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It is remarkable to be able to offer in a single sale two fragments from an Anglo-Saxon translation of the New Testament, a leaf from a Middle English Wycliffite translation of the Old Testament (lot 2) and a monumental thirteenth-century Latin Vulgate Bible from England, from the library of the Duke of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle (lot 49).

The first of these, the present fragments, are of the utmost rarity. Apart from these, only six manuscripts and two fragments survive: (i) Cambridge, University Library, MS.Ii.2.11, mid-eleventh century, Ker no.20; (ii) Bodleian, Bodley MSS.441, first half of eleventh century, Ker no.312; (iii) and Hatton 38, twelfth or thirteenth century: Ker no.325; (iv) British Library, Cotton Otho C.i, first half of eleventh century: Ker no.181; (v) Royal 1.A.XIV, second half of twelfth century: Ker no.245; (vi) Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS.140, first half of eleventh century: Ker no.35, and exhibited earlier this year in the Vatican in the Verbum Domini II exhibition; and the fragments, (a) Yale, Beinecke, MS.578, first half of eleventh century: Ker no.1; and (b) Bodleian, Eng.Bib.c.2, first half of eleventh century: Ker no.322. The present fragments are older than any other witness to the text , and if as seems likely the text is a product of the revival of monastic life in southern England under King Edgar and Archbishop Dunstan in the second half of the tenth century (see Luizza, II, 2000, ch.3), then they come from the same decades in which the translation was made.

The West Saxon Gospels was the first concerted attempt to produce a single coherent text of the scriptures in a form of English. The early date and localisation of the present fragments is important here, as it has long been supposed that the text was translated somewhere in the south-west of England, and the hand here might well suggest that this task was undertaken by the scribe or scribes of the present fragments in the vicinity of Exeter. If so, then these two strips must be the only known witness to one of the very earliest copies . The text holds an especial place in the history of the Bible in English, as it was used by early Protestant reformers to show that contrary to Catholic teaching, the Bible had existed in English in antiquity. This notion lay behind Archbishop Matthew Parker and John Foxe’s printing of The Gospels of the fower Evangelists translated in the olde Saxons tyme out of Latin, in 1571, and played an important role in justifying the religious revolution of the Reformation.

Manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon, or fragments of them, have been eagerly collected into institutional hands for several centuries, and come to the market perhaps only once or twice a generation. Those with Biblical translations do so only once a century or so. Of those listed above, the last to be sold were the fragments now in the Beinecke, which was reused in the binding of a fourteenth-century Hymnal once in the collection of Major Abbey: his sale in our rooms, 24 March 1975, lot 2955; the 4 leaves in Bodleian, Eng.Bib.c.2, which were bought in our rooms, 14 March 1891, lot 695; and before that Hatton 38, which was bought by the Bodleian as part of the library of the 1st Baron Hatton in 1671.

Our thanks to Dr. Peter Stokes for assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.