Two Old English Legal Texts

Mühlebach, Dominique and Olga Timofeeva. 2025. ‘Four Old English Legal Texts in a Gospel Book’. In Annina Seiler and Nicole Studer-Joho, eds. Old English in Switzerland: Manuscripts, Texts and Libraries. Basel: Schwabe Verlag. 151-169. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Codex 671, f. 75v.

The two Old English legal texts covered in this exercise are found at the end of Codex Bern 671, a pocket-sized Gospel book written mainly in Latin, containing, other than the four Gospels, two acrostic poems dedicated to King Alfred and a collection of four relatively brief legal texts written in Old English, covering three different topics (the payment of tithes, guild rules, and two manumissions).

The origin and intended use of the manuscript are unknown; however, the size, lack of decoration, and absence of canon tables, capitula, or prefaces suggest an Irish-influenced scriptorium in Britain’s south-west. The manuscript reached Bedwyn (now Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire) by the 10th century, where the Old English texts were added by three or four different hands.

Codex 671 was written in France by the 12th or 13th century, possibly at Fleury Abbey, and remained there until the early 17th century, when it belonged to Pierre Daniel d’Orléans (1530-1603). It then made its way to Switzerland via the collection of Jacques Bongars (1554-1612), a Protestant French book collector who in turn willed the contents of his library to the Bernese Jacob von Graviseth (1598-1658). The manuscript finally entered the collection of the Burgerbibliothek Bern in the first half of the 17th century.

Due to the several different hands that participated in adding the Old English legal texts to Codex 671, the writing style, spacing, and character size vary. The script is an Anglo-Saxon square minuscule.

While the first text is written in a clearly legible and coherent style, in the second, word separation is inconsistent and, even within the same text, words may be spelled in different ways. Due to these inconsistencies, the two main transcriptions and translations of the texts (authored respectively by Merrit 1934 and Förster 1941) are somewhat conflicting.