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This thesis attempts to explain the Anglo-Saxon influence on Hopkins's poetry by providing a biographical study of his life to determine when he acquired knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon.

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Thesis advisor: Robin Fleming / The towns that the Norman invaders found in England in 1066 had far longer and far more complex histories than have often been conveyed in the historiography of the Anglo-Saxon period. This lack of depth is not surprising, however, as the study of the towns of Anglo-Saxon England has long been complicated by a dearth of textual sources and by the work of influential historians who have measured the urban status of Anglo-Saxon settlements using the attributes of late medieval towns as their gage. These factors have led to a schism amongst historian regarding when the first towns developed in Anglo-Saxon England and about which historical development marks the beginning of the continuous history of the English towns. This dissertation endeavors to apply new evidence and new methodologies to questions related to the development, status, and nature of Anglo-Saxon urban communities in order to provide a greater insight into their origins and their evolutionary trajectories. It is the argument of this work that the emporia of the sixth through nine centuries were indeed towns and that the burhs founded by Alfred the Great and his heirs were intended from their inception to be towns and were quickly recognized as such by contemporaries. Two distinct methodologies are used to support these arguments: The first uses recent archeological and numismatic data related to the settlements in question to determine if the size and occupational make-up of their populations, the complexity and diversity of their economies, and their integration into regional and cross-Channel exchange networks sufficiently differentiated them from contemporary rural sites and places them in a distinct, urban category. The second methodology employs contemporary texts including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Old English Orosius, and The Old English Martyrology to reveal the terms actually used by the Anglo-Saxons to describe their settlements and then compares those terms to the words used to describe places that the Anglo-Saxons would have definitively recognized as a town or a city, such as Rome or Jerusalem. Regarding the continuity of Anglo-Saxon towns, recent archaeological data is used to prove that the periods of time which have often been cited as breaks in occupation were actually moments of transition from one type of town to another. At London, for example, we can now see that there was no substantive gap between the end of the extramural emporium of Lundenwic and earliest evidence for secular settlement within the walls of the former Roman town during the ninth century when it was refortified as a burh. This indicates that we should trace the continuous history of many towns, like London, back beyond Alfred and his burhs, to the emporia and other settlements that preceded them. Another major theme that threads its way through this work is that the Anglo-Saxon towns were negotiated spaces defined by the interplay of different groups of people and different ideas. Kings and bishops certainly exerted a great deal of influence over the development of the Anglo-Saxon towns, but, by no means were they the only forces at work. The common craftsmen and traders who lived and worked in the towns and the lesser elites and royal officials who lorded over them shaped the physical and social environments of the towns, their regional and cross-Channel connections, and how their economies functioned. Different groups of foreigners also influenced the Anglo-Saxon towns through trade, evangelism, and, at times, violence. Moreover, in so much as any of these groups or individuals may have exerted a greater influence over the development of the Anglo-Saxon towns at one time or another, no single group--be it kings, bishops, elites, traders, craftsmen, or assorted foreigners--can ever be said to have been acting totally independently of the others. In short, this dissertation illustrates that the towns of Anglo-Saxon England were the products of complex networks that moved people, things, wealth, and ideas throughout regions and across seas. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines some projects of moral regulation, implemented by the agents of the church and king in the late Anglo-Saxon period, which sought to modify and govern marital conduct. Theories of moral regulation are analysed in the Introduction, which also examines Germanic marriage practices, as far as they can be recovered, and the Anglo-Saxon church’s inherited attitudes towards marriage. Manuscripts and texts are examined firstly as projects of moral regulation, and secondly as projects which attempted to alter marital behaviour. In Chapter 1, moral regulation is situated within the context of the Benedictine reform through the examination of one manuscript – Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 201 – as a case-study in the cooperative efforts of the church and king to regulate society. In particular, the legislative and penitential texts which are compiled in MS 201 bear witness to the tendency in late Anglo-Saxon England for legislation to be moralised, and for morality to be legislated. MS 201 also includes the unique copy of the Old English translation of Apollonius of Tyre, and the marital morality inscribed therein perhaps accounts for its inclusion in this predominantly Wulfstanian manuscript. In Chapter 2 the riddles recorded in the Exeter Book are interpreted as literary exercises in regulation. This chapter establishes the possible moral and regulatory agenda of the Exeter Book riddles by offering a new interpretation of, and solution to, one riddle. It also analyses the marriages made manifest in some of the so-called ‘double entendre’ riddles, which regulate the moral relationship following Pauline exegesis: emphasis in these riddles is on the sanctity of marriage, wifely obedience, and the payment of the conjugal debt. Conversely, Ælfric, in his Lives of Saints, idealises marriage as characterised by the absence of all sexual relations. In his Life of St Agnes (examined in Chapter 3), and in his Lives of married saints (SS Julian and Basilissa, SS Cecilia and Valerian, and SS Chrysanthus and Daria, examined in Chapter 4), Ælfric makes non-sexual, companionable, and loving marriage morally paradigmatic. Whilst both marriage and morality have been studied by modern critics, neither topic has inspired extended, specific study (with a few, notable, exceptions), and the nexus between these two topics has been hitherto unacknowledged. Although new, and often profound, insight is gained into Anglo-Saxon texts by considering them in the context of moral regulation, the morality they propose, as well as the regulatory process used to impose that morality, varies across context, text, genre, and author. This conclusion is also true for marital morality, Anglo-Saxon perceptions of which differed in each of the texts chosen for evaluation. This thesis does not claim to be comprehensive; nor does it attempt to synthesise attitudes towards marriage and morality, since a synthesis does not do justice to the richness or complexity with which this topic was treated. It is hoped that this thesis will provide insight into not only individual Anglo-Saxon attitudes towards marriage but also processes of regulation and social control, and, indeed, into the intersection between attitudes and processes.

When warriors fall asleep within Heorot’s decorated walls, they initiate a sequence of events that ultimately ends in slaughter and death. This pattern of sleep, attack, and death predictably appears in each of the monster episodes. Humans sleep and fall prey to an otherworld attacker, who eventually receives death as punishment. Interestingly, the roles of the characters are reversed in the dragon scene. Here, the dragon’s sleep exposes him to harm at the hands of a human, the thief, whose guilt is transferred to Beowulf. In this way, sleep designates the victims and the attackers, but it also helps the audience predict the judgment that will take place at the end of each episode. This judgment becomes specifically Christian when contextualized by other Anglo-Saxon accounts of sleep. As in these texts, sleep in Beowulf functions as a liminal zone connecting the world of the humans with an Otherworld. The intersection of these worlds in Beowulf follows the structural paradigm of the popular “Doomsday motif,” in which an angry Christ comes to earth to surprise a sleeping humanity. A study of the verbal and thematic similarities of Beowulf and Christ III best exemplifies this connection. Other mythographic traditions of Christian judgment within Anglo Saxon texts appear throughout Beowulf. Motifs of Christ’s second coming surround Grendel as he approaches Heorot, and his entrance echoes Christ’s harrowing of Hell. The fight in Grendel’s mother’s lair recalls redemption through water: Beowulf’s immersion represents baptism and the hilt of the sword which saves the Danish nation depicts the great Flood. Finally, the dragon’s fire and its resulting annihilation of a people, at least indirectly, resounds with apocalyptic undertones.