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Secular Learning in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Chardonnens and Carella Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 69 (2012), 1–43

ANGLO-SAXON SECULAR LEARNING AND THE VERNACULAR: AN OVERVIEW

Stephanie Hollis

For some Anglo-Saxonists, Old English literature is one of the finest achievements of the pre-conquest period. For others, particularly some Anglo-Latinists, it is evidence of a deplorable ignorance of Latin, which isolated England from the West European intellectual mainstream and the cultural heritage of the ancient world until the Nor- mans arrived. In this overview, I am therefore surveying the use of the vernacular for ‘scientific’ or ‘secular’ subjects (primarily computus and medicine) within the context of Latin literacy and learning, in the hope of modifying the view that use of the vernacular and ignorance of Latin inevitably went hand in hand. Although the attention given here to the Age of Bede may seem disproportionate, my intention is to emphasize that this was indeed a time of Latin literacy and scientific advance, for despite Christopher Hohler’s claim that if Augustine of Canterbury was ‘under any illusions about the Englishman’s natural aptitude for foreign languages’, he must ‘soon have lost them’,1 An- glo-Saxons were not racially destined to monolingualism (although as insular speakers of a Germanic language they were at a disadvantage in learning Latin). At the same time, however, I want to suggest that the lack of evidence of vernacular prose and a vernacular teaching tradition in the Age of Bede might be an artefact of the low survival of manuscripts from that period. In considering the origins of vernacular medical literature (which appear to have predated the decline of Latin learning in the ninth century), I argue that practical usefulness to specialist physicians rather than ignorance of Latin was the motivating force. In examining the two vernacular computus texts of the Benedic- tine Reform period (Ælfric’s De temporibus anni and Byrhtferth’s

1 C. E. Hohler, ‘Some Service-Books in the Later Saxon Church’, Tenth-Century Studies: Essays in Commemoration of the Millennium of the Council of Winchester and Regularis concordia, ed. D. Parsons (London, Chichester, 1975), 60–93, at 61.

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Enchiridion), I am particularly concerned to argue that these works are in the vernacular because they were intended for the edification of parish priests, and that they tell us nothing about the Latin literacy and learning of their authors or the general standard of Latin literacy and learning in Anglo-Saxon monasteries. I also suggest alternative ways of identifying the milieu of Benedictine Reform manuscripts that have been regarded as evidence of a low level of Latin literacy even among monks at reformed monasteries. Finally, I survey the unexpected per- sistence and vitality of the vernacular medical tradition, particularly arguing against the claim that it was only with the introduction of Lat- in manuscripts by Normans in the eleventh century that English medicine rejoined the European mainstream.

The Age of Bede and Alfred’s Educational Reform In the Preface to his translation of Cura Pastoralis (c. 890), King Alf- red lamented the decline of Latin literacy and learning throughout England – both among the religious orders and among those in the secular life – that had followed in the wake of the first Viking invasion. Wanting to restore learning throughout his kingdom, and also the prosperity and peace which, he believed, was its concomitant, Alfred called on his bishops to assist him in implementing an educational programme that was, for its time, remarkably inclusive. He called for the teaching of vernacular literacy to all young persons (sio gioguð) of the freeborn classes, and the subsequent teaching of Latin to the more promising of them (or perhaps he meant those who were intended for religious orders).2 And, in the seeming absence of existing vernacular literature, Alfred urged his bishops to join him in translating ‘sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, … on ðæt geðiode … ðe we ealle gecnawan mægen’.3 Since the days when Alfred was reverently dubbed ‘the father of English prose’, scholars have cautioned against taking his Preface at face value. In giving the impression that the development of a vernacular literary tradition, far from being a cause for nationalist celebra-

2 ‘[L]ære mon siððan furðor on Lædengeðiode ða ðe mon furðor læren wille & to hieran hade don wille’: King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. H. Sweet, EETS os 45 (London, 1871), 7/13–5. ‘One may then instruct in Latin those whom one wishes to teach further and promote to a higher rank’. 3 Ibid. 7/6–8. ‘Certain books which are the most necessary for all to know … into the language … that we can all understand’.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 3 tion, was the best that could be done to compensate for an almost complete ignorance of Latin, Alfred’s Preface is in marked contrast to the self-confident pride of Ireland’s traditional learned classes (filid) in their indigenous culture, which is expressed in an eighth-century origin legend that places the Irish language above Isidore’s tres linguae sacrae (Hebrew, Greek and Latin).4 The absence of a positive contemporary rationale for the cultivation of a vernacular literary culture in England is also a notable feature of the Benedictine Reform period. Perhaps, ultimately, the real reason for the precocity and profusion of English vernacular literature is simply that Anglo-Saxons preferred the comfortable familiarity of their own language, as is reflected in Bede’s account of the falling out between Coenwalh of Wessex and Agilbert of Gaul. Initially impressed by Agilbert’s learning and enthusiasm, Coenwalh made him a bishop: ‘Tandem rex, qui Saxonum tan- tum linguam nouerat, pertaesus barbarae loquellae, subintroduxit in prouinciam alium suae linguae episcopum’.5 Coenwalh’s replacement of Agilbert with a bishop who spoke the same language as he himself did might merely seem to bear out Christopher Hohler’s disparaging opinion of ‘the Englishman’s natural aptitude for foreign languages’. But Anglo-Saxons’ pride in their own language is occasionally expressed in oblique forms (particularly in the cultivation of Old English poetry by scholars like Bede and Aldhelm), and when Alfred points out towards the end of his Preface that Latin scriptures are themselves derived from a Greek translation of a Hebrew original and that ‘ealla oðræ Cristnæ ðioda summe dæl hiora on hiora agen geðiode wen- don’,6 his readers were surely meant to understand that English translation of the scriptures would mark England as a full recipient of Romano-Christian culture.

4 D. Edel, ‘The Status and Development of the Vernacular in Early Medieval Ire- land’, The Dawn of the Written Vernacular in Western Europe, ed. M. Goyens and W. Verbeke, Mediaevalia Lovaniensia 33 (Leuven, 2003), 351–77, at 361. 5 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica III.7 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford Med. Texts (Ox- ford, 1969), 234). ‘Later, however, the king, who understood only Saxon, grew tired of the bishop’s foreign speech, and invited to the province a bishop of his own tongue’. 6 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, 7/4– 5. ‘All the other Christian peoples turned some part of them into their own language’.

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That so few of the manuscripts known to have been in England in the seventh and eighth centuries have survived leaves no doubt that the pervasive destruction of monastic libraries evoked by Alfred did take place. Yet there is a certain amount of pardonable exaggeration in his assessment of the state of learning when he first came to power. England was not entirely destitute of Latin scholars south of the Hum- ber,7 but by the ninth century, even before the Viking raids, there had inevitably been a falling away from the heights that had been attained during the first flush of the conversion, in the arts as well as in scholarship, and above all in Northumbria, where the meeting together of Romano-Christian, Germanic and Celtic religious traditions and cultural influences proved particularly fruitful. Throughout the seventh century, Christian converts from England and Gaul travelled to Ireland in search of learning, and Irish missionaries in England played a formative part in the development of traditions of scholarship in the north and west of the country. The establishment of monastic schools in England by Theodore and Hadri- an, however, following their arrival in 669 as leaders of the second mission from Rome, was regarded by both Bede and Aldhelm as the beginning of a new era of scholarship that far outshone the achievements of the Irish Church. Bede describes Theodore and Hadrian as extremely learned in sacred and secular literature, and fluent in Latin and Greek. In addition to teaching interpretation of the scriptures, they taught astronomy and ‘arithmeticae ecclesiasticae disciplinam’ (later known as computus), as well as the art of (classical) metre.8 According to Bede:

Indicio est quod usque hodie supersunt de eorum discipulis, qui Latinam Graecamque linguam aeque ut propriam in qua nati sunt norunt. Neque um- quam prorsus, ex quo Brittaniam petierunt Angli, feliciora fuere tempora, … et omnium uota ad nuper audita caelestis regni gaudia penderent, et qui- cumque lectionibus sacris cuperent erudiri, haberent in promtu magistros qui docerent.9

7 E.g., Alfred found four Mercians to assist with his educational reforms. See n. 20 below. 8 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica IV.2 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 332). ‘The study of ecclesiastical arithmetic’. 9 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica IV.2 (ibid. 334). ‘Some of their students still alive to- day are as proficient in Latin and Greek as in their native tongue. Never had there been such happy times as these since the English settled in Britain …. The people

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Bede excepted, early Anglo-Saxons’ fluency in Greek is not well attested,10 but there was undoubtedly tremendous zeal among his con- temporaries for learning Latin in order to gain access to knowledge of God and all of his creation, which was not confined to the religious orders. Among the religious orders, women were conspicuous in their enthusiasm. Even before the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, the monastic school taught by Abbess Hild at Whitby (founded c. 657) was training men who became bishops and priests.11 Aldhelm’s De virginitate, written c. 706 for the nuns at Barking taught by Abbess Hildelith, evokes the heady excitement of adventure generated by the new learning when he depicts the nuns as a swarm of bees winging their way into unknown territory under Hildelith’s leadership.12 Dating from a little later in the eighth century, the Latin letters and poems exchanged between men and women associated with the Anglo-Saxon mission to the continent led by Boniface (many of whom were educated in Wes- sex) similarly convey acceptance of women as members of a shared aesthetic and intellectual community, engaged in the same quest for Latin learning that was synonymous with knowledge of God.13 Despite the paucity of surviving documentation from the seventh and eighth centuries, then, there is evidence that men and women at a number of monasteries, and at least two Northumbrian kings,14 were highly capable readers of Latin, and that the ability to compose Latin eagerly sought the new found joys of the kingdom of heaven, and all who wished instruction in the reading of the scriptures found teachers ready at hand’. See also Aldhelm’s Letter V (Aldhelm: the Prose Works, trans. M. Lapidge and M. Herren, (Cambridge, 1979), 163). 10 M. Lapidge, ‘The Study of Greek at the School of Canterbury in the Seventh Century’, The Sacred Nectar of the Greeks: the Study of Greek in the West in the Early Middle Ages, ed. M. W. Herren and S. A. Brown, King’s College London Med. Stud. 2 (London, 1988), 169–94, concludes that students of Theodore and Hadrian sometimes had trouble understanding explications of Greek. 11 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica IV.23 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 404–14). 12 Aldhelm, De virginitate IV (Aldhelm: the Prose Works, trans. Lapidge and Her- ren, 61–2). 13 C. E. Fell, ‘Some Implications of the Boniface Correspondence’, New Readings on Women in Old English Literature, ed. H. Damico and A. H. Olsen (Bloomington, 1990), 29–43. 14 Bede dedicated his Historia ecclesiastica to Ceolwulf of Northumbria (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 2). Aldhelm addressed his Episto- la ad Acircium to King Aldfrith (Aldhelm: the Prose Works, trans. Lapidge and Herren, 34–47).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 6 Stephanie Hollis letters and short verses exhibiting study of the metre and rhetoric of classic poetry was not uncommon. As far as is known, though, authorship as such – the ability to compose lengthy original works in Latin – was not common, and of those whose work survives, only a handful of elite scholars appear to have been both fluent and prolific.15 Foremost among these of course was Bede, whose numerous works of scriptural exegesis, written in the first instance for his fellow monks at Monk- wearmouth-Jarrow where he was for many years master of the monastic school, are eloquent testimony to the high standard his students attained. His two short scientific treatises, De natura rerum (c. 701), and De temporibus (c. 703), were originally written for the students at his monastic school.16 De natura rerum provided an introductory context to the study of time-reckoning, fundamental to the liturgical life of the Church, by giving an account of cosmology and natural phenomena. His De temporum ratione, completed c. 725, was a much more sophisticated work, written at the request of his fellow monks.17 Given further impetus by the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian, Northumbrian computus had advanced so far by c. 706 that Bede’s former teacher Ceolfrith could boast of a multitude of mathematicians who were ex- perts in the calculation of Easter cycles.18 Bede’s major scientific achievement was to recognize the superior accuracy of Easter tables based on sidereal time. His De temporum ratione was the product of long study and empirical observation aided by the sun-dial he had constructed at Jarrow. In it, Bede incorporated his own calendar table and an explanation of sidereal time. Aware of its imperfections, Bede invited future readers to improve upon his findings; but although his work circulated widely on both sides of the channel, no significant

15 See M. Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899 (London, 1996). 16 Bedae Venerabilis Opera VI: Opera didascalica 1, ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 123A (Turnhout, 1975), 189–234 (De natura rerum); Bedae Opera de temporibus, ed. C. W. Jones (Cambridge, MA, 1943), 295–303 (De temporibus); translated as Bede On the Nature of Things and On Times, trans. C. B. Kendall and F. Wallis, TTH 56 (Liv- erpool, 2010). 17 Bedae Venerabilis Opera VI: Opera didascalica 2, ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 123B (Turnhout, 1979), 263–544; translated as Bede: the Reckoning of Time, trans. F. Wal- lis, TTH 29 (Liverpool, 1999). 18 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica V.21 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 532–52). Jones argued that Northumbrian computus achievements largely depended on Irish knowledge and methods (Bedae Opera de temporibus, 105–13).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 7 advance on Bede’s work was made until the time of Abbo of Fleury, who took temporary refuge in England c. 985–7.19 It is generally agreed, then, that learning had already undergone a marked decline by the ninth century. Opinions differ, however, on the extent to which traces of Latin scholarship survived in the ninth century, and also on whether the effects of the Viking invasion were exac- erbated by a diminished enthusiasm for monasticism.20 That very little has survived in the way of vernacular writings pre-dating the Alfredi- an Reform seems to confirm the view, superficially promulgated by Alfred’s Preface, and held by a number of scholars, that the vernacular had no place in monastic schools prior to the reign of Alfred.21 The fact that most of the small number of vernacular writings generally accepted as pre-Alfredian are from ninth-century Mercia has suggested, to others, that Alfred’s Reform built on a pre-existing vernacular literary tradition of Mercian origin.22 Alfred himself, of course, learnt to read and write in the vernacular before going on to learn Latin, and the education of two of his own children followed the same course.23 Was he proposing something rad- ically new when he called for all children of the free-born classes to be taught to read their own language and subsequent education in Latin for the more able of them? Or was he proposing to reinstate an educational tradition with a long history, while diverging from past practice in planning to extend its benefits beyond the most powerful members

19 W. M. Stevens, ‘Sidereal Time in Anglo-Saxon England’, Voyage to the Other World: the Legacy of Sutton Hoo, ed. C. B. Kendall and P. S. Wells, Med. Stud. at Minnesota 5 (Minneapolis, 1992), 125–52. 20 See, e.g., J. Morrish, ‘King Alfred’s Letter as a Source on Learning in England in the Ninth Century’, Studies in Earlier Old English Prose, ed. P. E. Szarmach (Albany, 1986), 87–107. Morrish, 92–4, lists seventeen extant manuscripts copied in England during the ninth century. The only scientific manuscript is Oxford, Bod. Lib., Digby 63, fols 1–87 (s. ix2 (844 or 867x892), Northumbria; Ker, Catalogue, no. 319; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 611), which contains computistical material. See also Asser, De rebus gestis Ælfredi XCIII (Asser’s Life of King Alfred, together with the Annals of Saint Neots Erroneously Ascribed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1904), 80–1); translated as The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great, trans. A. P. Smyth (Basingstoke, 2002). 21 See R. Stanton, The Culture of Translation in Anglo-Saxon England (Cam- bridge, 2002), 48. 22 For a rebuttal of this view, see J. M. Bately, ‘Old English Prose before and during the Reign of Alfred’, ASE 17 (1988), 93–138. 23 Asser, De rebus gestis Ælfredi XXII–XXIV, LXXV, LXXXVIII (Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. Stevenson, 19–21, 57–9, 73–4).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 8 Stephanie Hollis of secular society to all the children of the freeborn classes? Vernacular literacy was evidently not uncommon among the religious orders even before Alfred’s educational programme was imple- mented, since he remarks in his Preface that, although knowledge of Latin had decayed, ‘ðeah monige cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan’.24 This is not surprising, since, contrary to the impression Alfred’s Preface gives, the Council of Clovesho (747) permitted priests to learn not only the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer in English but also the Offices of Mass and Baptism,25 and Bede himself, a few decades earlier, had translated the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer so that they could be mem- orized by the laity.26 And although Alfred’s Preface is to some extent borne out by the non-survival of any pre-Alfredian translations of scripture as such (aside from continuous Psalter glosses), one of the two projects Bede was anxious to complete, when he realised his death was approaching, was an English translation of St John’s Gos- pel. The other was an anthology of excerpts from Isidore’s De natura rerum, whose purpose seems to have been either to explain especially difficult passages, or to correct errors in Isidore’s work.27 Neatly en- capsulating what we may term for convenience the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ aspects of Bede’s life-long devotion to teaching and learning (although, for Bede, the natural world and the words of scripture were, equally, forms in which God was made manifest), the account of his last days reveals his concern to advance the least educated members of his society, for the translation of St John’s Gospel was evidently for the benefit of the laity, and the anthology of excerpts from Isidore was intended for his youngest pupils (pueri).28 It has sometimes been assumed that the Isidorean anthology for Bede’s pueri was also in the vernacular. This flies in the face of the widely held view that the vernacular was not used in monastic schools before the reign of Alfred. It is worth noticing, however, that the amanuensis who wrote down Bede’s translation of St John’s Gospel as

24 King Alfred’s West-Saxon Version of Gregory’s Pastoral Care, ed. Sweet, 7/16– 7. ‘Yet many could still read things written in English’. 25 Council of Clovesho X (Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland, ed. A. W. Haddan and W. Stubbs, 3 vols (Oxford, 1869–78) III, 366). 26 Bede, Letter to Ecgberht, archbishop of York (ibid. III, 314–25). 27 See Bede: the Reckoning of Time, trans. Wallis, lxxxi–lxxxii. 28 Cuthbert’s Letter on the Death of Bede (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Col- grave and Mynors, 580–6).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 9 he dictated was one of his pueri – the story, in other words, turns upon the existence of a young pupil of Bede who had been taught to read and write his own language. It is also worth recalling that a writing system to record spoken English was developed at a remarkably early date. Everyone who has read Bede’s account of the poet Cædmon re- members that, as early as c. 660, scholars at the monastic school taught by Hild recorded his orally performed vernacular poems in writing. Less commonly remembered is that the law code of Æthel- berht of Kent (d. 616), was written down in English during his lifetime – before the death of Augustine of Canterbury (604) according to the surviving version.29 Yet Æthelberht’s decision to have his law code committed to writing, doubtless encouraged either by Augustine or his successors, was ‘iuxta exempla Romanorum’.30 This is a remarkable affirmation of the primacy of indigenous culture against the cultural supremacy of Rome. The precedent, once established, was continued with few exceptions by Æthelberht’s immediate successors and by the Wessex monarchy from the time of Ine, and presumably gave encouragement to the ninth-century development of vernacular wills, writs and charters. Also offering potential encouragement to the development of an English vernacular prose literature were the Irish missionaries who were the Anglo-Saxons’ first teachers. Introduced to Christianity almost a century earlier than the Anglo-Saxons, the Irish were at a similar disadvantage in gaining fluency in Latin; for them, Latin was a foreign language, as it was not for the continental converts whose de- scendants were to become speakers of Romance. Ireland, a recent study claims, ‘boasts the most extensive and diverse vernacular literature of early medieval Europe, going back to the seventh century at least’.31 The claim is bound to strike an Anglo-Saxonist as tendentious, but there is enough extant in contemporary manuscripts to support the claim that Irish vernacular prose ‘was well-established by the end of the seventh century’.32 Much of it is, of course, homiletic or exegetical

29 ‘Þis syndon þa domas, þe Æðelbirht cyning asette on Agustinus dæge’: Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. and trans. F. Liebermann, 3 vols (Halle, 1903–16) I, 3. ‘These are the decrees which King Æthelberht established in Augustine’s day’. 30 Bede, Historia ecclesiastica II.5 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 150). ‘Inspired by the example of the Romans’. 31 Edel, ‘The Status and Development of the Vernacular’, 351. 32 Ibid. 363.

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(and may have been for preaching to the laity), but a seventh-century tract on scriptural miracles explains the same natural phenomena that are covered by Bede’s De natura rerum (the courses of the sun and moon, the pattern of tides, etc.), and Irish vernacular texts for teaching Latin grammar, dating from the eighth century onwards, were fairly certainly intended for the instruction of monastics.33 Remarking upon Irish glossing of early computistical texts, Faith Wallis raises ‘the intriguing question’ of whether Irish scholars taught computus in the vernacular, and goes on to remark: ‘It is not impossible that even Bede himself taught computus in Old English’.34 This may seem at odds with the high standard of Latin literacy undoubtedly attained by the former pupils of Bede for whom he wrote his De temporum ratione, but it is not easy to imagine even Bede’s pueri understanding Latin grammar as beginners, let alone acquiring enough fluency to understand his De natura rerum and his De temporibus, without fairly extensive vernacular explanation. Michael Lapidge’s envisaging of the way Latin was taught to novices suggests, in effect, that the acquisition of vernacular literacy was the first step towards learning to read Latin:

the beginner would first have committed the Latin psalter to memory. His teacher would have aided memorization by means of literal explanations: hence, presumably, the complete Old English interlinear glosses of Latin texts in many Anglo-Saxon psalters.35

But teaching in the vernacular does not necessarily generate vernacular textbooks, and the only conceivable trace of the emergence of a vernacular tradition of written prose from the monastic study of time- reckoning are two short notes on the length of summer and winter (similar in kind to the computistical notes commonly recorded in the vernacular in late tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts) found in the Old English Martyrology, which is sometimes accepted as a mid or late ninth-century Mercian text that pre-dates the Alfredian Re- form.36 Whether these notes offer a glimpse of the familiar use of the

33 Ibid. 364; 360–1. 34 Bede: the Reckoning of Time, trans. Wallis, lxxxvii. 35 Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899, 2. 36 Das altenglische Martyrologium, ed. G. Kotzor, ABAW, philosophisch-histo- rische Klasse, ns 88.1–2, 2 vols (Munich, 1981) I, 443–54. See also C. Rauer, ‘The Sources of the Old English Martyrology’, ASE 32 (2003), 89–109. The Old English

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 11 vernacular for jotting down information on basic time-reckoning, or whether they represent a rare use of the vernacular for this purpose prompted by a desire for consistency with the overall project, is unan- swerable, but an answer to whether computus was taught in Old Eng- lish in the Age of Bede might possibly be discoverable from a study of early glosses and glossaries.37

The Age of Alfred and the Vernacularization of Medicine The pre-Alfredian development of vernacular medical texts is somewhat easier to detect. A substantial corpus of vernacular medical literature survives from the Anglo-Saxon period, including three major compilations of remedies (Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III and Lac- nunga) as well as several translations of the Herbarium of Pseudo- Apuleius.38 With the exception of a single fragment, all of the extant Old English medical literature is preserved in copies dated from the mid tenth century onwards, but it derives from a long tradition of study of Latin medical writings, which may have originated with the arrival of Theodore, or even earlier through contact with Irish scholarship.39 Closer contact with the continent through missionary activity in the eighth century, however, played an important role in facilitating the practical use of Latin medical remedies. Bald’s Leechbook has been linked to Alfred’s programme for the dissemination of knowledge amongst the laity. Yet the vernacularization of medical literature seems more likely to have been associated with the development of a specialized medical practice derived from the classical tradition. Like all of the Old English medical codices, Bald’s Leechbook has been connected with the didactic and pastoral aims of the Benedictine

Martyrology also contains notes explaining the Latin and Old English names of the months. 37 The terse vernacular fiscal document known as the Tribal Hidage, now dated 625–6, is suggestive. See also N. J. Higham, An English Empire: Bede and the Ear- ly Anglo-Saxon Kings (Manchester, New York, 1995), 74–111. 38 Kleinere angelsächsische Denkmäler ed. G. Leonhardi, Bibliothek der angel- sächsischen Prosa 6 (Hamburg, 1905), 1–120 (Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III); Anglo-Saxon Remedies, ed. and trans. Pettit; The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, ed. H. J. de Vriend, EETS os 286 (London, 1984). See also Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 211–29, 311–26; M. L. Cameron, An- glo-Saxon Medicine, CSASE 7 (Cambridge, 1993). 39 See also M. A. D’Aronco, ‘Anglo-Saxon Plant Pharmacy and the Latin Medical Tradition’, From Earth to Art: the Many Aspects of the Plant-World in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. C. P. Biggam, Costerus ns 148 (Amsterdam, New York, 2003), 133–51.

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Reform.40 But although Bald’s Leechbook survives only in a mid tenth-century manuscript, it is not a Benedictine Reform production. It belongs rather to the Age of Alfred, since the exemplar of the surviving copy – and the exemplar was probably itself a copy rather than the original manuscript belonging to Bald – is dated c. 900 on linguistic grounds.41 Bald’s Leechbook was compiled from a wide variety of sources.42 It represents a considerable feat of organization and was clearly designed for practical use. Its two books consist of chapters organized according to topic, and each book is preceded by a table of contents. The first book consists of remedies for specific parts of the body organized in head-to-toe order, followed by remedies for ‘outer’ diseases, which are mostly associated with the body as a whole rather than a specific part. Leechbook III, a less orderly collection of remedies than Bald’s Leechbook, is preserved in the same manuscript, and was copied by the same scribe.43 It was probably compiled at a different centre, but is generally thought to have originated at much the same time as Bald’s Leechbook. From her study of textual relationships, Audrey Meaney concluded that even before the reign of Alfred, small clusters of topically related remedies, in Latin and in Old English, were already in circulation.44 None of the sources used by the compilers of Bald’s Leechbook survives in original form, but copies of two of the clusters of remedies the compilers drew upon are extant; both are believed to have originated in Mercia, and they demonstrate the tendency of early remedy collections to form groups according to topic. One of these clusters, consisting of some fifty Old English remedies, was copied in the early eleventh century, either at Winchester or Canterbury.45 The other, a

40 See esp. V. I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1991); K. L. Jolly, Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context (Chapel Hill, London, 1996). 41 Hollis, ‘Scientific and Medical Writings’, 198–9. 42 See M. L. Cameron, ‘Bald’s Leechbook: its Sources and their Use in its Compila- tion’, ASE 12 (1983), 153–82; R. S. Nokes, ‘The Several Compilers of Bald’s Leech- book’, ASE 33 (2004), 41–76. 43 London, Brit. Lib., Royal 12. D. xvii (s. xmed, Winchester?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 264; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 479; Doane, Books, no. 10). See Bald’s Leechbook: British Museum Royal Manuscript 12 D. XVII, ed. C. E. Wright, EEMF 5 (Copenhagen, 1955). 44 A. L. Meaney, ‘Variant Versions of Old English Medical Remedies and the Com- pilation of Bald’s Leechbook’, ASE 13 (1984), 235–68. 45 Preserved only in a transcript by the sixteenth-century antiquarian Laurence No-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 13 group of eleven remedies mostly for feet, thighs and loins, is found on a single leaf (the Omont Fragment); it looks to have come from a larger medical codex.46 Though it probably does not pre-date Alfred’s educational reform (it is now dated either late ninth or early tenth century), the Omont Fragment is nevertheless an important witness to the early tendency to select, translate and reorganize remedies that were originally embedded in a wide range of Latin medical texts. Even without the confirmation provided by Meaney’s study of textual relationships, it is evident that the existence of a substantial body of vernacular medical literature by c. 900 required the prior establishment of English equivalents (or substitutions) for the terms for a great number of exotic herbal ingredients, diseases, internal organs, or, in other cases, the naturalization of Latin terminology, and that this must have entailed both study of Latin texts and practical experimentation over a considerable period of time. Medical study, as well as medical books, might have been introduced by Theodore,47 but there is no evidence that he taught medicine as a formal discipline. Whatever specialist medical knowledge he may have had, his biblical commentaries suggest that he (like Bede) imparted it only by way of incidental elu- cidation of the scriptures.48 It is likely, however, that medicine was formally taught as a discipline in Irish monasteries. Aldhelm, who studied in Ireland for some years, twice gives a list of the seven fisicae artes, which he defines as arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, astrology, mechanics and

well, in London, Brit. Lib., Additional 43703, fols 261r–264v (see Ker, Catalogue, 230–4). See also Meaney, ‘Variant Versions’, 238–9, 265–8; Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 231–2. For the suggested Canterbury provenance of the eleventh- century copy, see P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), 173–5. 46 Louvain-la-Neuve, Archives de l’Université Catholique de Louvain, Fragmenta H. Omont 3 (Ker, ‘Supplement’, no. 417; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 848; Bremmer and Dekker, Manuscripts, no. 16). Printed by B. Schauman and A. Cameron, ‘A Newly- Found Leaf of Old English from Louvain’, Anglia 95 (1977), 289–312. See also Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 233–4; M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medi- cine, 31. 47 See p. 38 below. 48 Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian, ed. B. Bischoff and M. Lapidge, CSASE 10 (Cambridge, 1994), 249–55. For Bede’s medical knowledge, including two texts quoted in explaining the humours in De temporum ratione, see M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 28.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 14 Stephanie Hollis medicine.49 Medicine was not among the seven liberal arts listed in Isi- dore’s Etymologiae, which came to form the curriculum of many continental monasteries (though it is one of the many branches of study he covers). The schema known to Aldhelm, although it has points of contact with Isidore’s, is distinctively Irish. It was known also to Alcuin of York who, after his appointment as master of the school at Charle- magne’s court, played a central role in cultivating the study of medical literature.50 It is tempting to speculate that Alcuin owed his familiarity with the Irish schema and his knowledge of medical literature to the influence of Irish scholars in the north of England. Lindisfarne, for instance, which was an Irish foundation, was said by the anonymous Lindisfarne author of the vita of St Cuthbert (c. 690) to have medici famous for their skill, and their presence presumably accounts for the anonymous author’s occasional use of Latin medical terms.51 Bede, too, was familiar with Latin educated physicians, and occasionally uses expressions such as ‘the disease which medici call dysentery’.52 The earliest unequivocal evidence of the study of medicine is found in a letter of c. 754 from Cyneheard, bishop of Winchester, asking the missionary Bishop Lul at Mainz to keep him in mind if he acquired any books on the ‘secular science’ of medicine: ‘ut sunt de medicinali- bus, quorum copia est aliqua apud nos’, he explained, ‘sed tamen sig- menta ultramarina, quae in eis scripta conperimus, ignota sunt et diffi- cilia adpiscendum’.53 This is an important piece of testimony, for it establishes that practical use was being made of medical writings at least as early as the mid eighth century (when, probably not coinci-

49 Aldhelm, Epistola ad Acircium III; idem, De virginitate XXXV (Aldhelm: the Prose Works, trans. Lapidge and Herren, 42, 96). 50 F. E. Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall: the Ownership and Circulation of Medical Books in Medieval Europe, ca. 800–1200’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Duke Univ., 1999), 84–90. 51 Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert IV.xvii (Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert: a Life by an Anonymous Monk of Lindisfarne and Bede’s Prose Life, ed. and trans. B. Colgrave (Cambridge, 1940), 136). 52 Bede, Life of St Cuthbert VIII (ibid. 182). See also Bede, Historia ecclesiastica IV.32 (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, ed. Colgrave and Mynors, 446–8). It appears, from Bede (Historia ecclesiastica V.3 (ibid. 458–62)), that the nuns of Watton were practising phlebotomy according to Irish principles. 53 Letter 114 (Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. M. Tangl, Monu- menta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae selectae 1 (Berlin, 1916), 247/4–6). ‘We have some medical books, but the foreign ingredients we find prescribed in them are unknown to us and difficult to obtain’.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 15 dentally, Anglo-Saxon missionary contacts with southern Italy were making it easier to obtain the exotic herbs and spices relayed by Arab traders to Venice). No less importantly, it establishes that medical books were already owned and being read in England c. 754 – some thirty years before the beginnings of the Carolingian Reform, in which the copying and study of medical manuscripts played a notable part. Medical study during the Carolingian Reform also prompted the creation of practical codices, similar in kind to Bald’s Leechbook, though in Latin instead of the vernacular, such as the Lorscher Arzneibuch (c. 795), compiled by a former student of Alcuin of York.54 Given the relatively early Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons, and the reliance of the Carolingian Reform on the copying of manuscripts sent from other countries, including England and Ireland,55 there seems at present to be a surprising reluctance to accept the existence of Latin medical texts in England prior to their appearance in ninth- century continental manuscripts, or to entertain the possibility that, rather than Anglo-Saxon study and practice of medicine being a pale Alfredian reflex of the Carolingian Reform, the Carolingian Reform might have benefited from the earlier cultivation of medical knowledge by Anglo-Saxon and Irish scholars.56 This has particular implications for the eleventh-century manuscripts containing Latin medical literature, some of which may be copies of texts earlier available in England.57 M. L. Cameron, after all, identified a dozen or so Latin medical works as the ultimate sources of Bald’s Leechbook,58 and manuscripts had been reaching Anglo-Saxons from Ireland and the continent from the time of Augustine’s landing in 597, sometimes in considerable numbers.59

54 Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Cod. med. 1. Printed as Das ‘Lorscher Arzneibuch’: ein medizinisches Kompendium des 8. Jahrhunderts (Codex Bambergensis Medici- nalis 1), ed. and trans. U. Stoll, Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 28 (Stuttgart, 1992). See also Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall’, 79–92. 55 See B. Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne, trans. M. M. Gorman, Cambridge Stud. in Palaeography and Codicology 1 (Cambridge, 1994), 56–92. 56 See, e.g., C. H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England, Oldbourne Hist. of Sci- ence Lib. (London, 1967), 9–23. 57 See pp. 37–40 below. 58 M. L. Cameron, ‘Bald’s Leechbook’. See also idem, ‘The Sources of Medical Knowledge in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 11 (1982), 135–55; J. N. Adams and M. Deegan, ‘Bald’s Leechbook and the Physica Plinii’, ASE 21 (1992), 87–114. 59 See, e.g., Bede’s account of Benedict Biscop’s journeys to Rome, Historia Ab-

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The first steps towards the vernacularization of medical literature can be observed in the earliest sets of Latin-English glossaries, which are believed to embody the teaching of Theodore and Hadrian.60 It has not proved possible to identify any particular medical text to which these might relate, but there are a fair sprinkling of vernacular words suggesting Anglo-Saxon readers’ interest in topics such as herbs, parts of the body, diseases, and so on. Not all of these could have derived from reading the Etymologiae; OE blodsaex (‘lancet’, L phlebotomus) in one of the oldest extant Latin-Old English glossaries could have, but the early appearance of this coining presumably reflects the popularity of medicinal blood-letting (inextricably related to the study of time-reckoning) among Anglo-Saxons.61 If it is true that vernacular translations are an index of illiteracy in Latin, we would expect translation of medical remedies to have begun in England when learning declined in the ninth century. The chance preservation of an eighth-century Old High German translation of an Old English medical remedy, however, suggests that Anglo-Saxons were already translating remedies from Latin in the eighth century.62 Just as Irish missionaries’ use of their own language in written documents was a probable influence on the development of English vernacular writings in the seventh century, so Anglo-Saxon and Irish missionary activity on the continent helped to give impetus to the production of Germanic vernacular writings even before Charlemagne gave encouragement to the use of the vernacular, particularly for lay instruction.63 batum IV, IX (Venerabilis Baedae: Historiam ecclesiasticam gentis anglorum, Histo- riam abbatum, Epistolam ad Ecgberctum, una cum Historia abbatum auctore anony- mo, ed. C. Plummer, 2 vols (Oxford, 1896) I, 367–8, 373; translated as The Age of Bede, trans. J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer, revised repr. (Harmondsworth, 1988), 188– 9, 194. See further M. Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006). 60 See Lapidge, Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899, 149–68. 61 The Leiden Glossary XXXIX.6 (A Late Eighth-Century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glos- sary preserved in the Library of the Leiden University (MS. Voss. Q° Lat. N°. 69), ed. J. H. Hessels (Cambridge, 1906), 40). Phlebotomus is listed among the instruments of physicians in Isidore’s Etymologiae IV.xi.2 (Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologia- rum sive Originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols (Oxford, 1911) I). 62 Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F. III. 15a, fol. 17 (Ker, Catalogue, appendix no. 3). Printed by E. von Steinmeyer, Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmäler (Berlin, 1916), 39–42. 63 Anglo-Saxon influence is chiefly discernible on Old High German biblical poems. Of particular interest is Notker III (c. 950–1022), author of a number of works

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It is also worth considering the possibility that translation of remedies might have come about not through lack of fluency in Latin but because it was significantly more convenient for medical practitioners, since medical remedies chiefly consist of lists of prescription ingredients, and the pharmacopeia of Anglo-Saxon remedies runs to hundreds of items. At first, in cases where vernacular equivalents or substitutes had been determined, interlinear glosses would doubtless have been preferred to reliance on memory, but the glosses, in time, are likely to have been incorporated into the text in place of the Latin terms. Such a process of vernacularization seems to be in evidence in the Leiden Leechbook, a Neo-Brittonic fragment of a medical codex, now dated to the early tenth century, and thought to be either Cornish or Welsh.64 This fragment might represent an earlier Celtic tradition capable of influencing the creation of Bald’s Leechbook, although recent editors detect a trace of Anglo-Saxon influence on one of the Neo-Brittonic coinings. All of the items on the surviving bifolium are entirely in Lat- in, with the exception of the collection of medical remedies, which are mostly in Latin, but employ Neo-Brittonic names for some of the herbal ingredients. There is reason to believe, then, that the user of this codex could read Latin but regarded the vernacular names of some prescription ingredients as definitive. The suggestion has been made, more than once, that the motivating force behind Bald’s Leechbook was Alfred’s educational reform; in other words, that it was one of the texts Alfred regarded as ‘necessary for all to know’. The inclusion of a letter of medical advice sent to Alfred by Elias the Patriarch of Jerusalem, taken together with the assumed Winchester origin of the original compilation, and the unusu- al prominence it gives to ‘inner’ conditions, suggests a close connection with the king. It is likely that Alfred’s much-publicized illnesses gave encouragement to the study of medicine, but a connection between Bald’s Leechbook and his educational programme is doubtful.65 on computus and quadrivium subjects, some in German. See M. E. Gibbs and S. M. Johnson, Medieval German Literature: a Companion, Garland Reference Lib. of the Humanities 1774 (New York, 1997), 21–59. 64 Leiden, Universiteitsbibliotheek, Vossianus Lat. F. 96A. (Bremmer and Dekker, Manuscripts, no. 13). For an edition and commentary on the text, see A. Falileyev and M. E. Owen, The Leiden Leechbook: a Study of the Earliest Neo-Brittonic Med- ical Compilation, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Kulturwissenschaft, Sonderheft 122 (Innsbruck, 2005), 15–22, 74–87. 65 The suggestion was first advanced by A. Meaney, ‘King Alfred and his Secre-

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Alfred and his assistants do appear to have been intent on providing reading material across a broad variety of areas of study (though they do not seem to have had much interest in natural science),66 but the aim of Alfred’s educational reform seems to have been to promote knowledge of the Christian spiritual and historical tradition, not practical information. Bald’s Leechbook is clearly not an introduction to the study of medicine for the general reader (such an aim would have been much better fulfilled by translation of the relevant sections of Isi- dore’s Etymologiae).67 It is a practical working manual for a professional medical practitioner, clerical rather than lay, I think, whose patients belonged to the highest social echelon.68 The original owner (presumably Bald) may even have been one of the physicians whose presence at Alfred’s court is mentioned by Asser.69 And Bald’s Leech- book is irrefutable evidence that already in c. 900 – before Alfred’s programme of vernacular literacy can have had time to establish itself – the compilers of Bald’s Leechbook were fluent in Latin, for they were able to understand whatever remedies came into their hands that were still in Latin, but chose to turn them all into the vernacular. One of the consequences of the vernacularization of medicine, one might expect, would be that the patients of practitioners who made use of vernacular medical codices such Bald’s Leechbook would find their physicians’ terminology accessible and understandable and would adopt it into their own everyday speech. A recent article by Luisa Bezzo analysing the terms for palsy concludes, on the contrary, that ‘medicine had its own peculiar terminology’ (i.e., medical texts use paralisin and other expressions that mirror medical Latin), whereas other Old English texts generally use ‘native terms typical of everyday language’ to express lameness.70 This, as she suggests, points to the tariat’, Parergon 11 (1975), 16–24. 66 I am unable to discover anything about the translation of Hrabanus Maurus (presumably De rerum naturis) referred to by Bately, ‘Old English Prose’, 98, n. 18, as possibly in existence before 900. 67 Isidore, Etymologiae IV (De medicina), XI (De homine et portentis); XVII (De rebus rusticis) includes a section on herbs (Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologia- rum, ed. Lindsay). 68 S. Hollis, ‘The Social Milieu of Bald’s Leechbook’, Avista 14 (2004), 11–6. 69 Asser, De rebus gestis Ælfredi XXV, LXXIV (Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ed. Stevenson, 21–2, 54–7). 70 L. Bezzo, ‘Parallel Remedies: Old English “paralisin þæt is lyftadl”’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Lazzari and D’Aronco, 435-45, at 444.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 19 existence of professional doctors. I am inclined to wonder, however, if study of vernacular medical terms (vernacular coinings modelled on Latin terminology, for instance, as opposed to a foreign loan word) might yield different results. Bezzo also identifies two exceptions to the general principle she discerns. These perhaps suggest that educated men have liked to demonstrate their knowledge of classical languages for as long as medical practitioners have employed technical terminology to define themselves as a professional class (and the remedies of Bald’s Leech- book are conspicuously conscious of leeches as a group possessing unique expertise).71 For the term paralisin is frequently used by one of the finest scholars of the Benedictine Reform period, Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham, and by the Alfredian translator of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, who, despite knowing that the term in common use was OE lyftadl nevertheless rendered his original as: ‘mid þa adle … þe Gre- cas nemnað paralysis, 7 we cweðað lyftadl’.72 The same phenomenon seems to be evident in the compensation-for-injury clauses in Alfred’s law code. These demonstrate a marked increase in anatomical knowledge and availability of medical treatment by comparison with earlier law codes, particularly in the reference to synovia (OE liðseaw), which is also the subject of a chapter in Bald’s Leechbook.73 Possibly there was a medical practitioner among the king’s council who introduced this technical refinement on his own initiative, but I think what we have here is the recollection of a recent cause célèbre in which the learned diagnosis of an attendant physician had been carefully memo- rized.

The Benedictine Reform and Computus The increasing proliferation of vernacular writings in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, in the secular sphere as well as in the monasteries, suggests that, at least in the upper social echelons, the extension of vernacular literacy envisaged in Alfred’s educational programme

71 See S. Rubin, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Physician’, Medicine in Early Medieval Eng- land, ed. M. Deegan and D. G. Scragg (Manchester, 1987), 1–15. 72 Old English Bede IV.xxxii (The Old English Version of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. T. Miller, EETS os 95–6, 110–1, 2 vols (London, 1890–8) I, 378). ‘With the infirmity … that the Greeks call paralysis and we call lyftadl’. 73 Alfred 53 (Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. and trans. Liebermann, I, 80); Bald’s Leechbook I.lxi (Kleinere angelsächsische Denkmäler ed. Leonhardi, 40).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 20 Stephanie Hollis did eventuate. Throughout the late Anglo-Saxon period, lay girls were educated at the nunneries; that Dunstan taught lay boys at Glastonbury while Æthelwold was a student there strongly suggests that the monastic schools of reformed men’s houses also accepted them.74 Notwith- standing David Dumville’s belief that ‘Alfred remained quite clear that the vernacular was (and could only be) an inferior and inadequate substitute for Latin’,75 studies of manuscripts such as London, Brit. Lib., Harley 3271, help to confirm the expectation that late Anglo- Saxon monastic schools followed the plan of action that Alfred proposed for his educational reform, and began the education of their students by teaching them to read and write in the vernacular.76 The development of vernacular literary prose at Bishop Æthelwold’s Win- chester school, and its further cultivation by Æthelwold’s pupil Ælfric, is rightly regarded as one of the finest achievements of the late Anglo- Saxon period, unparalleled at this early date in Europe, except possibly in Ireland where, however, evidence of contemporary manuscript copies is lacking.77 The general standard of Latin literacy in the late Anglo-Saxon period, on the other hand, has not infrequently been derogated, with the use of the vernacular being commonly equated with ignorance of Lat- in, and ignorance of Latin being equated (particularly by Anglo-Latin- ists) with limited intellectual capacities and low aspirations. Christine Fell asserted that, in the late Anglo-Saxon period, ‘[p]astoral advice

74 S. Hollis, ‘Wilton as a Centre of Learning’, Writing the Wilton Women: Gosce- lin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. S. Hollis, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 9 (Turnhout, 2004), 307–38; idem, ‘Barking’s Monastic School, Late Seventh to Twelfth Century: History, Saint Making and Literary Culture’, Barking Abbey and its Books, ed. J. Brown and D. Bussell (York, 2012), in press. For Glaston- bury see B. Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses (London, 2003), 86. For Winchester, see Asser, De rebus gestis Ælfredi LXXV (Asser’s Life of King Alf- red, ed. Stevenson, 57–9). 75 D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar, Stud. in AS Hist. 3 (Woodbridge, 1992), 191. Cf. M. R. Godden, ‘King Alfred’s Preface and the Teach- ing of Latin in Anglo-Saxon England’, Eng. Hist. Rev. 117 (2002), 596–604. 76 S. xi1 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 239; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 435; A. N. Doane, Gram- mars, ASMMF 15 (Tempe, 2007), no. 4). L. S. Chardonnens, ‘London, British Li- brary, Harley 3271: the Composition and Structure of an Eleventh-Century Anglo- Saxon Miscellany’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Lazzari and D’Aronco, 3–34. 77 M. Gretsch, The Intellectual Foundations of the English Benedictine Reform, CSASE 25 (Cambridge, 1999).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 21 was written in English rather than Latin out of deference not to the incompetence of women but the incompetence of bishops, and the equality of the sexes which flourished in the eighth century in learning and in literacy was replaced in the tenth century by equality in ignorance’.78 Christopher Hohler was even more sweeping:

everything conspires to suggest that the knowledge of Latin among the clergy was almost universally low, and that, except in so far as an insignifi- cant minority of scholars was prepared, as well as able, to provide translations, the [English] Church was cut off from the general cultural heritage of the West.79

Martin Blake gives a more measured assessment. ‘Neither Ælfric [in his De temporibus anni] nor Byrhtferth [in his Enchiridion] aspires to the heights of scientific learning contained in Bede’s DTR [De temporum ratione], and this suggests an educational curriculum in Eng- land at the time which had limited ambitions in this area’.80 And although Blake agrees that Ælfric’s De temporibus anni was originally intended for the instruction of parish priests, he also considers that it might have been attractive to those who had a training in Latin but ‘still found it easier to consult a vernacular reference book where one was available’.81 Blake observes that ‘most extant copies of DTA [De temporibus anni] are contained in manuscripts clearly organised for monastic use, and some of the Latin texts which accompany it in these manuscripts indicate that fluency in Latin on the part of monks could by no means be taken for granted, even at prestigious centres like Winchester and Canterbury’.82 For Ælfric, the most pressing area in need of reform was the faith and morals of the laity, particularly in remote places where there had for generations been little contact with churchmen. But reform of the religious orders, which depended centrally upon raising the standard of Latin literacy and learning, was a high priority for Æthelwold and for his former student, and there is clear evidence that a Latin educational tradition was established at some male and female houses dur-

78 C. Fell, Women in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1984), 128. 79 Hohler, ‘Some Service Books’, 74. 80 Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, ed. and trans. M. Blake, AST 6 (Cambridge, 2009), 66. 81 Ibid. 46. 82 Ibid. 46.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 22 Stephanie Hollis ing the Reform period (whether or not as a result of Æthelwold’s direct intervention), which was maintained up to and in some cases beyond the Norman Conquest, despite the destruction and instability caused by the second Viking invasion (c. 980–1016).83 Ælfric, for instance, translated into the vernacular an exhortation of Basil’s that he wished to address to all monks and nuns – he evidently did not think he could assume universal Latin literacy among the religious orders – but the rule he wrote for his own monks was in Latin.84 And although Æthelwold translated the Benedictine Rule, his ostensible reason was to ensure instruction in the fundamentals of the religious life for those who joined religious communities as adults, and hence, by implica- tion, had not been taught to read Latin as oblates were.85 The importance placed on the teaching of Latin is demonstrated by Ælfric’s authorship of a vernacular textbook for teaching Latin grammar, and its repeated copying throughout the eleventh century.86 It may well be that raising the standard of Latin was to some extent un- dermined by the prior teaching of vernacular literacy and by the provi- sion of vernacular reading material, but I want in this section to emphasize that the two computistical texts in the vernacular produced during the Benedictine Reform period (Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, c.

83 See Wulfstan of Winchester: the Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Med. Texts (Oxford, 1991). Wulfstan’s vita presents Æthelwold’s Reform largely in terms of imposing adherence to the Rule, and its only reference to education concerns Æthelwold’s vernacular translations for his Winches- ter pupils (XXXI; Lapidge and Winterbottom, 46–8), but we know the names of at least three Latinists taught by him (Wulfstan of Winchester, Ælfric and Godeman, abbot of Peterborough and Thorney). Winchester, St Mary’s (Nunnaminster), is the only female house that Æthelwold is said to have reformed. See further Hollis, ‘Wil- ton as a Centre of Learning’, and ‘Barking’s Monastic School’. 84 The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Hexameron of St. Basil, or, Be godes six daga weorcum, and the Anglo-Saxon Remains of St. Basil’s Admonitio ad filium spiritua- lem, ed. H. W. Norman, 2nd ed. (London, 1848), 31–55; Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, ed. C. A. Jones, CSASE 24 (Cambridge, 1998). 85 An Account of King Edgar’s Establishment of Monasteries (Councils & Synods with other Documents Relating to the English Church I: A.D. 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols (Oxford, 1981) I, 142–54). Whitelock is surely right that, although this treatise of Æthelwold’s concludes with an exhortation to abbesses, it was also intended for circulation to abbots (ibid. 153, n. 1). 86 Aelfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed. J. Zupitza, Sammlung Englischer Denk- mäler in kritischen Ausgaben 1 (Berlin, 1880). See J. Hill, ‘Ælfric’s Grammatical Triad’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Lazzari and D’Aronco, 285– 307.

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1011, and Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, c. 995) cannot be regarded as representative of the standard of scientific study in the monasteries, because both were originally intended for the edification of pastoral priests and ordinands.87 Nor can the subsequent copying of Ælfric’s De temporibus anni in manuscripts that demonstrate an imperfect grasp of Latin be taken as evidence of a general lack of fluency in Lat- in even among monks at reformed monasteries. The implementation of reformist aspirations to eradicate non- Christian beliefs and customs among the laity made it essential to raise the educational standard of the parish priests who preached and ministered to them. Ælfric deplored the ignorance and inadequate Lat- in of the parish priest who was his first teacher.88 His pastoral letters called upon examining bishops to require candidates for ordination to demonstrate knowledge of the liturgical calendar (particularly the ability to calculate the date of Easter and other movable feasts). Archbish- op Wulfstan reveals, however, that it was sometimes necessary to ordain candidates who were not up to standard.89 Byrhtferth, in his Enchiridion, was particularly concerned to prepare his students for this examination. He repeatedly intimates that clerics and ‘uplandish’ priests are lazy and ignorant, in contrast to ‘þam iungum munecum þe heora cildhad habbað abisgod on cræftigum bocum …. Nu þyrst heom þearle swyðe to þissum cræfte’.90 But although he was not sanguine about his clerical students’ chances of gaining episcopal approval, he was nevertheless hopeful of creating an educated younger generation of priests who would pass on their knowledge to older priests of the kind Ælfric deplored.91 It is important to bear in mind, then, that Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion is directly addressed to a mixed audience of Latin educated monastic schoolboys and men who were being trained as secular priests (it may

87 Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. P. S. Baker and M. Lapidge, EETS ss 15 (Oxford, 1995); Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, ed. and trans. Blake. 88 Old English Preface to the Translation of Genesis (Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. J. Wilcox, Durham Med. Texts 9, corrected repr. (Durham, 1996), 116/11–6). 89 Wulfstan, On the Examination of Candidates for Ordination (Councils & Syn- ods, ed. Whitelock, Brett and Brooke, I, 422–7. 90 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion II.3 (Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, 120/240–4; see also 94/19–21, 232/26–9). ‘Young monks who have occu- pied their childhoods with learned books …. Now they have an overwhelming thirst for this science’. 91 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion I.2 (ibid. 42/323–5, 120/248–53).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 24 Stephanie Hollis even have been pieced together from his students’ lecture notes).92 As Ramsey was one of Æthelwold’s reformed monasteries, the practice of educating ordinands side by side with oblates is likely to have been customary at other reformed monasteries. The Enchiridion gives de- tailed instruction on time-reckoning and the divisions of time as well as the practical knowledge required of priests. It also contains a section on rhetoric, and one on number symbolism and the six ages of the world, and thus reflects the tendency of computus to encompass any areas of knowledge that reflected the ‘measure, number and weight’ that God had imparted to all aspects of the cosmos at its creation.93 Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion is a simplified commentary on a number of texts, chiefly Bede’s De temporum ratione, Rabanus’s De computo and Hilperic’s De computo ecclesiastico.94 It does not attempt to explain sidereal time, for instance, but it cannot be regarded as evidence of limitations in Byrhtferth’s own education. He (and his fellow monks at Ramsey) were taught c. 985–7 by a leading continental computus scholar, Abbo of Fleury, and a collection of Latin computistical texts compiled by Byrhtferth is preserved in an early twelfth- century manuscript copied at Thorney.95 Byrhtferth, indeed, gestures apologetically to the monastic members of his audience for the rudimentary instruction he is obliged to give to priests, and at one point insists on further elaborating his explanation so that he will not feel embarrassed in front of learned men.96 He was not an original scholar of the same stature of Bede (few were), but examination of his Latin computistical compilation has established that he contributed to the

92 Ibid. lxxix. Baker and Lapidge note an absence in England of the continental ‘in- terior’ and ‘exterior’ monastic schools. 93 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion I.1 (ibid. 7/80–1). See further F. Wallis, ‘Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts’, Manuscript Sources of Medieval Medicine: a Book of Essays, ed. M. R. Schleissner, Garland Reference Lib. of the Humanities 1576 (New York, 1995), 105–43. 94 See further Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, lxxxvi– xciv. 95 Oxford, St John’s College 17 (s. xiiin (c. 1110), Thorney; Ker, Catalogue, no. 360; Gameson, Manuscripts, no. 794). See Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 153–6. It is not now thought that the manuscript is an exact replica of Byrhtferth’s compilation. See further F. Wallis, The Calendar & the Cloister: Oxford – St. John’s College MS 17, accessed 1 July 2011 . 96 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion III.3 (Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, 182/275–7).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 25 study of the abacus.97 Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, then, is an abundant example of what may seem scarcely imaginable in the Age of Bede – the teaching of computus in the vernacular. Importantly, Byrhtferth repeatedly makes it clear that, were it not for the presence of priests and clerks, he would be teaching his young monks in Latin. He remarks occasionally on the difficulties of finding English equivalents for Latin terms, and explains at one point that he must borrow a little from Latin.98 One of the first modern readers of Byrhtferth’s work observed that ‘Byrhtferth is a very poor computist’, and that Old English ‘is evidently not a language suitable for scientific works’.99 Perhaps Byrhtferth deserves a little more recognition for his attempts to vernacularize computus study? Donald Bullough remarked that it is not clear how far Byrht- ferth had to create new words for this purpose, since (in his opinion) Ælfric had partly anticipated him, ‘but the range of ideas, often of considerable complexity, of which the English language was a medium was now greatly extended’.100 Were there in the field of computus, as Bezzo concludes in her study of medical language, (Graeco-)Latin- ate terms used by specialists and the learned which were not used in everyday language, or did the teaching of computus in the vernacular filter down and make it to some extent accessible to the laity? Ælfric’s De temporibus anni (c. 995) is extremely brief by contrast, but similarly provides an introduction to cosmology that combines explanation of practical matters of time-reckoning of immediate interest to priests and ordinands with explanations of natural phenomena. It also condemns lunar prognostication.101 The earliest copy is preserved in a manuscript containing Ælfric’s first series of Catholic Homilies, together with a number of texts of evident use to pastoral priests, and

97 G. R. Evans, ‘Schools and Scholars: The Study of the Abacus in English Schools c. 980–c. 1150’, EHR 94 (1979), 71–89. 98 Byrhtferth, Enchiridion II.1, II.3 (Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, 66/190–3, 104/21–2). 99 R. Steele, review of Byrhtferth’s Manual, ed. S. J. Crawford (1929), Mod. Lang. Rev. 26 (1931), 351–2, at 352. 100 D. A. Bullough, ‘The Educational Tradition in England from Alfred to Ælfric: Teaching utriusque lingua’, SettSpol 19, 2 vols (Spoleto, 1972) II, 453–94, at 486. Byrhtferth probably knew Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, but made little identifiable use of it. 101 See L. S. Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100: Study and Texts, Brill’s Stud. in Intellectual Hist. 153 (Leiden, Boston, 2007), 117–21.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 26 Stephanie Hollis this strongly supports the view that De temporibus anni was specifi- cally written for them.102 Unlike Byrhtferth, Ælfric is not known to have made a special study of computus, but his guardedly simple explanation of the wonders of God’s creation doubtless reflects his assessment of what was best suited to his intended audience. There are few signs that Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion was known outside Ramsey.103 But vernacular study of computus at other centres is reflected in the appearance of Old English notes on practical information relating to the liturgical calendar.104 Typically these notes relate to epacts, concurrents, ferial regulars and rules for finding movable feasts. They tend to occur in combination with vernacular notes on biblical persons and events of numerical signification, such as the Ages of the World and the age of the Virgin (the kinds of topics which, as Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion shows, were closely associated with computus).105 Substantial clusters of vernacular computus and related notes occur in five manuscripts, and single items are found in seven others.106 A number of manuscripts containing vernacular computus notes also contain prognostics, whose association with computus rests upon their use of measurements of time and/or observation of

102 Cambridge, Univ. Lib., Gg. 3. 28 (s. x/xi, Cerne?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 15; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 11; J. Wilcox, Homilies by Ælfric and other Homilies, ASMMF 17 (Tempe, 2008), no. 1). See Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, ed. and trans. Blake, 38– 46. 103 A few fragmentary excerpts from the Enchiridion are extant, see Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 152–3. 104 Computus notes in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are more generally in Latin. 105 See Kees Dekker’s contribution in the present volume, 65–95; idem, ‘Anglo- Saxon Encyclopaedic Notes: Tradition and Function’, Foundations of Learning, ed. Bremmer and Dekker, 279–315. See also Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 60–1. 106 The Old English computus notes are printed by H. Henel, Studien zum alteng- lischen Computus, Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 26 (Leipzig, 1934), 36–68. The principal manuscripts are: CCCC 422, pp. 27–570 (s. ximed (1060/61?), prob. Win- chester, New Minster?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 70B; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 111; Graham et al., CCCC I, no. 8); London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Caligula A. xv, fols 120–153, + Egerton 3314, fols 9–72 (s. xiex (in and after 1073), Canterbury, Christ Church (and St Augustine’s?); Ker, Catalogue, no. 139; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 411; Gameson, Manu- scripts, no. 370); London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Titus D. xxvii + Titus D. xxvi (1023x1031, Winchester, New Minster; Ker, Catalogue, no. 202; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 380); London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Vitellius E. xviii (s. ximed or xi3/4, Winchester, New Minster; Ker, Catalogue, no. 224; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 407; Pulsiano, Psalters I, no. 6); Harley 3271. See also Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 185–9.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 27 natural phenomena to predict the future.107 The prognostics are sometimes also in the vernacular, and some of the Latin prognostics have Old English interlinear glosses.108 Three manuscripts containing substantial clusters of computus and prognostic notes also contain copies of all or part of Ælfric’s De temporibus anni.109 This is a somewhat unexpected combination, since Ælfric, like many highly educated reformist churchmen on the continent, condemned most forms of foretelling the future, together with belief in lucky and unlucky days, as incompatible with Christianity.110 The preservation of prognostics in seemingly monastic manuscripts, regarded as evidence of what Heinrich Henel termed ‘Mönchsaberglaube’,111 has helped (certainly in past decades) to encourage the view that the intellectual standards of Anglo-Saxon monasteries were in a state of deep decline on the eve of the conquest. So too does the appearance of texts redo- lent with ‘monkish superstition’ combined with the use of the vernacular and/or substandard Latin. Valerie Flint, however, countered this view by arguing that material unacceptable to the orthodox, such as prognostication, was disseminated by monasteries involved in training secular priests in the hope that it would replace native pagan beliefs and practices, which orthodox churchmen regarded as even more dangerously incompatible with Christianity. In her view, monasteries which were responsible for the training of pastoral priests preferred to accommodate paganism in a variety of ways, instead of undertaking the thorough-going eradication of all erroneous beliefs and practices

107 Wallis, ‘Medicine in Medieval Calendar Manuscripts’, 112–22. 108 Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics, 900–1100; Anglo-Saxon Prognostics: an Edition and Translation of Texts from London, British Library, MS Cotton Tibe- rius A.iii., ed. and trans. R. M. Liuzza, AST 8 (Cambridge, 2011). 109 Caligula A. xv; London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Tiberius A. iii, fols 2–173 (s. ximed, Canterbury, Christ Church; Ker, Catalogue, no. 186; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 363); Titus D. xxvii. 110 A. L. Meaney argued persuasively that Ælfric was not merely echoing patristic condemnations but addressing practices actually existing in late Anglo-Saxon Eng- land; see her ‘Ælfric and Idolatry’, Jnl of Religious Hist. 13 (1984), 119–35; idem, ‘Ælfric’s Use of his Sources in his Homily on Auguries’, Eng. Stud. 66 (1985), 477–95. Anonymous translators of prognostics, in turn, used Ælfric’s vocabulary and ideas to authorise their adaptations (L. S. Chardonnens, ‘Ælfric and the Author- ship of the Old English De diebus malis’, Limits of Learning, ed. Giliberto and Te- resi, forthcoming). 111 H. Henel, ‘Altenglischer Mönchsaberglaube’, Englische Studien 69 (1934–5), 329–49.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 28 Stephanie Hollis demanded by orthodox bishops.112 In an earlier study, I followed her lead, and suggested that the manuscripts containing vernacular clusters of computus notes and prognostics either served the needs of pastoral priests, or were used in monastic schools where (as at Ramsey) ordinands were being educated alongside novice monks, and possibly also (following the practice at Winchester in Alfred’s time) the sons of freeborn men not intended for the religious orders.113 Subsequent studies of the manuscript context of Latin prognostics, however, suggests that even some highly educated members of reformed monasteries appear to have had an interest in prognostics in their own right – they are found even in the early twelfth-century copy of Byrhtferth’s Latin computus compilation in St John’s 17.114 (Ælfric thereby seems so isolated in his ultra- orthodox views as to tempt the speculation that these were responsible for Æthelwold’s star pupil being rusticated at Cerne Abbas instead of succeeding him as master the Winchester school.115) It still seems to me plausible, however, that largely vernacular manuscripts containing computus notes and prognostics (such as London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Caligula A. xv, and Cotton Tiberius A. iii) were used for the elementary instruction of a mixed audience that included men being trained as pastoral priests. It is also worth observing that not all manuscripts demonstrating vernacular literacy and substandard Latin need to be thought of as hailing from a monastic school training boys to be monks and men to be parish priests. There were a number of categories of people in the late Anglo-Saxon period who may not have aspired to fluency in Latin but were literate in the vernacular – not just lay pupils and the mature age postulants who were the ostensible target audience for Æthelwold’s translation of the Benedictine Rule, but men like Ealdorman Æthelweard who translated a vernacular chronicle into not terribly good Latin;116 high status laywomen ed-

112 Flint, The Rise of Magic, 87–172, 217–26, 301–28. 113 Hollis, ‘Scientific and Medical Writings’. 114 See Chardonnens, Anglo-Saxon Prognostics 900–1100, 126–38. For prognostics in this manuscript, see ibid. 541–4. 115 But the homiletic condemnations of Wulfstan and Ælfric, taken together with the Old English penitentials and canon law, suggest that, whatever the intellectual pro- clivities of the monastic orders, there was a serious desire to eradicate various kinds of indigenous divinatory beliefs and practices among the laity; and substitution of classi- cally derived ones may have seemed to some an acceptable strategy. 116 The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell, Nelson’s Med. Texts (London,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 29 ucated in the nunneries who owned glossed copies of the Psalter;117 religious solitaries, such as the vowed widows who pursued their vo- cations in their own homes, or attached to religious houses, whose wills sometimes include books, for instance.118 It is also possible that some of the entries in these manuscripts may have been copied by students rather than their teachers, either as translation exercises, or as part of their training as scribes. This, the Collo- quies of Ælfric Bata suggest, was an important part of a monastic education.119 He also implies that each of his students had his own individual book.120 However we may envisage the milieu of the manuscripts containing clusters of vernacular computus notes and prognostics, they are clearly for the use and/or instruction of students in the early stages of learning, and the educational level of late Anglo- Saxon monks (and nuns) as a whole cannot therefore be deduced from such manuscripts. The long-term aim of Ælfric Bata, however, who was probably a schoolmaster at Canterbury, was to teach his young pupils to read Lat- in books with such fluency that they in turn could teach others,121 and a recent article by Patrizia Lendinara lists over 250 ‘Anglo-Saxon manuscripts (up to 1100) containing works with a possible instructional use’.122 The list includes over forty Latin computus manuscripts as well as a small number of manuscripts containing arithmetic and astronomical material. Lendinara’s list, it must be noted, includes a number of manuscripts generally taken to be representative of the pro-

1962). Ælfric wrote English versions of Genesis and Lives of Saints for Ealdorman Æthelweard and his son (Old English Preface to the Translation of Genesis, and Prefaces to Lives of Saints (Ælfric’s Prefaces, ed. Wilcox, 116–21)). 117 E.g., Gunhild, daughter of Cnut, bequeathed a (lost) Psalter with Old English glosses to Saint-Donatien in Bruges in 1087 (see M. Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists from Anglo-Saxon England’, Learning and Literature in Anglo-Saxon England: Studies Presented to Peter Clemoes on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. M. Lapidge and H. Gneuss (Cambridge, 1985), 33–89, at 58–9). 118 S. Foot, Veiled Women, Stud. in Early Med. Britain 1, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1988) I, 110–44. 119 Colloquy XXIV (Anglo-Saxon Conversations: the Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, ed. and trans. S. Gwara and D. W. Porter (Woodbridge, 1997), 130–6. 120 Colloquies III and XXVI (ibid. 82–4, 158–60). 121 Colloquy IV (ibid. 84–8). 122 P. Lendinara, ‘Instructional Manuscripts in England: the Tenth- and Eleventh- Century Codices and the Early Norman Ones’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Lazzari and D’Aronco, 59–113, at 105–13.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 30 Stephanie Hollis gramme carried out by Norman ecclesiastics, from c. 1080, to restock and update Anglo-Saxon libraries, which they regarded as highly inadequate.123 On the whole late Anglo-Saxon Latin computus manuscripts have not received much attention. Perhaps it does not bode well that the late tenth-century revised version of the Winchester computus ‘requires of its users virtually no knowledge of arithmetic’.124 But it is in the Latin manuscripts read and used by monks (and sometimes nuns) who had already been successfully educated, not the vernacular miscellanies used for elementary instruction, that we will discover the level of learning, scientific and otherwise, achieved by Anglo-Saxon monastics. Here too, though, it may be worth observing that not all of the instructional manuscripts listed by Lendinara might have been read and used only in a monastic context. London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Tiberius B. v, for instance, is a lavishly illustrated Latin miscellany; it also contains Old English computus notes and Ælfric’s De temporibus anni, as well as Marvels of the East in both Old English and Latin.125 Dated c. 1050, the production of the manuscript coincides with the arrival at the court of Edward the Confessor of the children of Edward Æthel- ing, who included nephews under consideration as heir(s) apparent, and a niece later famed for her learning as Margaret, Queen of Scot- land. The vita that Edward’s wife Edith commissioned in his honour says that she undertook the education of these children.126 The vita makes no mention of quadrivium subjects in its eulogy of the learning Edith acquired as a student at the Wilton nunnery, but a posthumous epigram commemorates her as a teacher of the seven liberal arts.127 This is, of course, pure speculation, but offers one way of making

123 R. M. Thomson, ‘The Norman Conquest and English Libraries’, The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture, ed. P. Ganz, Bibliologia: elementa ad librorum studia perti- nentia 3–4, 2 vols (Turnhout, 1986) II, 27–40. 124 Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion, ed. and trans. Baker and Lapidge, xlix. 125 Tiberius B. v, fols 2–73 and 77–88 (s. xi2/4, Canterbury, Christ Church?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 193; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 373; Doane and Grade, Deluxe and Illus- trated Manuscripts, no. 5). See An Illustrated Miscellany, ed. McGurk et al. 126 Vita Eadwardi I.2 (The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, Attribut- ed to a Monk of Saint-Bertin, ed. and trans. F. Barlow, Oxford Med. Texts, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1992), 24). 127 Godfrey of Winchester (d. 1107). ‘You teach the stars, measuring, arithmetic, the art of the lyre,/ The ways of learning and grammar,/ An understanding of rhetoric allowed you to pour out speeches’: F. Barlow, The Godwins: the Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (Harlow, 2002), 115–6.

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Late Anglo-Saxon Medical Literature Two further vernacular medical codices were produced during the Benedictine Reform period. The copying at Winchester of Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III in the manuscript in which they have come down to us might also have taken place during the Reform period, but could equally well have occurred before Æthelwold expelled the secular canons from Winchester, Old Minster, in 963. The Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius was one of the underlying sources of the Leechbooks, and must therefore have been involved in the earlier vernacularization of Latin medical and pharmacological terms. The eighth-century Mercian origin of the Old English translation of the Herbarium proposed by H. J. de Vriend, however, has not found general acceptance.128 The three eleventh-century vernacular translations of the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius all derive from the same original, which Maria D’Aronco dates to the mid or late tenth century, and connects with Æthelwold’s reforming activities.129 A list of books that Æthelwold sent to Peterborough includes Medicinalis.130 This suggests that he favoured the study of medicine in the reformed monasteries (it was after all one of the branches of learning authorized by Isidore), whether as an academic study or for the training of practitioners. The individually distinctive nature of the three Old English translations of the Herbarium, however, suggests circulation of the exemplar among different institutions over a period of half a century rather than programmatic diffusion from a single centre.131 It does not

128 The Old English Herbarium and Medicina de quadrupedibus, ed. de Vriend, xlii–xliii. Cf. Bately, ‘Old English Prose’, 101–3. 129 M. A. D’Aronco, ‘L’erbario anglosassone, un’ipotesi sulla data della traduzi- one’, Romanobarbarica 13 (1994–5), 325–65. 130 Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists’, 53. 131 The Herbarium in London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Vitellius C. iii, fols 11–85 (s. xi1 or ximed, Canterbury, Christ Church?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 219; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 402; Doane, Books, no. 4), is handsomely illustrated throughout with coloured drawings. See The Old English Illustrated Pharmacopoeia. British Library Cotton Vitellius C III, ed. M. A. D’Aronco and M. L. Cameron, EEMF 27 (Copenhagen, 1998). In Oxford, Bod. Lib., Hatton 76, fols 68–130a (s. ximed, Worcester?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 328; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 633; C. Franzen, Worcester Manuscripts, ASMMF 6 (Tempe, 1998), no. 5), roughly corresponding spaces have been left for illustrations. London, Brit. Lib., Harley 585 (s. xi1, S England?; Ker, Catalogue, no.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 32 Stephanie Hollis seem to have been known to Ælfric, for only a little over half of the Latin plant names in the Glossary designed for use with his Grammar coincide with herbs in the enlarged Old English Herbarium.132 Whereas Bald’s Leechbook is a practical working manual for a specialist practitioner, the enlarged Old English Herbarium (where the organizing principle is the herbal ingredient instead of diseases or parts of the body to be treated) is more suitable for study, either by readers interested in the healing properties of plants and other sub- stances as a branch of learning, or for the purposes of (self-) education as a practitioner. This difference is also reflected in the contrasting nature of authority in the two works. The vernacularization of the Leechbooks was, simultaneously, a form of cultural adaptation and assimilation. The ‘Englishing’ of the pharmacopeia is mirrored in the way that names of classical medical authorities have been removed in the process of transmission. The guarantee of the remedies’ efficacy derives instead from the wisdom of the past, a tradition of wise leeches possessing specialist expertise (‘as leeches know how’); a tradition that could as easily be Anglo-Saxon as any other, for the only two leeches named are Dun and Oxa.133 The translation of the Herbarium, on the other hand, retains the original’s repeated references to Greek deities or heroes as the originators from which humankind derived knowledge of the healing properties of herbs. This is further emphasised in London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Vi- tellius C. iii, which opens with a captioned portrait of Apuleius Plato- nicus receiving a book from Aesculapius, the god of medicine, and Chiron the centaur, mentor of Aesculapius.134 The fact that Isidore in his Etymologiae similarly attributes the origins of medicine to Apollo and his son Aesculapius doubtless contributed to the popularity of the Herbarium.135 As with the seeming interest in prognostics by reformed

231; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 421; Doane, Books, no. 5), where the Herbarium is preserved with Lacnunga, has neither illustrations nor spaces; it is not a neat copy, and has crude marginal sketches. 132 Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar, ed. Zupitza, 310–1. 133 Cf. D. Banham, ‘A Millennium in Medicine? New Medical Texts and Ideas in England in the Eleventh Century’, Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart, ed. S. Keynes and A. P. Smyth (Dublin, 2006), 230–42, at 234, who construes this Anglicization as ignorance of the Graeco-Roman tradition. 134 See L. E. Voigts, ‘The Significance of the Name Apuleius to the Herbarium Apulei’, Bulletin of the Hist. of Medicine 52 (1978), 214–27. 135 Isidore, Etymologiae IV.iii, IV.ix.12, IV.xiii (Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymo-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 33 communities, the enlarged Old English Herbarium’s assertion of Greek divinities and demi-gods as the source of healing knowledge runs counter to orthodox pronouncements. Ælfric and Archbishop Wulfstan both inveighed against classical paganism and its deities, and Ælfric further excised references to classical mythology from the sources he used for his Grammar.136 There were evidently among the reformed monasteries more liberal and sophisticated views of the classical world than we find expressed by those who sought to eradicate all forms of theological error.137 Unless, of course, the enlarged Old English Herbarium was translated and owned by un-reformed communities. Unlike the Leechbooks and the enlarged Old English Herbarium – which contain a high proportion of remedies that retain the structure of the classical recipe, apply treatments directly to the body and have an implicitly natural aetiology of disease – the remedies in Lacnunga make noticeable use of ‘popular’ practices.138 Lacnunga also includes passages of Old English alliterative verse charms, whose Germanic pagan references have been much commented on.139 There is also a strong strain of liturgical healing in Lacnunga, rare in the Leechbooks. Lacnunga may not have existed in its present form until the early eleventh century, but it draws on much older material. In particular, it contains material similar to that found in prayer-books compiled at double monasteries in the West Country in the late eight or early ninth century and, tellingly, one of its concluding entries is a prayer for pro- tection against the plague for male and female servants of God.140 A possible explanation for its disorganized nature is that the scribe- compiler was selecting material from one or more early prayer-books which had remedies entered in the margins and in blank spaces. logiarum, ed. Lindsay, I). 136 See L. E. Voigts, ‘One Anglo-Saxon View of the Classical Gods’, Stud. in Ico- nography 3 (1977), 3–16. 137 V. Law, Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages, Longman Lin- guistics Lib. (London, 1997), 208–10. 138 ‘Popular’ practices typically do not involve direct treatment of the body, and their aetiology is generally supernatural. See further Hollis, ‘Scientific and Medical Writings’, 199–201. 139 See, e.g., B. R. Hutcheson’s contribution in the present volume, 175–202. 140 Anglo-Saxon Remedies, ed. and trans. Pettit, I, 124–6. See P. Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in Western England, 600–800, CSASE 3 (Cambridge, 1990), 273–327.

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Lacnunga, then, with its combination of popular, and possibly even ultimately pagan practices, on the one hand, and, on the other, its ex- plicitly Christian prayer formulae and its use of masses and ecclesiastical ingredients such as holy oil, seems – in marked contrast to the Leechbooks and the enlarged Old English Herbarium – to represent the kind of pastoral accommodation to a Christian framework of lay practices prohibited by orthodox ecclesiastics that Flint took to be the rationale of Old English medical literature.141 That might have been the original purpose of Lacnunga, but its preservation in the same manuscript as copies of the enlarged Old English Herbarium suggests that this manuscript, like the manuscript containing Bald’s Leechbook and Leechbook III, is a medical codex compiled for the use of a specialist practitioner.142 And although Lacnunga has commonly been associated with pastoral priests giving charitable medical treatment to poor and superstitious rural parishioners upon whom Christianity had yet to make much impression, a number of its remedies, like those in Bald’s Leechbook, appear to have taken shape in a very affluent milieu. In one of its veterinary remedies, for instance, the owner of ailing cattle is directed to have them valued before paying a tithe to the church.143 The indications are that the study and/or practical use of medical literature, both vernacular and Latin, was widely disseminated during the eleventh century in southern England. Of the four extant vernacular medical codices, only the copy of the Leechbooks (generally assigned to Winchester) has a relatively secure provenance, but each of them appears to have originated at a different centre.144 The Medici- nalis that Æthelwold sent to Peterborough, like the Librum medicinalis included in the list of books taken to the continent shortly after the conquest by Sæwold, abbot of Bath, were very probably in Latin, but þe lece boc (‘the leechbook’) in the possession of a priest at Bury St Edmunds during the abbacy of one of Edward the Confessor’s physicians, Baldwin (1065–1097/8) was surely in the vernacular.145 An-

141 Flint, The Rise of Magic, 301–28. See also Hollis, ‘Scientific and Medical Writ- ings’, 202–4. Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 227–8. 142 Harley 585 and Royal 12. D. xvii, respectively. 143 See Hollis, ‘The Social Milieu of Bald’s Leechbook’. 144 See n. 131 above. 145 Lapidge, ‘Surviving Booklists’, 60, 75. The Bury ‘lece boc’ in the possession of ‘Sigar preost’ might have been assigned reading. Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall’, in contrast, shows that personal (rather than collective) ownership of medical books was

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 35 other collection of vernacular medical literature known to have been lost was contained in a collection of sermons burnt in the Cotton fire of 1731.146 The collection of fifty or so vernacular remedies copied in the early eleventh century at either Canterbury or Winchester (mentioned above), is another indication of a centre where specialist medical practice is likely to have been taking place.147 The individual remedies or small clusters of vernacular remedies recorded in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, mostly on flyleaves or in blank spaces, might in some cases represent access to a larger body of medical literature (and hence a centre of medical study), but they are generally difficult to interpret.148 The most interesting of these are found in the Galba Prayer-book, consisting of two herbal remedies (loosely related to Bald’s Leechbook), and, on a separate folio, a group of remedies representing a creative adaptation (or possibly a mistranslation) of material ultimately deriving from one of the constituent texts of the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius.149 Bernard Muir describes the manuscript, generally assigned to the Winchester nunnery (St Mary’s, aka Nunnaminster), as an exercise book being used at an institution where both men and women were being taught, and, in view of the large number of hands, he suggests the manuscript was used for scribal practice.150 Signs of the availability of medical literature at Nunnaminster is of interest in itself, but the indications of scribal training are especially interesting, because there is a case to be made that the mid tenth-century copy of the Leechbooks might not have been made at Old Minster, as is generally assumed, but at the Winchester nunnery.151 Other small clusters include a book-binding on common in early medieval monasteries. 146 London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Galba A. ii, iii (Ker, Catalogue, no. 156). 147 See n. 45 above. 148 For details, see Hollis and Wright, Old English Prose, 234–8. 149 London, Brit. Lib., Cotton Galba A. xiv + Nero A. ii, fols 3–13 (s. xi2/4, Win- chester?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 157; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 333; Doane, Books, no. 2). See S. Hollis and M. J. Wright, ‘The Remedies in British Library MS Cotton Galba A.xiv, fos 139 and 136r’, Notes & Queries ns 41 (1994), 146–7. 150 Both masculine and feminine forms are employed in the prayers. See A Pre- Conquest English Prayer-Book (BL MSS Cotton Galba A.xiv and Nero A.ii (ff. 3- 13)), ed. B. J. Muir, HBS 103 (Woodbridge, 1988), xiv, xiii, xvii. 151 The Leechbooks in Royal 12. D. xvii are generally assigned to Winchester, Old Minster, because the script is identical to the Parker Chronicle annals for 925–55 (Ker, Catalogue, 333); the same scribe was also responsible for two other manuscripts containing works associated with Alfred and his circle. The same hand has,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 36 Stephanie Hollis which three different hands recorded five remedies. It might, as Ker suggested, have come from an end-leaf of a vernacular medical codex; it might equally well have been penned by trainee scribes copying a few stray remedies into an entirely different kind of manuscript.152 The Glossary accompanying Ælfric’s Grammar (c. 992–1002), which includes a section on plant names, reflects the encyclopaedic interest in the natural world encouraged by Isidore’s Etymologiae.153 For Ælfric and his students the names of plants may simply have rep- resented knowledge of God’s creation that was of value for its own sake. As used in the creation of Latin dialogue by Ælfric Bata (c. 1005), however, there is a possible suggestion of interest in training medical practitioners (or perhaps apothecaries), since the colloquy in which the student is required by the schoolmaster to give a list of Lat- in names for herbs is framed as a request to tell the schoolmaster what plants are grown by the abbot’s physician in the monastery garden.154 As an indication of the importance of the vernacular in the field of herbal healing, it is noteworthy that Ælfric Bata’s students were also required to know the English names for the medicinal plants they listed. Almost all of the surviving Latin medical manuscripts of English provenance date from the eleventh century; several of them are assigned either to Bury St Edmunds or to Canterbury, St Augustine’s.155 Florence Glaze regards the appearance of Latin medical manuscripts however, more recently been identified in additions to the Book of Nunnaminster (London, Brit. Lib., Harley 2965 (s. viii/ix or ix1, Mercia or S England?; Ker, Cata- logue, no. 237; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 432; Doane, Books, no. 6)). See P. R. Robinson, ‘A Twelfth-Century Scriptrix from Nunnaminster’, in Of the Making of Books: Medi- eval Manuscripts, their Scribes and Readers: Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. P. R. Robinson and R. Zim (Aldershot, 1997), 73–93. 152 London, Wellcome Hist. Medical Lib. 46 (s. x/xi; Ker, Catalogue, no. 98; idem, ‘Supplement’, no. 98; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 523; Doane and Grade, Deluxe and Illus- trated Manuscripts, no. 7). 153 See W. Hüllen, English Dictionaries, 800–1700: the Topical Tradition (Oxford, 1999), 54–62. 154 Colloquy XXV (Anglo-Saxon Conversations, ed. and trans. Gwara and Porter, 136–58). Even if the abbot’s medicus was a fiction of Bata’s (which I doubt), it nevertheless suggests his familiarity with the cultivation of herbs for medical practice. 155 Banham, ‘A Millennium in Medicine?’, 237, lists Latin medical manuscripts of English provenance pre-dating 1100. Cf. Lendinara, ‘Instructional Manuscripts’, 113, who includes Digby 63. According to R. M. Liuzza, ‘Anglo-Saxon Prognostics in Context: a Survey and Handlist of Manuscripts’, ASE 30 (2001), 181–230, at 227, Digby 63 is ‘[d]evoted entirely to computistical texts’.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 37 in the eleventh century as an indication that England was keeping abreast of continental developments in beginning to make available academic training for medical practitioners.156 Debby Banham, by contrast, who regards the vernacular medical literature produced in pre- conquest England as insular in the worst sense of the word (separate from the ‘continental mainstream of medical learning’), considers that it was only by Norman importation of Latin medical manuscripts in the eleventh century (both before and after the conquest) that medicine in England was returned to the mainstream.157 It seems to me that she both understates the extent to which Bald’s Leechbook drew upon a variety of Latin sources (which, of course, are not extant because few manuscripts that were in England before 900 survived the Viking invasion), and overstates the extent to which the Leechbooks differ in nature from the Latin remedy collections for practical use compiled on the continent, which similarly omit theoretical and diagnostic material, because these were surplus to the requirements of trained practitioners.158 It does not necessarily follow that practitioners who used the Old English remedy collections must have been ignorant of Latin medical literature and therefore knew nothing of the theoretical and diagnostic underpinnings of their remedies. As Banham herself points out, there is one Latin medical manuscript that does survive from the tenth century, whose contents have yet to be identified.159 There are also signs in the surviving booklists of Latin

156 F. E. Glaze, ‘Master-Student Medical Dialogues: the Evidence of London, British Library, Sloane 2839’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Laz- zari and D’Aronco, 467–94. 157 Banham, ‘A Millennium in Medicine?’, 240. See also her ‘England Joins the Medical Mainstream: New Texts in Eleventh-Century Manuscripts’, Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, ed. H. Sauer and J. Story, Essays in AS Stud. 3 (Tempe, 2011), 341–52, at 346–7. 158 Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall’, 10–58, argues that the stripping away of the theoretical and diagnostic content of Greek literature was already well under way when it was translated into Latin in the late Roman world. M. L. Cameron, ‘The Sources of Medical Knowledge’, 152, concluded that ‘at each period examined, English physicians were using the same texts as were available elsewhere in Europe’. See also M. A. D’Aronco, ‘How “English” is Anglo-Saxon Medicine? The Latin Sources for Anglo-Saxon Medical Texts’, Britannia Latina: Latin in the Culture of Great Britain from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century, ed. C. Burnett and N. Mann, Warburg Institute Colloquia 8 (London, Turin, 2005), 27–41. 159 Durham, Cathedral Lib., A. III. 31, fols 1–4, 288–291 (s. xex; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 222.3). See Banham, ‘A Millennium in Medicine?’, 238. See also her retraction of the English origin of this manuscript in ‘England Joins the Medical Mainstream’

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 38 Stephanie Hollis medical literature in England in the tenth century that has been lost.160 And at least two of the Anglo-Latin manuscripts may be copies of material available in England before the reign of Alfred. One of these is the early twelfth-century Thorney manuscript connected with Byrht- ferth’s Latin computistical compilation; its Latin medical material (which includes a healing formula in Old English) might similarly have come from Ramsey.161 The eleventh-century Canterbury Class- book contains much older medical material, which is thought to have been taken to England by Theodore.162 It also includes extracts from the Practica Petrocelli, which was known in England in some form at least as early as the ninth century, because, as Charles Talbot demonstrated, it was drawn on by the compilers of Bald’s Leechbook.163 Nor should it be too readily assumed that it was invariably Normans rather than Anglo-Saxons who were responsible for the importation (or recopying) of Latin medical books in the eleventh century. In some cases, English monastic libraries before the conquest may have been better stocked with Latin medical books than those in Normandy, for in c. 1074 – before Norman ecclesiastics had begun their reform of English libraries – Anselm wrote to one of his monks who was at Can- terbury asking him to bring back copies of medical books that were not available at Bec.164 Even in the early thirteenth century, identifi- ably English medical books (presumably in Latin), were being re- tained in monastic libraries; Rochester’s 1202 catalogue includes

342, n. 2. 160 See p. 31 above. 161 For the medical items in St. John’s 17, see M. L. Cameron, ‘The Sources of Medical Knowledge’, 153–5. 162 Cambridge, Univ. Lib., Gg. 5. 35 (s. ximed, Canterbury, St Augustine’s?; Ker, Catalogue, no. 16; Gneuss, Handlist, no. 12; Doane and Grade, Deluxe and Illustrated Manuscripts, no. 1). M. Lapidge, ‘The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century Anglo- Latin Literature’, ASE 4 (1975), 67–111. Cf. Glaze, ‘Master-Student Medical Dia- logues’, 471, who suggests this material was transmitted to England in the late tenth or eleventh century ‘as part of the vogue in hermeneutic literature’. This material became conventional on the continent in the ninth century (Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall’, 115, n. 18), but that does not make it inherently impossible that it was taken to England by Theodore and subsequently transmitted to the continent. 163 C. H. Talbot, ‘Some Notes on Anglo-Saxon Medicine’, Medical Hist. 9 (1965), 156–69. See also M. L. Cameron, ‘Bald’s Leechbook’. 164 The Letters of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, trans. W. Fröhlich, Cistercian Stud. Ser. 96–7, 142, 3 vols (Kalamazoo, 1990–4) I, 43, 60. Anselm particularly wanted Opus medicinae hippocraticae (text and commentaries). Also at Canterbury was De pulsibus, perhaps Galen’s work of that name.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 39 medicinale anglicum as well as Salernitan texts; medicinale anglicum also appears in a twelfth-century Glastonbury catalogue, and the late twelfth-century Leominster catalogue records a medical book written in English script.165 An early fourteenth-century Canterbury catalogue lists an English illustrated herbal.166 What is remarkable about the English vernacular medical tradition is both its durability and its continuing capacity to innovate. All four of the vernacular medical codices have annotations and/or additions showing continuing use for centuries after the conquest. Bald’s Leech- book, for instance, has frequent Latin marginalia and nota signs from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.167 The illustrated translation of the enlarged Herbarium, too, has both English and Latin remedies, as well as a Latin tract on urine, added in a number of eleventh- to thirteenth- century hands.168 Lacnunga has late additions in Anglo-Norman as well as in English and Latin.169 In a number of fields, the existence of English vernacular literature gave incentive to analogous Anglo- Norman compositions and translations from Latin. This did not hap- pen in the area of medicine to any great extent because the increasing- ly academic professionalism of medicine in the twelfth century established Latin as its lingua franca. Glossaries such as the Laud Herbal Glossary nevertheless show that speakers of Anglo-Norman wanted to retain access to the English medical tradition.170 Remarkably, too, the last medical work in Old English was com- posed some fifty years after the conquest. Peri didaxeon (c. 1100) is based on a translation of Epistula I and parts of Book I of the Practica

165 Glaze, ‘The Perforated Wall’, 289, 292. 166 Ker, Catalogue, 285, did not think this referred to the Old English Herbarium in Vitellius C. iii. In addition, Latin and Norman-French medical literature was recorded in an English hand in the now lost Galba A. ii (see n. 146 above). 167 Ker, Catalogue, 332, also noted an Old English remedy added in an eleventh- century hand. 168 Ibid. 284. 169 Ibid. 306. 170 Oxford, Bod. Lib., Laud Misc. 567, fols 67–73 (s. xii; Ker, Catalogue, no. 345). Printed as The Laud Herbal Glossary, ed. J. R. Stracke (Amsterdam, 1974). M. H. Green, ‘Salerno on the Thames: the Genesis of Anglo-Norman Medical Liter- ature’, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: the French of England c.1100– c.1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (Woodbridge, 2009), 220–31. See also P. G. Rusche, ‘The Sources for Plant-Names in Anglo-Saxon England and the Laud Herbal Glossary’, Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden, ed. P. Dendle and A. Touwaide (Woodbridge, 2008), 128–44.

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Petrocelli.171 The source of Peri didaxeon is assumed to have been one of the new copies of the Practica Petrocelli brought into England in the eleventh century, rather than the source drawn on by Bald’s Leechbook; but it is worth noting that the oldest manuscript of the Practica surviving on the continent is dated to the mid ninth century, and it is this version that underlies the vernacularization.172 Peri didaxeon was evidently intended for practical use, not for study, and like earlier compilations of remedy books on both sides of the channel, it does not include much theoretical or diagnostic material. This new compilation was very enduring, for the only surviving copy is found in a medical codex dated c. 1200, which also contains a version of the Old English Herbarium.173 This text also demonstrates the ongoing creativity of the vernacular tradition, for it is based on the translation that underlies the earlier copies of the enlarged Old English Herbari- um, but adapts it for practical use by the alphabetic reordering (a- order) of the chapters on herbs.

Conclusion Although it has long been recognized that Alfred’s Preface to Cura Pastoralis cannot be taken at face value, its influence lingers on in the tendency to regard vernacular literacy as the corollary of an absence of competency in Latin. In particular, there is a continuing reluctance to accept that the vernacular was used as a medium of instruction in monastic schools in the Age of Bede. Yet Old English prose established itself remarkably soon after Augustine’s arrival as the customary form in which Anglo-Saxon law codes were written down. This parallels, and was perhaps influenced by, the early development of vernacular prose among Irish scholars, to whom even Bede was indebted for his expertise in computus, and it is the Irish glossing of Latin computus manuscripts which prompts reconsideration of whether Old English

171 Peri didaxeon, eine Sammlung von Rezepten in englischer Sprache aus dem 11./12. Jahrhundert nach einer Handschrift des Britischen Museums, ed. M. Löwe- neck, Erlanger Beiträge zur englischen Philologie 12 (Erlangen, 1896). 172 D. Maion, ‘The Fortune of the So-called Practica Petrocelli Salernitani in Eng- land: New Evidence and some Considerations’, Form and Content of Instruction, ed. Lendinara, Lazzari and D’Aronco, 495–512. 173 London, Brit. Lib., Harley 6258B (s. xiiex; Ker, Catalogue, xix; Ker, ‘Supple- ment’, 126, n. 1; Doane, Books, no. 7). The date of Peri didaxeon is disputed; for the re-dating of the original to c. 1l00, see D. Maion, ‘Il lessico tecnico Peri didaxeon: Elementi di datazione’, Il Bianco e il Nero 6 (2003), 179–86.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 41 was used in the teaching of computus to beginning students at early Anglo-Saxon monastic schools. The contemporary account of Bede’s last days, after all, turns upon the existence of a pupil able to write down from dictation Bede’s vernacular translation of St John’s Gos- pel. Missionaries were unable to proselytize without vernacular translations of fundamental Christian texts, and it is difficult to imagine that even Bede’s monastic schoolboys were able to understand the Latin computistical treatises he wrote for them without prior explanation in the vernacular. Whereas the only extant vernacular computistical texts which probably pre-date Alfred’s Reform are two short notes in the Old English Martyrology, use of the vernacular for medical writings prior to Alf- red’s Reform is abundantly demonstrated by Bald’s Leechbook, which survives in a copy of an original dated c. 900 on linguistic grounds, and is evidently based on a long tradition of vernacularization. The earliest indications we have of the vernacularization of medical terms are the Latin-English glossaries which are believed to embody the teaching of Theodore and Hadrian. These might also prove a fruitful source of evidence for the vernacularization of specialized computus terms in the Age of Bede. Notwithstanding a tendency to assume, from use of the vernacular in medical writings, that the study of medicine in England until the arrival of the Normans was an inferior imitation of continental developments that took place in Latin, Latin medical manuscripts were being studied at Winchester by Bishop Cyneheard and his circle at least as early as c. 754, some three decades before the Carolingian Reform, in which study of Latin medicine figured prominently. Alcuin’s in- volvement in this, after his appointment to the court of Charlemagne, suggests that Latin medical writings were also studied at York where he was educated. The translation of Latin remedies into Old English is not necessarily evidence of a low level of Latin literacy. Early Anglo-Saxon study of Latin medical texts was driven by a desire to make practical use of them, as is evident from Bishop Cyneheard’s complaint about the dif- ficulty of identifying the herbal ingredients specified in the medical books available to him. Once vernacular equivalents for ingredients had been securely identified, they were likely to be incorporated for convenience into copies of Latin remedies. The tenth-century Leiden Leechbook illustrates this process. As Latin medical remedies consist-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access 42 Stephanie Hollis ed primarily of lists of ingredients to be administered, translation of entire remedies was bound to follow. Although it has been suggested that Bald’s Leechbook was among the books translated by Alfred and his circle for the edification of general readers ignorant of Latin, it appears rather to have been compiled for the convenience of a specialized practitioner, very likely one of the professional medici attending Alfred, whose illnesses doubtless contributed to an increased interest in medical matters in his reign. The Benedictine Reform initiated by Æthelwold aimed to raise the standard of religious education among the laity. The education of pastoral priests was therefore an urgent necessity. Reformers were also, however, concerned to raise the standard of Latin literacy and learning within the monasteries. Byrhtferth’s Enchiridion makes it plain that he normally taught in Latin, but was obliged to employ the vernacular, and to offer only rudimentary instruction in computus, because he was addressing a mixed audience of young monks and youths being trained to satisfy future examiners that they were fit candidates for ordination. The manuscript context in which the earliest copy of Ælf- ric’s De temporibus anni is preserved confirms the expectation that this work, like much of his vernacular corpus, was intended to assist priests in instructing the laity. The Enchiridion and De temporibus anni, then, are not an index of the Latin competence or the computistical knowledge either of their authors or the adult monks educated by them. We are surely right to conclude that manuscripts containing vernacular computus notes, ex- amples of inadequate Latin and De temporibus anni were used in an educational milieu, but, particularly in view of Byrhtferth’s simulta- neous teaching of young monks and ordinands, and the evident importance to Ælfric Bata of training professional scribes, it should not be too readily assumed that such manuscripts are evidence of the low level of learning and Latinity attained by mature monks in the late Anglo-Saxon period. The evidence of their achievements (or otherwise) remains to be discovered in the neglected Latin computistical manuscripts of the period and those pertaining to the trivium. It was not only ordinands as well as monks (and nuns) who were educated inside the monasteries in the late tenth and eleventh centuries; so too were others, such as children of the laity not intended for the religious life. Conversely, manuscripts were also owned and used outside the monasteries by people of both sexes pursuing a variety of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:38:23PM via free access Anglo-Saxon Secular Learning and the Vernacular 43 life-styles, both religious and secular, and in attempting to convey the need for a more flexible view of the possible contexts in which manuscripts were created and used, I suggest, very tentatively, Queen Edith, teacher of Edward the Confessor’s heir(s) apparent, as a possible owner of a deluxe miscellany, among whose Latin contents are computus notes in the vernacular and Ælfric’s De temporibus anni. The vernacular tradition of medical literature, already established by the reign of Alfred continued with unabated vigour long after the conquest, at least until c. 1200, when Peri didaxeon, a translation based on the Practica Petrocelli, now thought to have originated c. 1100, was copied into the same manuscript as a new translation of the Her- barium of Pseudo-Apuleius. Vernacular medical writings appear to have been available at a number of centres in the late tenth and eleventh centuries. There is no necessity to conclude from this that Eng- land was cut off from the continental mainstream of medical knowledge until the importation of Latin medical manuscripts by Normans. One tenth-century Latin medical manuscript is extant that may have been produced in England, and Latin medical literature preserved with the Latin computistical collection attributed to Byrhtferth is also thought to be of Anglo-Saxon origin. Lost literature includes medicinalis referred to in two Anglo-Saxon booklists and medicinale anglicum in several later medieval catalogues, which are unlikely to have been vernacular leechbooks. The Latin medical manuscripts from which Bald’s Leechbook was derived seem to have disappeared during the Viking invasions. But Talbot established some time ago that its sources included extracts from the Practica Petrocelli, and extracts from this work are found in an early eleventh-century manuscript thought to contain medical literature dating back to Theodore. As the Peri didaxeon is based on a version of the Practica Petrocelli whose earliest witness is a ninth-century manuscript preserved on the continent, there is no apparent necessity to conclude that the translator of Peri didaxeon was working from a manuscript brought in by Normans in the eleventh century rather than one that had been available in Eng- land for at least two centuries.174

174 My thanks to Linda Templer for her help as research assistant for this essay.

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