This volume mostly deals with manuscripts, directly or indirectly. Of outstanding importance is the first ever attempt to list all the surviving manuscripts that were written or owned in Anglo-Saxon England. There are studies of particular manuscripts: three Latin poems are added to the very few known to have been composed in the time of Athelstan the first; the damaged page in the Exeter Book of Old English poetry is made to yield a better text than before; the distinctive sense of scholarship and literary style that went into a late Old English editing of one of King Alfred's prose works is revealed. Another study assembles the widely scattered evidence for slave raiding and slave trading in England from the Anglo-Saxon settlement to the advent of the Normans. Other interpretative contributions examine word order in Beowulf and make further advances in the critical appreciation of The Seafarer.
