Anglo-Saxon Engl 35

The article aims to evaluate the likelihood that whelk dye was known in Anglo-Saxon England, either in the form of imported cloth and textile products, and/or as an activity carried out in England. The nature of whelk dye and the likely processing options available to early societies are considered in the light of extant records and modern experimentation in Israel and Britain. The currently available `hard' evidence is then presented from archaeology, manuscript studies, and the chemical analysis of textiles. Finally, the semantic and literary evidence is considered, including three passages from texts by Bede and Aldhelm, and a new interpretation of OE cornwurma.

The paper provides an edition, translation and discussion of four letters written by Flemish abbots to the archbishops of Canterbury between the years 980 and 991 and preserved in two manuscripts drawn on the archiepiscopal archives in the early-eleventh century. The letters document the increasing importance of cross-Channel relations in the late-tenth century and provide context for a number of hitherto unexplained indications of cultural, religious and financial exchanges between the county of Flanders and England. Includes

The article discusses an unfinished mappa mundi found in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and dates it to a late-eleventh-century (c. 1065--95) production in Worcester, identifying it as a nearly exact and earlier analogue of two later twelfth-century English maps of the world from the Ramsey area. The close connections between these three maps point to a unique, late Anglo-Saxon tradition of mappae mundi.