The northern world of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi

The 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.

The ‘old books of Glastonbury’ and the Muchelney breviary fragment: London, British Library, Additional 56488, fols. i, 1–5

London, British Library, Add. 56488, fols. i, 1–5, is a fragment from a monastic breviary of the first half of the eleventh century, probably made at or for Muchelney Abbey (Somerset). It is here argued on palaeographical, musical and liturgical grounds that this breviary represents a liturgical tradition separate from that of Æthelwold’s network of reformed houses, which imitated the northern French monastery of Corbie. The fragment’s liturgy is based instead on a local ‘secular’ (non-monastic) liturgical tradition that has been minimally supplemented and rearranged to agree with the requirements of the Regula S. Benedicti. The scribe apparently compiled the breviary from several separate exemplars (a collectar, a bible, a homiliary, and what seems to have been a ‘secular’ antiphoner), which may indicate that the liturgy at Muchelney was ‘Benedictinized’ much later than might have been assumed. The same secular tradition seems to be preserved, beneath subsequent layers of modification, in a thirteenth-century Muchelney breviary (London, British Library, Add. 43405–6) and a fifteenth-century ordinal of St Mary’s Abbey, York (Cambridge, St John’s College D. 27). These later sources, while not representing the Benedictine liturgy of the lost ‘old books of Glastonbury’ under Dunstan (as suggested by McLachlan and Tolhurst), are valuable potential witnesses to the otherwise largely unattested Office liturgy used in English minsters before the ‘Benedictine Reform’ of the tenth century.

Sworn swords: the Germanic context of Beowulf 2064, aðsweord

This article argues that the Beowulf-poet’s use of the word aðsweord, usually glossed as ‘sworn oath’ in Beowulf 2064 is a play on the words for oaths (að) and swords (sweord) intended to evoke the difficulty inherent in social mechanisms designed to end cycles of reciprocal violence. By tracing the idea of a ‘sword-oath’ as a means to secure peace through a number of Latin and Norse analogs, this article elucidates an important feature of Beowulf’s rhetoric in his speech to Hygelac’s court, showing how he contrasts his own heroic successes in defeating the Grendelkin with Hrothgar’s failure to cement peace between the Danes and the Heatho-Bards. The article thus offers a structural rationale for the Ingeld episode, which has often seemed repetitious to critics, and illustrates the value of criticism that focuses on the intersection of style, narrative logic and theme in Beowulf.

‘In me porto crucem’: a new light on the lost St Margaret’s crux nigra

St Margaret of Scotland owned a reliquary containing a relic of the True Cross known as crux nigra. Both Turgot, Margaret’s biographer, and Aelred of Rievaulx, who spent some years at the court of Margaret’s son, King David, mention the reliquary without offering sufficient information on its origin. The Black Rood was probably lost or destroyed in the sixteenth century. Some lines written on the margins of a twelfth-century manuscript containing Aelred’s Genealogia regum Anglorum can now shed a new light on this sacred object. The mysterious lines, originally written on the Black Rood or more probably on the casket in which it was contained, claim that the relic once belonged to an Anglo-Saxon king, and at the same time they seem to convey a significant political message.

A fourth supplement to Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions

This fourth supplement brings up to date my Hand-List of Anglo-Saxon Non-Runic Inscriptions (Cambridge, 1971), and the three supplements which appeared in Anglo-Saxon England 11 (1983), 21 (1992) and 33 (2004). This fourth supplement contains twenty-two entries and includes all the Anglo-Saxon non-runic inscriptions that have come to my notice between 2004 and 2017. Wherever possible I have personally examined all the existing inscriptions contained in this supplement. For ease of reference, this supplement follows the same pattern as before: the Entries appear first, with the same layout as before, followed by the Bibliography and Addenda.

St Kenelm, St Melor and Anglo-Breton contact from the tenth to the twelfth centuries

This article discusses the similarity between two apparently unrelated hagiographical texts: Vita et Miracula Kenelmi, composed between 1045 and the 1080s and attributed to Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, and Vita Melori, composed perhaps in the 1060s–1080s but surviving only in a variety of late-medieval versions from England and France. Kenelm was venerated at Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, Melor chiefly at Lanmeur, Finistère. Both saints were reputed to be royal child martyrs, and their Vitae contain a sequence of motifs and miracles so similar that a textual relationship or common oral origin seems a reasonable hypothesis. In order to elucidate this, possible contexts for the composition of Vita Melori are considered, and evidence for the Breton contacts of Goscelin and, earlier, Winchcombe Abbey is investigated. No priority of one Vita over the other can be demonstrated, but their relationship suggests that there was more cultural contact between western Brittany and England from the mid-tenth to the twelfth centuries than emerges overtly in the written record.