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Detailed record for Additional 23211
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| Title |
Fragments containing West Saxon and East Saxon royal genealogies (f. 1), Latin verses for calculating Easter (f. 1v) and a martyrology in Old English (f. 2r-2v) |
| Origin |
England (S.W.) |
| Date |
4th quarter of the 9th century |
| Language |
English and Latin |
| Script |
Minuscule |
| Decoration |
Black initial with penwork decoration, filled with yellow, red and green, surrounded with red dots (f. 2). Black initials filled with red, yellow or green, some surrounded with red dots. Rubrics in red (f. 1v). Punctuation marks, abbreviation symbols and accents traced in red. |
| Dimensions in mm |
145 x 100/10 (135 x 95) |
| Official foliation |
ff. 2 (+ 2 unfoliated paper flyleaves at the beginning, 1 between ff. 1 and 2 and 10 at the end) |
| Form |
Parchment codex |
| Binding |
BM/BL in-house. Bound together in 1859. |
| Provenance |
The two parchment leaves formed the pastedown of a printed book in the British Museum collections: a note on the front flyleaf states 'Received from the Dept of Printed Books, 31 March 1859'. |
| Notes |
The leaves were probably paste downs for the cover of a small octavo book and were severely trimmed.
The list of West Saxon kings from the god Woden to Alfred the Great is followed by regnal lists of East Saxon kings, with the third imperfect at the end (see Ker 1957). This is the only surviving pre-Conquest list of East-Saxon kings, according to Roberts (2005). It traces their descent from the god Seaxnet and ends with Sigered, who surrendered to Egbert, Alfred's grandfather, in 825.
The martyrology is for the days, 14th to 23rd April. It is in the same mixture of Mercian and West Saxon dialect as MS Additional 40165 and they were probably copied from the same exemplar (see Sisam 1953). |
| Select bibliography |
Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the Years 1854-1860 (London: British Museum, 1875), p. 848.
Cecilia Sisam., ‘An Early Fragment of the Old English Martyrology', Review of English Studies 4 (1953), 209-20 (pp. 210-12, 216).
N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), no. 127.
Raymond Page, 'Anglo-Saxon Texts in Early Modern Transcripts', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 6 (1977), 69-83 (p. 76).
Barbara Yorke, 'The kingdom of the East Saxons' Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985), (1-86), pp. 9-10, 13, 15, 16, 18.
Jennifer Morrish, ‘Dated and Datable Manuscripts Copied in England during the Ninth Century: A Preliminary List', Mediaeval Studies, 50 (1988), 512-38, (p. 531).
The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600-900, ed. by Leslie Webster and Janet Backhouse (London: British Museum, 1991), no. 30 [exhibition catalogue].
Karen Quinn and Kenneth Quinn, A Manual of Old English Prose (New York: Garland, 1990), no. 603.
David Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar: Six Essays on Political, Cultural, and Ecclesiastical Revival (Woodbridge: Brewer, 1992), pl. V.
Helmut Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: A List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 241 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), no. 282.
Thomas A. Bredehoft, Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 27, 35.
David Dumville, 'English Script in the Second Half of the Ninth Century' in Latin Learning and English Lore: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature for Michael Lapidge, ed. by Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe and Andy Orchard, 2 vols (Toronto, 2005), I, pp. 305-25 (p. 319).
Jane Roberts, Guide to Scripts used in English Writings up to 1500 (London: British Library, 2005), p. 45.
Michelle P. Brown, Manuscripts from the Anglo-Saxon Age (London: British Library, 2007), p. 80, pl. 58.
A. N. Doane, 'London, British Library, Add. 23211' in Saints' Lives, Martyrologies, and Bilingual 'Rule of St. Benedict, British Library, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile,19 (Tempe: Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), pp. 1-4. |
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