ABSTRACT
When Henry VIII's Antiquary, John Leland, died in I 55 z, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called his Collectanea. Volume III of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin-Old English glossary entitled 'Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico '. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from lElfric's Glossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. 1 Although (excluding a Latin-Old Cornish version) the Glossary is extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts - two more manuscripts being known from sixteenthand seventeenth-century transcripts - this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of the Glossary; it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne's edition of the Collectanea in 1715 was in fact the first printing x Leland's transcript as printed by Hearne (see below, p. 155) was cited, without reference to its
relationship to JE!fric's Glossary, by Arthur A. Kennedy, A Bibliography of Writings on the English Language from the Beginning of Printing to the End of I922 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927), no. 3284, and by R. C. Alston, A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year I 8 o o III. I: Old English, Middle English, Ear!J Modern English Miscellaneous Works [and] Vocabulary (Menston, Leeds, 1970), nos. 12-14, reproduced in pis. x-xr. In an unpublished doctoral dissertation, 'The History of Old English and Old Norse Studies in England from the Time of Francis Junius till the End of the Eighteenth Century' (Oxford, 1938), J. A. W. Bennett also noted (p. 349, n. 2) that Leland derived this material from lElfric's Glossary. While this article was awaiting publication and copies of its abstract and typescript had been for some time in circulation, a note appeared which contains many of its conclusions without the evidence on which they are based: M. J. Swanton, 'Eine wenig bekannte Fassung von lElfrics Glossar ', ASNSL 213 (1976), 104-7.
