Two Old English Legal Texts

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.

The word spacing is tricky here, as orthographical conventions at the time were different to our current ones. Try to thus separate unsegmented text into single words and to combine spaced out morphemes to form a word. The Tironian nota ⁊ is consistently used for the word and. As the text is Old English, we find the letters ash (æ), wynn (ƿ) and thorn (þ). The flat-topped g (ᵹ) character has a long pointed tail and is written as a g. In ligatures, the head of e extends above the middle writing-band (“high” e). Note that there are two variants of the letter y, namely straight-limbed y (with straight branches) as well as f-shaped y (with both upper branches curved to the right). Also note that in the second exercise the ascender of round-backed d curves very far to the left and is almost horizontal. Moreover, the letters f (ꝼ), r (ꞃ) and long s (ꞅ) are sitting on the baseline, which sometimes makes r difficult to distinguish from s and f. Abbreviations should be written out in full; their explanations can be found at the end of each exercise.