The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220

Mary Swan and Owen Roberson

Tournai, Bibliothèque Municipale, 134

[Cædmon’s Hymn]

Date: s. xii

Summary:

Old English Cædmon’s Hymn added in the margin of a s. xii copy of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica. Ker (1957, p. 457) notes that ‘the Latin text of the Historia ecclesiastica may not be in an English hand. The Old English is either in an English hand or has been carefully copied from an English exemplar: the occasional forms of one or two letters suggest that it is not impossibly in the same hand as the Latin’. The manuscript was destroyed by fire in 1940, and Ker (1957) described it from a reduced facsimile (P. Faider ad Jan P. van Sint, Catalogue des Manuscrits conserves à Tournai (1950)). Its place of production is not known.

Manuscript Items:

1. Item: fol. 78v

   Title (A.32.2): Cædmon's Hymn: West Saxon Version

   Incipit: (fol. 78v) Nu we sceolan herian heofonrices weard. metodes mihte.

   Explicit: (fol. 78v) þa middan eard mancynnes weard ece drihten æfter teode | firum foldan. frea ælmihtig

   Text Language: English

   Bibliography:

   Ker 1957, item 387

Administration Information:

Manuscript described by Mary Swan and Owen Roberson with the assistance of Hollie Morgan, with reference to published scholarship.

Bibliography:

Ker, N. R., Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; repr. 1990), item 387