referred to it as ‘Coketown’ in Hard Times (1854), for example, and Louis Golding as ‘Doomington’ in Magnolia Street (1931).

It has been customary, since comparative scholarship in the field of Germanic literatures began, to explain perceived similarities between Old English and Old Norse poetry in terms of their derivation from common cultural roots and closely cognate languages. Similarities in the two poetic systems have been regarded as evidence of the conservation of ideas, figures of speech and poetic forms. Such similarities have then been used to reveal what the ‘original’ Germanic customs, ideas and literary expressions might have been before the various tribal groups dispersed to their historical medieval locations. This way of thinking assumes the persistence into early medieval times of archaic modes of thought and expression wherever cultural similarities are perceived. The Old English, Old Norwegian and Icelandic Rune Poems have usually been considered in this light. It is widely accepted that they reflect a shared cultural prototype. Moreover, their texts span a considerable period of time and yet show significant similarities. The Old English Rune Poem has often been compared with its Scandinavian counterparts to reveal older forms of thought. Andreas Heusler offered a fairly typical assessment: ‘Die wenigen Anklänge an die nordischen Reihen … erklären sich unbedenklich aus einer alten Grundform der Wanderungszeit, als Angeln und Nordleute Nachbarn waren.’

England was a wealthy country at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, as P. H. Sawyer has reminded us; wealthy enough to tempt the Vikings to repeated raids and to pay them enormous sums in tribute while still maintaining a prosperous economy. It was also, increasingly, a country whose wealth was expressed in terms of money rather than other kinds of assets. There was an enormous volume of silver coinage in circulation, continually renewed and replaced by a veritable army of moneyers. Rents, taxes and fines were defined in monetary terms and apparently paid in that form, even by the peasantry. In land charters the traditional rhetoric asserting that grants are being made from affection, loyalty, reward for service or piety remains, but increasingly frequent references to sums of money suggest that a market in the buying and selling of land was developing. Archaeological evidence points to a steady shift away from such traditional manifestations of wealth as rings and ornamented swords and towards the expression of wealth in coinage. The growth of an urban society of artisans and traders within the largely defensive structures of the burhs initiated by King Alfred presumably played its part in these developments. All this was a stage in the gradual movement from a society in which wealth had been manifested in land and military equipment, granted to individuals in recognition of service and often held for one lifetime only, to one in which wealth was expressed in terms of money and acquired as a permanent possession through commercial activities; but the effect seems to have been particularly marked in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

St Jerome's third Latin translation of the Sefer Tehillim or ‘Book of Psalms’ is called the iuxta Hebraeos or Hebraicum, because he based it on the original Hebrew in which it was composed in order to obtain the greatest authenticity possible. Preceded by the so-called Romanum version of c. 384, which was primarily a translation of the Greek Septuagint, and the Gallicanum of c.392 which was a revision of it based on Origen's hexaplaric Septuagint text, the Hebraicum version of c. 400 represents an attempt by Jerome to produce a Latin translation as close as possible to the Hebrew text. However, despite its greater accuracy with respect to the Hebrew original, the Hebraicum was apparently never used in the liturgy, and was preserved solely as a patristic text in bibles or psalters for scholarly use.

A commonplace among English historians today is the importance of English ties with Aquitaine during the later Middle Ages. For some three centuries, historical events came to link the destinies of these two countries and peoples who otherwise differed strikingly in economy, language and culture in general, with lasting consequences for both. It has long been taken for granted by both English and French historians that this association came about abruptly in the 1150s as a result of the ascent to the English throne of Henry of Anjou who, through his marriage to Eleanor, heiress of the duchy of Aquitaine, became the sovereign of that enormous territorial principality. Till the present no one has suspected that any significant ties existed between the Anglo-Saxons and Aquitanians prior to that time. To be sure, the Anglo-Saxons had been in contact with the late Carolingian kings in the tenth century and with the Normans in the eleventh, but those were purely northern French phenomena. So too were the important Anglo-Saxon relations with the monks of Fleury-sur-Loire in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, but these were not known to have had any repercussions in Aquitaine far to the south.

The Holme Riddles are a collection of 144 English riddles preserved in London, British Library, Harley 1960. Although the manuscript dates from the mid-seventeenth century, some of these riddles are apparently rooted in ancient Germanic tradition. One of these, an ancient ‘world-riddle’ according to the editor, is a version of the ‘oak-ship’ riddle:

Q. wn j lived j fed the liveing now j am dead j beare the live[in]g & with swift speed j walk our the liveing

A. a ship mad[e] of oake groweing feeds hogs with acorns now b[e]ars men & swims our fishes.

The Old English account of the passion of St Vincent of Saragossa survives only in one late manuscript, Cambridge, University Library, Ii. 1. 33, written in the second half of the twelfth century. This manuscript contains a large proportion of saints' lives by Ælfric, belonging mainly to his two series of Catholic Homilies and his later collection known as the Lives of Saints. The passion of St Vincent, from its alliterative style, reveals itself also to be the work of Ælfric. Since it was appended by W.W. Skeat to his edition of the Lives of Saints, it has generally been treated as part of the Lives of Saints collection, although there is no evidence that Ælfric himself ever added it to that set.

The process through which glossaries came into being can sometimes still be seen and studied in surviving manuscripts, and in such cases it provides a valuable index to the way in which Latin texts were studied in medieval schools. This is the case with an unprinted glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i. The glossary is mainly made up of words taken from bk III of the Bella Parisiacae urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a work which was widely studied in English schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all because of its unusual vocabulary. We know that Abbo drew the unusual vocabulary in his poem from pre-existing glossaries such as the Liber glossarum and the Scholica graecarum glossarum; but he also took from these works the interlinear glosses which he provided for the difficult words in bk III of his poem, and these in turn are found, with little variation, in all of the manuscripts which preserve the poem. Now under the rubric ‘Incipiunt glossae diversae’ in Cotton Domitian i are collected some two hundred lemmata from bk III of the poem, followed in each case by one or more glosses; on examination these glosses are found to be identical with those which accompany the text in other manuscripts. The glossary in Domitian i thus provides a working model of how a glossary was compiled, and is a further witness to the popularity of Abbo's poem in Anglo-Saxon England.

The illustrated manuscripts of later Anglo-Saxon England are justly famed for their beauty. The expense lavished on the most elaborate of them is paralleled in Western Europe at the time only in late-tenth- and eleventh-century Germany. Neither France, Spain nor Italy can offer anything that is comparable to this sustained luxury production. Modern art-historical scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon material has not really attempted to explain this phenomenal industry beyond implying that the vast majority of these books were made in monastic scriptoria and for the use of the church. If this implication is correct, it begs the questions, ‘where did the money come from?’ and ‘whence the desire to spend it in this way?’ Perhaps the questions are not asked because the answers in general terms seem rather obvious. Expenditure on any particular luxury item is usually in part a question of fashion, and fashion in certain circumstances becomes a priority which determines that surplus money is directed towards its indulgence. Doubtless a response along these lines could be fleshed out by a discussion of the sources of income of the Anglo-Saxon church and of its aspirations to conspicuous display. But any exploration of monastic wealth and rivalry for prestige which attempts to explain book production at this period would be based on the assumption, and it is no more than an assumption, that the phenomenon is to be accounted for by ecclesiastical patronage. The arguments brought forward in this paper will be directed towards a different end: that many of the most famous English illuminated books of this period owe their creation to royal money, and that they were produced, sometimes without a particular recipient in mind, to be given as presents which would help cement allegiance to the crown and serve as an indication of the donor's piety. But what is the evidence for this upturn in the production of de luxe manuscripts?

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Archbishop Sigeric of Canterbury went to Rome in 990, to fetch his pallium. Sigeric, formerly a monk of Glastonbury and then abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury, had been consecrated bishop of Ramsbury in 985, and became archbishop of Canterbury at the end of 989 or at the beginning of 990, on the death of Archbishop Æthelgar. During the journey, or more likely, once he had returned to England, he committed to writing a diary covering his journey and his stay in Rome. This year, the 1000th anniversary of Sigeric's visit to the ‘city of St Peter’, as medieval travellers called Rome, seems a suitable time to undertake a new examination of the considerable devotional and artistic impact of the Roman pilgrimage on the cultural and spiritual life of the late Anglo-Saxon Church.