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oral teaching and preaching. As time went on, how-ever, and monasteries were founded, many of whose inmates were imperfectly acquainted either with English or with Latin, a demand arose for English translations of the Scriptures. This took two forms. On the one hand, there was a call for word-for-word translations of the Latin, which might assist readers to a compre-hension of the Latin Bible; and, on the other, for con-tinuous versions or paraphrases, which might be read to, or by, those whose skill in reading Latin was small.

2. The earUest form, so far as is known, in which this demand was met was the poem of Caedmon, the work of a monk of Whitby in the third quarter of the 7th cent., which gives a metrical paraphrase of parts of both Testaments. The only extant MS of the poem (in the Bodleian) belongs to the end of the 10th cent., and it is doubtful how much of it really goes back to the time of Caedmon. In any case, the poem as it appears here does not appear to be later than the 8th century. A tradition, originating with Bale, attrib-uted an English version of the Psalms to Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne (.d. 707), but it appears to be quite baseless (see A. S. Cook, Bibl. Quot. in Old Bug. Prose Writers, 1878, pp. xiv-xviii). An Anglo-Saxon Psalter in an 11th cent. MS at Paris (partly in prose and partly in verse) has been identified, without any evidence, with this imaginary work. The well-known story of the death of Bode (in 735) shows him engaged on an EngUsh translation of St. John's Gospel [one early MS (at St. Gall) represents this as extending only to Jn 6'; but so abrupt a conclusion seems inconsistent with the course of the narrative] , but of this all traces have disappeared. The scholarship of the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow, which had an important influence on the textual history of the Latin Vulgate, did not concern itself with vernacular translations; and no further trace of an English Bible appears until the 9th century. To that period is assigned a word-for-word translation of the Psalter, written between the lines of a Latin MS (Cotton MS Vespasian A. I., in the British Museum), which was the progenitor of several similar glosses between that date and the 12th cent.; and to it certainly belongs the attempt of Alfred to educate his people by English translations of the works which he thought most needful to them. He is said to have undertaken a version of the Psalms, of which no portion survives, unless the prose portion (Ps 1-50) of the above-mentioned Paris MS is a relic of it; but we still have the translation of the Decalogue, the summary of the Mosaic law, and the letter of the Council of Jerusalem (Ac IS^^-^"), which he prefixed to his code of laws. To the 10th cent, belongs probably the verse portion of the Paris MS, and the interlinear translation of the Gospels in Northumbrian dialect inserted by the priest Aldred in the Lindisfarne Gospels (British Museum), which is repeated in the Rushworth Gospels (Bodleian) of the same century, with the difference that the version of Mt. is there in the Mercian dialect. This is the earliest extant translation of the Gospels into English.

3. The eariiest independent version of any of the books of the Bible has likewise generally been assigned to the 10th cent., but if this claim can be made good at all, it can apply only to the last years of that century. The version in question is a translation of the Gospels in the dialect of Wessex, of which six MSS (with a fragment of a seventh) are now extant. It was edited by W. Skeat, The Holy Gospels in Anglo-Saxon (1871-1877); two MSS are in the British Museum, two at Cambridge, and two (with a fragment of another) at Oxford. From the number of copies which still survive, it must be presumed to have had a certain circulation, at any rate in Wessex, and it continued to be copied for at least a century. The earliest MSS are assigned to the beginning of the 11th cent.; but it is observable that /Elfric the Grammarian, abbot of Eynsham, writing about 990,

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says that the English at that time 'had not the evan-gelical doctrines among their writings, . . . those books excepted which King Alfred wisely turned from Latin into English' [preface to iElfric's Homilies, edited by B. Thorpe, London, 1843-461. In a subsequent treatise (Treatise concerning the Old and New Testament, ed. W. Lisle, London, 1623) also (the date of which is said to be about 1010, see Dietrich, Zeitsch. f. hist. Theol. 1856, quoted by Cook, op. cit., p. Ixiv.) he speaks as if no English version of the Gospels were in exist-ence, and refers his readers to his own homilies on the Gospels. Since iBlfric had been a monk at Winchester and abbot of Cerne, in Dorset, it is diffi-cult to understand how he could have failed to know of the Wessex version of the Gospels, if it had been produced and circulated much before 1000; and it seems probable that it only came into existence early in the 11th century. In this case it was contemporaneous with another work of translation, due to ^Ifric himself. iElfric, at the request of iEthelweard. son of his patron iEthelmsr, ealdorman of Devonshire and founder of Eynsham Abbey, produced a paraphrase of the Hepta-teuch, homilies containing epitomes of the Books of Kings and Job, and brief versions of Esther, Judith, and Maccabees. These have the interest of being the earliest extant English version of the narrative books of the OT. [The Heptateuch and Job were printed by E. Thwaites (Oxford, 1698). For the rest, see Cook, op. cit.\

■ . 4. The Norman Conquest checked for a time all the vernacular literature of England, including the trans-lations of the Bible. One of the first signs of its revival was the production of the Ormulum, a poem which embodies metrical versions of the Gospels and Acts, written about the end of the 12th century. The main Biblical literature of this period, however, was French. For the benefit of the Norman settlers in England, translations of the greater part of both OT and NT were produced during the 12th and 13th centuries. Especially notable among these was the version of the Apocalypse, because it was frequently accompanied by a series of illustrations, the best examples of which are the finest (and also the most quaint) artistic pro-ductions of the period in the sphere of book-illustration. Nearly 90 MSS of this version are known, ranging from the first half of the 12th cent, to the first half of the 15th [see P. Berger, La Bible Franqaise au moyen Sge, p. 78 fl.; L. Delisle and P. Meyer, L' Apoc-alypse en Franqais (Paris, 1901 ) ; and New Palceographical Society, part 2, plates 38. 39], some having been pro-duced in England, and others in France; and in the 14th cent, it reappears in an English dress, having been translated apparently about that time. This English version (which at one time was attributed to Wyclif) is known In no less than 16 MSS, which fall into at least two classes [see Miss A. C. Panes, A Fourteenth Century English Biblical Version (Cambridge, 1902), pp. 24-30); and it is noteworthy that from the second of these was derived the version which appears in the revised Wyclifite Bible, to be mentioned presently, i 6. The 14th cent., which saw the practical extinction of the general use of the French language in England, and the rise of a real native literature, saw also a great revival of vernacular Biblical literature, beginning appar-ently with the Book of Psalms. Two EngUsh versions of the Psalter were produced at this period, one of which enjoyed great popularity. This was the work of Richard RoUe, hermit of Hampole, in Yorkshire (d. 1349). It con-tains the Latin text of the Psalter, followed verse by verse by an English translation and commentary. Originally written in the northern dialect, it soon spread over all England, and many MSS of it still exist in which the dialect has been altered to suit southern tastes. Towards the end of the century Rolle's work suffered further change, the commentary being re- written from a strongly Lollard point of view, and in this shape it continued

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