The Conspectus

I originally designed the predecessor of this volume (A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960–1100, published in 2012) as a stepping-stone towards a history of late Old English spelling, and as such its scope was limited to manuscripts and documents generally ascribed to the latter half of the tenth century and the entirety of the eleventh. That projected history having now been abandoned, I felt there would be value in expanding the Conspectus by taking the starting date back to the year 700, thereby allowing for the inclusion of around 300 new entries.

For ease of reference, I have retained the layout of the 960–1100 volume, with holding libraries listed alphabetically and individual hands numbered sequentially. To preserve the sequence, new entries have been inserted into the list with a decimal point in the hand number (e.g. 298 Chichester, 298.5 Cologne, 299 Copenhagen). Hand 671 (previously blank) has been added, and hand 1004 has been changed to 1005.2; otherwise, the hand numbers from the 960-1100 volume are unchanged. In places, discontinuous numbering of the decimal points has been used to allow for further additions by future scholars and, particularly in the case of some continental libraries, to allow for future discoveries. Errors that occurred during the composition of the earlier volume have been silently corrected, sporadic instances of English in Latin charters have been noted, and more information regarding facsimiles has been supplied (particularly in relation to the more recent volumes in the Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile series, which have useful bibliographies). ‘App’ before a number in the column listing Ker numbers is now used to signify an entry in his Appendix. In the apparatus, a small number of new entries has been incorporated into the Indices of Names and Places and the Subject Index has also been expanded to accommodate new material. The Appendix to the 2012 volume has been omitted, however, in that it has no bearing on the present work.

Unchanged and unchanging is my debt to Simon Keynes for his assistance with charters, and my appreciation of the unremitting helpfulness and patience shown to me by everyone at Boydell, especially Caroline Palmer. Above all, words cannot convey my gratitude for the help given to me by my son Tim, without whose assistance, when I became too ill for sustained academic work, this project could never have come to fruition.

Shows how scholars can interpret a manuscript from the way in which it is described in a catalogue, with a particular focus on the booklet as the key unit of manuscript production.

This essay is hardly the place to review the enormous impact of speech on the development of mankind. But the importance of writing, a different but ultimately related form of communication, is an appropriate place to begin since anyone reading this chapter must be interested in the history of their forebears of a millennium and more ago, and that history is most fully recorded for us in writing. Writing in the western European alphabets is not only a remarkable human achievement but is, ultimately, a form of cryptography. It is secret, available only to those who have been introduced to its mysteries through some species of instruction. Investigating all of the secrets involved in the process of writing would, however, take many volumes, and I have here only a small space. Consequently I propose to investigate only one form of cryptography within the general cryptography of writing, a secret code used initially by early medieval writers of Latin and transferred from their work to that of writers of English up to the end of the eleventh century. Why they should have used this form of cryptic communication is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is necessary to stress at the outset that their doing so implies a highly sophisticated understanding of the nature of alphabetic writing itself, involving as it does the replacement of a limited number of letters – and only those – in the alphabet as a whole.

There are many forms of the European alphabet but only two, the roman and the runic, are significant in Anglo-Saxon England. Both may have been the vehicle for secret writing. The cryptic runes on one side of the Franks Casket are well known if not fully understood, but this paper does not deal in runic secrets, in fact it ignores runic writing altogether.

This paper is concerned only with secret writing used by scribal hands who wrote English in the roman alphabet up to the beginning of the twelfth century and, appropriately in a volume devoted to a distinguished lexicographer, some of the problems that the compilers of the Dictionary of Old English (DOE) have faced in dealing with them. Seven scribal hands fall into this category, listed below in order of their putative dates