scholarly journals The Ely memoranda and the economy of the late Anglo-Saxon fenland

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 333-377 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Naismith
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Record Keeping ◽  
Material Resources

AbstractConsisting of six short Old English texts written in the early eleventh century, the Ely memoranda illustrate how a major and recently refounded Benedictine abbey managed its landed endowment. Two of the memoranda relate to generous help provided by Ely to Thorney, and four concern Ely's own lands. The collection as a whole reveals much about interaction between monasteries, monastic perspectives on material resources and investment in them, the economy of eastern England, and the context of record-keeping. This article offers a new edition and translation of the texts, and surveys the contribution the memoranda make to understanding of cultural and economic history.

scholarly journals The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
pp. 275-305
Author(s):  
Helen Appleton
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Mediterranean

AbstractThe Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi, sometimes known as the Cotton map or Cottoniana, is found on folio 56v of London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v, which dates from the first half of the eleventh century. This unique survivor from the period presents a detailed image of the inhabited world, centred on the Mediterranean. The map’s distinctive cartography, with its emphasis on islands, seas and urban spaces, reflects an Insular, West Saxon geographic imagination. As Evelyn Edson has observed, the mappa mundi appears to be copy of an earlier, larger map. This article argues that the mappa mundi’s focus on urban space, translatio imperii and Scandinavia is reminiscent of the Old English Orosius, and that it originates from a similar milieu. The mappa mundi’s northern perspective, together with its obvious dependence on and emulation of Carolingian cartography, suggest that its lost exemplar originated in the assertive England of the earlier tenth century.

Lists of saints' resting-places in Anglo-Saxon England

1978 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 61-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. W. Rollason
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Scholarly Edition ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
Topographical Feature ◽  
Usual Formula

Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston is the title of a short document in Old English which is extant in two manuscripts, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 201, pp. 149–51, and London, British Library, Stowe 944, 34v–39r. These manuscripts are dated to the middle and the first half of the eleventh century respectively on the evidence of their script. A third copy was once in London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xvii but was destroyed in the fire of 1731. The only scholarly edition is that of Felix Liebermann. The document mentions the resting-places of eighty-nine saints: all but one of these places are in England and all but ten of the saints were active in England. The usual formula is of the type, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Congarus confessor on Cungresbirig’ (37b), but in many cases the place is further defined by reference to some topographical feature, most often a river, as, for example, ‘Ðonne resteð sanctus Iohannes biscop on þare stowe Beferlic, neah þare ea Hul’ (5a).

Reddatur Parentibus: The Vengeance of the Family in Cnut's Homicide Legislation

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Jurasinski
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
The Family ◽  
Ultimate Outcome ◽  
English Law ◽  
One Year

TheAnglo-Saxon Chroniclestates that during his 1018 meeting in Oxford with the leading English ecclesiastical and lay authorities, roughly one year after his accession to the throne in England, Cnut agreed to uphold “the laws of Edgar” during his reign. The ultimate outcome of this and subsequent meetings is the code issued at Winchester in 1020, referred to by editorial convention as I and II Cnut. This code contains, respectively, the religious and secular laws of England promulgated under Cnut. The code is contained in four manuscripts in Old English. The earliest are British Library, Cotton Nero A.i and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 201, both dated to the mid-eleventh century; the latest, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College (CCCC) 383 and British Library, Harley 55, belong to the early twelfth century. Cnut's code reappears in three twelfth-century Norman Latin tracts intended to acquaint French authorities with English law, theInstituta Cnuti, Consiliatio Cnuti, andQuadripartitus. TheLeges Henrici Primi, prepared by the same author as theQuadripartitus, also draws heavily on Cnut's legislation.

The reception of the Latin Life of St Giles in Anglo-Saxon England

2013 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 63-145
Author(s):  
Carmela Vircillo Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Critical Edition ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
Textual Transmission ◽  
New Evidence

AbstractThis article maps the textual transmission of the Vita S. Aegidii to identify the routes of its reception in Anglo-Saxon England. It shows how the Mass of Giles in Leofric's Missal offers new evidence of Leofric's links to the Liège area. The collation between the Old English Life of St Giles and the critical edition of the Latin source indicates first that the Life was translated from a Latin copy related to Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Reginensis 497, containing a palimpsest of the Old English Orosius; second, it highlights the continuing exchanges between the Trier region and England in the eleventh century; and third, it applies inter-lingual transmission in order to understand translation practice. A new edition and translation of the Latin vita are included.

The æecerbot charm and its Christian user

1977 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 213-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas D. Hill
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Old Norse ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
The Rich

The Old English æcerbot charm, whichs is preserved in London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A. vii, in a hand of the first half of the eleventh century, has always attracted a good deal of attention, since it is one of the few surviving texts which unquestionably reflect the influence of Anglo-Saxon paganism – pagan religion, not merely pagan magic, if one can make the distinction. Our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon paganism is so limited, particularly in comparison with the rich corpus of myth and heroic legend preserved in Old Norse-Icelandic, that inevitably scholars give close attention to any text which reveals something of it. So far as the æcerbot charm is concerned, this has meant a preoccupation with distinguishing between pagan elements and Christian accretions. For instance, in Stopford Brooke's translation of lines 30–42 quoted by Storms in his edition, ‘old’ pagan parts of the prayer are printed in italics and ‘new’ Christian ones in roman print. Storms doubts the possibility of drawing a hard and fast line in all cases, but his quite lengthy commentary on the charm as a whole shares the same fundamental concern.

Unfulfilled promise: the rubrics of the Old English prose Genesis

1999 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 111-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin C. Withers
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Formulaic Language ◽  
English Prose ◽  
The People ◽  
Sacred History

The Old English prose Genesis contains a series of innovative rubrics, unparalleled in the Vulgate tradition, which divide the story of Genesis into a series of holy biographies of the patriarchs Noah, Abraham and Joseph. These rubrics, added to the text in the eleventh century, use formulaic language derived from contemporary documents such as Anglo-Saxon wills and thereby regulate how Genesis was to be read and interpreted by an aristocratic layman or novice monk. The rubrics blend ancient Hebrew narratives, stories of the saints and the legal conventions familiar to the reader in order to portray ‘sacred history’ as an unbroken, legally sanctioned inheritance. They emphasize the Covenant of God with Abraham and the people of Israel and assure the contemporary reader that he too will inherit an unfulfilled promise manifested in God's covenant with the patriarchs.

Lapidary traditions in Anglo-Saxon England: part I, the background; the Old English Lapidary

1978 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 9-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Kitson
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Precious Stones

Jewels have always fascinated man. They have been admired simply for their beauty – their depth of colour and their different propensities for catching and reflecting light. The combination of these qualities, rare in nature, has encouraged the attribution to them of many magical and medical powers. The rareness of gems and the distance and inaccessibility of the places from which many are obtained have caused them to figure curiously in legends and travellers' tales. The Anglo-Saxons appreciated the beauty of jewels, as their jewellery shows. Nor were they without interest in precious stones they could not possess; but it has been hard for modern readers to discover what their ideas about them were. The mid-eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, contains what is by common repute the oldest vernacular lapidary in western Europe. No edition has distinguished its sources accurately or analysed the process of its composition. It has been difficult, more generally, to see how the Anglo-Saxons' ideas fitted into those more widely current. There is no reliable published survey of lapidary writings between late antiquity and the late eleventh century.

The Taunton Fragment: a new text from Anglo-Saxon England

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 145-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mechthild Gretsch
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Somerset County ◽  
English Prose ◽  
Linguistic Evidence ◽  
English Translations ◽  
First Time

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.

Wynflæd's wardrobe

1979 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 195-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gale R. Owen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
British Library ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
General Terms ◽  
Relative Value

An Old English document, composed probably in the middle of the tenth century and extant in a not very careful, mutilated, eleventh-century copy, London, British Library, Cotton Charter, VIII, 38, lists the bequests of a woman named Wynflæd. The bequests of clothing in this will are particularly interesting. Anglo-Saxon testaments do not itemize elaborate garments as do some English wills of the later Middle Ages; they refer to clothing only rarely, and then sometimes in general terms. Wynflæd's will is unusual in mentioning several different items of clothing and in specifying them more precisely. Descriptive references to non-military clothing are uncommon in Old English texts generally. Although many garment-names are documented, some which occur only in glossaries or translations from Latin may never have been in common use in England and some words are of uncertain meaning. In most cases the sex of the wearer of a named garment and the relative value of the garment are unknown. The garment-names in Wynflæd's will, by contrast, refer to items of clothing which were certainly worn by women at a known date and were valuable enough to be bequeathed.

Anglo-Saxon Law and Scots Law

2009 ◽  
Vol 88 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Wormald
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Constitutional Development ◽  
Comparable Level ◽  
English Law ◽  
The Way

Patrick Wormald used legal material buried deep in volume i of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland to argue for a comparatively maximalist view of early Scottish royal government. The paper compares this Scottish legal material to two Old English codes to show that there existed in Scotland structures of social organisation similar to that in Anglo-Saxon England and a comparable level of royal control over crime by the early eleventh century. The model of a strong judicial regime in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, put forward fully by Wormald in volume i of The Making of English Law, suggests that the kingdom of the Scots could have been inspired by (or followed a parallel trajectory to) its Anglo-Saxon neighbour in its government's assumption of rights of amendment previously controlled by kin-groups. English influence on Scottish legal and constitutional development can therefore be seen in the tenth and eleventh centuries as much as it can in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The paper also suggests methods of examining the legal material in volume i of the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland and effectively clears the way for further study of this neglected corpus of evidence.

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