ABSTRACT

The Vercelli Book, as is well known, is a codex of the late tenth century containing a selection of religious prose and verse in Old English. Of the manuscript's twenty-nine items (some of which are defective owing to loss of leaves), six are alliterative poems and the rest prose homilies. There seems little doubt that one scribe (henceforth referred to as V) was responsible for writing the whole of the codex, even though the size of the writing changes considerably at various points, particularly towards the end of the volume where the lineation also changes. 1 As the earliest of the four extant poetic codices and the earliest surviving collection of homilies in the vernacular, the book is potentially a most important source of knowledge of tenth-century English; most linguistic studies which range over Old English as a whole have included some reference to it. Yet the language of the manuscript is a relatively neglected subject of study, the place of its composition has not been established and the circumstances of its compilation have not been fully explained. 2 This paper seeks to learn more of the book's origin in two ways: firstly, by examining its make-up in an attempt to determine the number and the nature of the sources that V used, and, secondly, by considering the distribution of distinctive linguistic forms in the manuscript in order to find out more about the nature of V's exemplars and about his background and training as displayed in his attitude to the language of his exemplars.