Conclusion

The First Worcester Fragment takes an equally selective view of Ælfric’s career as a leading teacher of the English, again foregrounding his biblical writings rather than his (now) more celebrated Lives of Saints or Catholic Homilies. Joseph Hall suggested that in highlighting Ælfric’s work on the Old English Pentateuch, the poet betrayed his ignorance of his other biblical translations.5 Joseph Hall, Selections from Early Middle English, 1130–1250, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), II, p. 226. S. K. Brehe, on the other hand, acknowledges that the Pentateuch’s concern with ‘the national and spiritual identity of Israel and its people’s struggle against faithlessness and foreign oppression’ fits well with the poem’s own themes.6 Brehe, 531–2. Brehe notes that in referring to Ælfric as Alcuin, the poet did not mistakenly conflate the two figures but rather sought to distinguish Ælfric from his various namesakes and to stress that he translated the Northumbrian-Carolingian scholar’s Quaestiones in Genesim into English (531). Mark Faulkner suggests that this may explain the reference to Bede’s Quæstiones in l. 6, with the poet confusing Bede, Ælfric and Alcuin: A New Literary History of the Long Twelfth Century: Language and Literature between Old and Middle English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 230–1. We have seen in Chapter Three that Ælfric did not, in fact, translate all of the Pentateuch, though he did make substantial contributions to the Old English Genesis and Numbers, as well as composing various other biblical paraphrases, homilies and summaries.7 See above, p. 148 The presence of Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis in the two major manuscripts of the Heptateuch (MS L) and Hexateuch (MS B) may have created the impression that he was responsible for the whole work.

The evidence presented in this book bears out the First Worcester Fragment’s claim that biblical translation and interpretation were key factors in the development of English national identity. From the diverse ethnicities of the multiple eighth-century English kingdoms, Bede drew on his profound knowledge of the Bible to envision a single gens Anglorum (‘English people’), an ‘imagined community’ united by their common Germanic ancestry, language and faith under the rule of a single Archbishop at Canterbury.8 Benedict Anderson coined this term to describe the nation as it developed in the nineteenth century in his influential Imagined Communities. For arguments that locate the development of the nation in the early medieval period, however, with England perhaps the earliest example, see, for example, Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood, and works cited above, p. 20 n. 74. In the late ninth century, King Alfred commissioned translations of the Psalms and parts of the Old and New Law to educate lay readers and thereby restore wisdom and prosperity to the Angelcynn after more than a century of Viking incursions. By the end of the tenth century, the production of a prose translation of the Gospels and the proliferation of vernacular homilies made the core teachings of the New Testament available both for private reading and preaching. Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, in particular, were designed to provide orthodox interpretation of the Gospels for the entire community of English Christians.9 See Wilcox, ‘Ælfric in Dorset’, p. 62; see further above, p. 121. By the turn of the eleventh century, the Old English Heptateuch provided the ruling elite of what was now Englaland with models for understanding their role as protectors of a Christian nation subject to God’s law. Finally, Ælfric’s Treatise delivered a succinct overview of the entire Bible and a guide to its meaning for the benefit of a broad community of English lay and clerical readers.

Despite the First Worcester Fragment poet’s claim that this rich corpus of vernacular biblical writing has been lost due to the arrival of ‘another people’ (oþre leoden, l. 13), recent scholarship has emphasised the continuing use of Old English texts after the Conquest.10 On Old English after the Conquest in general, see Elaine Treharne, Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Faulkner, Long Twelfth Century. On the continuing use and influence of the Old English biblical translations, see esp. Marsden, ‘Cain’s Face, and Other Problems’; and Elizabeth Solopova, ‘From Bede to Wyclif: The Knowledge of Old English within the Context of Late Middle English Biblical Translation and Beyond’, RES 71 (2020), 805–27. Indeed, not only Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies but also many of the other examples of Old English biblical prose discussed in this book remained in circulation long after 1066. For example, the twelfth-century Eadwine or Canterbury Psalter presents the text of all three of Jerome’s Latin psalters (the Romanum, the Gallicanum and the Hebraicum), with interlinear glosses supplied in both Old English – following the tradition of the Vespasian and Cambridge psalters discussed in Chapter One – and Anglo-Norman, framed by the Latin Glossa Ordinaria.11 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.17.1; see Mark Faulkner, ‘The Eadwine Psalter and Twelfth-Century English Vernacular Literary Culture’, in Psalms and Medieval English, ed. Atkin and Leneghan, pp. 72–106. As we have seen, several manuscripts of the Wessex Gospels date from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, indicating ongoing scholarly interest in this major work of Old English biblical prose.12 See above, p. 91 n. 38. See further Roy M. Liuzza, ‘Scribal Habit: The Evidence of the Old English Gospels’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Mary Swan and Elaine M. Treharne, CSASE 30 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), pp. 143–65. Moreover, the Old English ‘Pentateuch’ that the First Worcester Fragment poet attributes to Ælfric was itself read and studied well into the post-Conquest period: a twelfth-century interlinear Latin gloss appears in sections of Laud Misc. 509 (‘the Heptateuch’), occasionally supplying the missing Latin text for biblical passages omitted or summarised in the Old English,13 See above, pp. 145 n. 3, 162–3. while more glosses were added to the codex by various thirteenth- or fourteenth-century readers, including the latter sections where the Letter to Wulfgeat and the Treatise are copied.14 Solopova, ‘From Bede to Wyclif’, 814–15. Mark Faulkner has recently emphasised that excerpts from the Heptateuch were incorporated into twelfth- or thirteenth-century homiliaries (Long Twelfth Century, pp. 230–1). Faulkner notes that Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis and his translation of Gen. 1–24.22 are copied in a twelfth-century homiliary, Cambridge, University Library, MS Ii. 1. 33, fols 2–24v (Ker §18), while two apothegms from Deut. 18.11–12, possibly derived from the same source, are included in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS. R. 9. 17 (819), fol. 48v (Ker §89) (Long Twelfth Century, p. 230 n. 15). Finally, the post-Conquest use of Ælfric’s Treatise is demonstrated by the survival of a truncated version, shorn of its epistolary opening and the New Testament summary, in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 343, an important collection of mostly Ælfrician and Wulfstanian homilies copied in the second half of the twelfth century.15 For full description of the manuscript, see Susan Irvine, ed., Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343, EETS o.s. 302 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Irvine edits seven Old English homilies contained in this manuscript, four of them by Ælfric, but does not include the Treatise in her edition. Evidently, the Treatise was still regarded as a valuable guide to the Old Testament long after it had fulfilled its original purpose as an overview of the entire Bible for poorly educated early eleventh-century readers.16 Ker §310; the Treatise is copied on fols 129r–132r as the first item in section F, where it is succeeded by a sermon by Wulfstan on baptism. Susan Irvine describes the items in this section of the codex as ‘a miscellany of religious pieces with no apparent pattern in their arrangement’ (Old English Homilies from MS Bodley 343, p. xlvi). See further Susan Irvine, ‘The Compilation and Use of Manuscripts containing Old English in the Twelfth Century’, in Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, ed. Swan and Treharne, pp. 55–60.

The translation, adaptation and interpretation of Scripture into English continued in the centuries following the Conquest, though verse had once more become the medium of choice.17 On the preference for verse over prose as a medium for biblical translation in early Old English (i.e. before the age of Alfred), see above, pp. 13–16, 20 Notably, in the mid-twelfth-century, the Augustinian Friar Orm produced his Ormulum, a long series of verse homilies that follows the cycle of the liturgical calendar in the manner of Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies and includes translations of gospel pericopes as well as parts of Acts.18 Nils-Lennart Johannesson and Andrew Cooper, eds, The Ormulum, EETS o.s. 360, 361 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022–3). The single manuscript copy of the Ormulum, Oxford Bodleian Library MS Junius 1, written in Orm’s own hand, features a simplified spelling system designed for the use of Anglo-Norman speaking priests who were required to preach to their congregations in English.19 Another important English verse translation of Scripture from this period is the Middle English Metrical Psalter (also known as the Surtees Psalter) (c. 1300). For this and other Middle English psalm translations and adaptations, see Francis Leneghan, ‘Introduction: A Case Study of Psalm 50.1-3 in Old and Middle English’, in Psalms and Medieval English, ed. Atkin and Leneghan, pp. 1–33, at 16–23. The impact of Old English biblical prose after the Conquest is also evident in the emergence of vernacular biblical writing in the French of England: the earliest French-language psalter is The Oxford Psalter, a prose translation of Jerome’s Gallican Psalter made by the mid-twelfth century.

It was not until the fourteenth century, with the appearance of first the Middle English Glossed Prose Psalter and Richard Rolle’s English Psalter and then the Wycliffite Bible, the first complete English Bible, that English prose once more became a major vehicle for biblical translation.20 See Annie Sutherland, English Psalms in the Middle Ages, 1300–1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Significantly, the authors of the General Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible invoke the figures of Bede and King Alfred as precedents for their project:

The precedent of Old English biblical translation would again be invoked in the Tudor period, this time in support of the Protestant cause. In 1528, William Tyndale defended his translation of the Bible by claiming that King Æthelstan (r. 924–39), rather than his grandfather Alfred, caused the holy scripture to be translated into the tongue that then was in England, citing the evidence of unspecified chronicles.24 William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), ed. David Daniell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000), p. 19. See further Sarah Foot, Æthelstan: The First King of England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 233, 237. Tyndale may have had access to the lost life of Æthelstan that was known to William of Malmesbury; see Matthew Firth, ‘Constructing a King: William of Malmesbury and the Life of Æthelstan’, Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association 13 (2017), 69–82. Following Archbishop Parker’s rediscovery of the Wessex Gospels, John Foxe presented Queen Elizabeth I with a printed edition of this work in 1571; the framing of the Old English text with the 1568 Bishop’s Bible implies the continuity of English biblical translation over the centuries. Foxe explains in his preface that, contrary to the claims of some of his contemporaries who view it as dangerous to haue them [i.e. the Scriptures] in our popular language translated, there is ample proof that the Bible was translated into English long before the Conquest. Foxe cites the examples of Bede, who did translate the whole Bible in the Saxon tongue, and Alfred, who translated both the olde Testament and the new into his own natiue language.25 John Foxe, ed., The Gospels of the fower Evangelistes translated in the olde Saxons tyme out of Latin into the vulgare toung of the Saxons, newly collected out of Auncient Monumentes of the sayd Saxons, and now published for testimonie of the same (London: John Daye, 1571). Like William of Malmesbury, Foxe also attributes translations of Bede, Gregory and Orosius to Alfred. See further Hugh Magennis, ‘Not Angles but Anglicans? Reformation and Post-Reformation Perspectives on the Anglo-Saxon Church, Part I: Bede, Ælfric and the Anglo-Saxon Church in Early Modern England’, ES 96 (2015), 243–63. Addressing his own royal patron, Foxe credits King Alfred not only with the Wessex Gospels but with the translation of aboue a large hundred of learned homelies for regular use in the English church, seemingly conflating him with Ælfric:26 On Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, see above, pp. 119–44.

Old English biblical prose was continually cited by scholars in the post-Reformation period in support of claims for the antiquity of the English church and language. Hence, when William l’Isle printed Ælfric’s Treatise in 1623, he described the work as an ancient monument of the Church of England,29 William L’Isle, ed., A Saxon Treatise Concerning the Old and New Testament. Written about the Time of King Edgar (700 Yeares Agoe) by Ælfricus Abbas (London: John Haviland, 1623). while in 1715 Elizabeth Elstob defended the publication of her Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue, the first modern English grammar of Old English, against the criticisms of scholars such as Jonathan Swift with the following rejoinder:

As this brief overview demonstrates, Old English biblical prose would continue to shape debates about the nature of the English language, Church and nation centuries after the Conquest. Although the fashion for translating the Bible into English prose that began under Alfred in the late ninth century had already begun to wane by the mid-eleventh century, the cultural memory of this practice endured and came to serve as an inspiration for subsequent generations. While it might be tempting to attribute this long hiatus in the production of English biblical prose entirely to the events of 1066, this book has argued that other factors were involved, notably the resistance of influential figures such as Ælfric to the entire project of making the Bible available to a wide swathe of English readers.

The works of Old English biblical prose discussed in this book served a variety of purposes which determined their shape and form. Though not strictly speaking prose, interlinear glosses provided an impetus to meditation and language acquisition for monastic readers, serving as a guide to the meaning of the Latin text of the Vulgate. Free-standing prose translations, such as the Alfredian Prose Psalms and Mosaic Prologue to the Domboc, the Wessex Gospels and Heptateuch, as well as the gospel pericopes translated (and in some cases interpreted) in homilies, made these key parts of the Bible accessible for groups of readers and listeners for whom English rather than Latin was the main language of literacy. By contrast with the glosses, in all these free-standing prose translations the vernacular serves as a substitute for the Latin, bringing the meaning of the scriptural source to the reader. Finally, Ælfric’s eventual abandonment of word-for-word translation in favour of free homiletic paraphrase and summary reflects his lifelong commitment to ensuring that all members of English society had access to the contents of the Bible in their own language. In this common endeavour to make the Bible’s teaching available to diverse audiences, the authors of Old English biblical prose would prove worthy successors to their illustrious forebears whom King Alfred had admiringly described as wise wealhstodas (‘wise translators’).31 For the Prose Preface to the Old English Pastoral Care, see above, Introduction, pp. 3–4.