Two Old English Legal Texts

Additional picture - Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Codex 671, f. 76r

This picture shows the continuation of the fragment, it is not part of the exercise, but useful as additional context.

La transcription est:

þyses gegildes gerædnes is gif
hyrra hƿylcum foretsit gebyrige
begyte ælce uif mæssan
oððe fif salteras for þa saule
and æt þam þritige þan dæge tƿegen

The decree of this guild is: if

death should happen to a member,

each is to obtain five masses

or five psalters (to be said) for the soul (of the deceased)

and, on the thirtieth day, two … [The text continues on the next page of the manuscript.]

The second part of this transcription exercise covered the first five lines of the second Old English legal texts contained in Code Bern 671, a text which constitutes one of only five manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon guild statutes from Great Britain. This makes the text extremely important, especially since while guilds were generally understood to be “voluntary association[s] of people” and “forms of organisation in towns or among smaller communities” (Keynes 2013: 226; Reynolds 1997: 67), their role and functioning in Anglo-Saxon England differed quite significantly from that of their continental counterparts (Naismith, 2020).

The text was written around the same time as the first part of the exercise, however by a different, more irregular hand and (in its continuation) contains interesting irregularities in terms of spelling and added words in between the lines. For example, other than the spelling of the number five found in the transcribed passage, the text includes a variant of the word hlafas ‘bread’ spelled with initial <lh>, which might be a sign of h-cluster reduction, a sound change assumed to have begun in the 9th century leading to the reduction of consonant clusters and later popularised in the 11th century after the Norman Conquest.

The many inconsistencies, including on grammar caused the two main translators working on the text (Merrit and Förster) to come to two different and conflicting translations.

Sources:

• Background information and transcriptions/translations: Information and the structure of the provided translations and transcriptions was created using “Four Old English Legal Texts in a Gospel Book” (Mühlebach and Timofeeva, 2025 in Seiler and Studer-Joho, 2025) as reference.
• Förster, Max. 1941. Der Flussname Themse und seine Sippe: Studien zur Anglisierung keltischer Eigennamen und zur Lautchronologie des Altbritischen. München: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
• Meritt, Herbert. 1934. “Old English Entries in a Manuscript at Bern”. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 33(3): 343–351.
• Mühlebach, Dominique and Olga Timofeeva. 2025. “Four Old English Texts in a Gospel Book”. In Annina Seiler and Nicole Studer-Joho, ed. Old English in Switzerland: Manuscripts, Texts and Libraries, Schwabe Verlag, 151-169.
• Naismith, Rory. 2020. “Gilds, States and Societies in the Early Middle Ages”. Early Medieval Europe 28: 627–662.
• Keynes, Simon. 2013. “Guild Regulations”. In Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes and Donald Scragg, eds. The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 226–227.
• Reynolds, Susan. 1997. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300. Oxford: Clarendon Press