ABSTRACT
Whether or not the OE Bede was retained in the literary canon would have depended on our author’s reaction to the linguistic arguments put forward by Thomas Miller in 1890 and 1898, that the translator ‘belonged to the North Midland district’, and so could not be the West Saxon king.10 For amongst the unconvinced was Charles Plummer, who in his edition of the Chronicle, 1899, could still refer to ‘Alfred’s Bede’ without feeling any need for comment or justification. Indeed, if he did have a concern, it was with chronology, and with whether ‘Alfred’s Bede’ was later or earlier than ‘Alfred’s Orosius’.11 Moreover, Jacob Schipper, in his own edition of the Bede, 1897-99, was at that very time occupied with producing explanations for the Mercian element which in his view allowed for overall Alfredian authorship for the work, while slightly earlier, in 1893, J. W. Pearce had tried to square the circle by suggesting that the Bede
was ‘the joint work of several translators’, with Alfred possibly responsible only for the ‘extremely literal’ capitula and parts of Book I.12
