Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A special find has been made in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: A number of 17th-century book bindings contained pieces of parchment from a manuscript from the 11th century. The original manuscript may have belonged to a princess who fled England after the Norman Conquest.

Credit: Regionaal Archief Alkmaar

Many books were printed and bound in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bookbinders used parchment to strengthen their book bindings; that material was expensive and therefore people often chose to cut up old, medieval manuscripts. This often involved manuscripts that had lost their value: books that were too Catholic or were written in a language that could no longer be read.

Something very special was found in a number of book bindings in the Alkmaar Regional Archive: 21 fragments of a manuscript from the 11th century, an almost 1,000-year-old Latin psalter with Old English glosses. Thijs Porck, senior university lecturer of medieval English in Leiden, was involved in the find and analyzed the text and provenance of the fragments.

Reading between the lines: Old English glosses in a Latin psalter

Old English was spoken between about 500 and 1100 and is very similar to German, Frisian and Dutch. This is evident from the discovered Alkmaar fragments, in which an Old English translation was written above every Latin word: “ælce dæg” above tota die; “utgang wætera” above exitus aquarum; and “halig” above sanctus. These Old English glosses probably had a didactic purpose: with this translation aid between the lines, the user of this psalter could learn Latin.

For scholars, the discovery of a total of more than 500 Old English glosses in Alkmaar is important because they teach us more about the language of early medieval England—for example, the fragments contain a number of word forms that occur nowhere else, including the word “gewændunga” for the Latin commotionem “movement”—here, you might recognize the Dutch word wending “twist, turning.”