1

The Gems Fallen, The Body Broken: Attitudes to Furnished Burial in Later Anglo-Saxon England.

In this paper I will be exploring two connected lines of thought. The first is the context and meaning of the passage on the hand-out [at end of text]. The second is the significance of furnished burial in an early medieval Christian society. If it is legitimate to speculate on whether the descriptions of the funerals in Beowulf have any historical or archaeological application, then it is also legitimate where this homily is concerned. (I should make it clear at the outset I will not be talking about Cumwhitton or any other burials in the British Isles which invoke a Scandinavian tradition of furnished burial).

On the hand-out you will find a series of extracts, representing minor variations on a theme. They come from a group of related sermons or homilies, preserved in manuscript contexts dating from the late 10th to the late 12th centuries. Although the homilies are significantly different from one another, extracts one, two and three on the hand-out are virtually identical in their wording, number four has something very similar, and number five has something quite similar.

I want to explore this passage for several reasons:

Firstly, because it is a description, in an undoubtedly Christian context, of an expensive and elaborate burial, coming from a period of English history (the early to mid-10th century) when the archaeological record does not, on the whole, tend to preserve such burials and there are no detailed descriptions of such burials in more conventional historical sources;

Secondly, because the language used to describe the burial is replete with significant and intentional ambiguity which I will argue is culturally revealing. Taken together, these two

points make a strong case that there is more than a conventional rhetorical point being made here.

And finally, because I think we can use this to shed light on the nature of Christian objection to lavish burial customs.

Please look at numbers one to three on your hand-out. They are very similar, despite coming from manuscripts spanning a period of over a hundred and fifty years, and therefore I have translated them as one. The earliest manuscript context (this is item number one on the hand-out) is the Vercelli Book, a mixture of poetry and prose, probably best known for its poem on the Crucifixion, The Dream of the Rood. Although the Vercelli Book was compiled some time around the 970s, its contents are often demonstrably earlier. Vercelli Homily Ten, from which number one on the hand-out comes, is certainly older than the Vercelli Book in which it is now preserved: there are a number of scribal errors suggesting one and possibly two previous versions, taking us back, at a guess, to the early to mid-tenth century for its original composition. The language of the homily also suggests this: both its vocabulary and the forms of the words are markedly archaic in places (REFS).

Items number two and three on the hand-out show how the idea is picked up and passed on through the 11th and into the 12th century, and I have also included a fourth version on the hand-out, on the second page. Although number four has some minor differences it is clearly related, and it is the latest surviving occurrence of this passage. This manuscript, Bodley 343, dates from around 1150-1175. This image thus has an enduring popularity spanning some 200 to 250 years, from the age of Edgar to that of Henry II. These sermons contain internal evidence (REFS) suggesting that they were designed to be preached in public and to a wide audience, who presumably responded to the ideas and imagery they proclaimed. So, what made this particular image so resonant and long-lasting?

All the sermons which contain this passage have, as their general subject, the standard topos of the futility of worldly wealth, and the particular spiritual burdens carried by the rich.1 If God has been generous to you, then you must be generous in turn, is the broad theme. In two of them (one is Vercelli), our passage occurs at the end of a speech made directly by Christ to a wealthy man, asking him whether he expects his wealth to buy him an exemption from death and judgment. The preacher then turns to his audience, saying though we adorn ourselves with the brightest gold and the costliest gems, nonetheless we end up in the grave, thus flagging up his change of subject. Then he comes to the passage excerpted on the hand-out. [read in Old English from Vercelli X].

eah a strengestan & a ricestan hatan him reste gewyrcan of marmanstane & of orum goldfrtewum, & mid gimcynnum ealne astnan & mid seolfrenum ruwum & beddum eal oferwreon, & mid deorwyrum wyrt gemennessum eall gestyred & mid goldleafum geread ymbutan, hwere se bitera dea t todle eall. onne bi sio gleng agoten, & se rym tobroden, & a gimmas togloden, & t gold toscned, & a lichaman gebrosnode & to duste gewordene

What is being described here? A bed, or a grave? I will give the arguments for it being a grave in a minute, but first I want to explore the material culture in the list in a little more detail.

See for example St Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, Ps 49 (Vulg.). But that rich man Luke (16:22) too died, and a like funeral was made for him. See to what men have brought themselves: they regard not what a wicked life he led while he lived, but what pomp followed him when he died! O happy he, whom so many lament! But the other lived in such sort, that few lament. For all ought to lament a man living so sadly. But there is the funeral train; he is received in a costly tomb, he is wound in costly robes, he is buried in perfumes and spices. Secondly, what a monument he has! How marbled! Does he live in that same monument? He is therein dead. Men deeming these to be good things, have strayed from God, and have not sought the true good things, and have been deceived with the false. To this end see what follows. He who gave not the price of the redemption of his soul, who understood not death, because he saw wise men dying, he became imprudent and unwise, in order that he might die with them. And how shall they perish, who shall leave their riches to aliens?... http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1801049.htm Accessed 8/2/2012

This is a remarkable list of objects and materials, which can be divided into three categories. The first contains the silver rugs or hangings and the gold-leaf, which are referred to nowhere else in the surviving corpus of writing in Old English. Other items, such as the gold ornaments and the gemstones, occur in many kinds of text. A third category includes the marble and the precious spices, these are things referred to fairly commonly in a funerary context, but the burials are those of Christ and the saints. What would the original audiences of this homily have made of this passage? Would the early 10th-century listeners have understood it in much the same way as their successors in the late 12th century? I suspect that they would have, and that throughout this period it was understood as a meaningful description of contemporary burial practices, although only the burials of those people described with superlatives at the opening of the extract, a strengestan & a ricestan, the strongest and most powerful. Not just the strong and the powerful but the strongest and the most powerful.

This description of a wealthy burial is given meaning by an implicit comparison with two other kinds of burials, which are acceptable, in contrast with this one, which is not. The first of the two acceptable burials is the material opposite of the one described by the homilist, that is, the neutral or ascetic model, in which the corpse goes shrouded and perhaps coffined but otherwise unaccompanied to the grave. The second is the spiritual opposite of the worldly burial under criticism, that is, the complex and lavish shrine of the saint.

We, of course, might think of a fourth kind of burial (Prittlewell reconstruction), what we might label a pagan burial, a burial containing objects apparently intended for use in another life, cups, weapons, bowls, food, ships, musical instruments. Is pagan burial a concept that existed for this writer? It seems not, there is no anxiety here that being buried with a lot of expensive kit is a sign of actively subscribing to a different belief system. We might note that the Prittlewell burial has many features in common with Mound one at Sutton Hoo, but also has the only English example of the minute and fragile gold foil

crosses found in several areas of the Continent (Bavarian, Allemanic, Lombardic). The writer has problems with the kind of burial he describes, but they are centred around the issues of waste and futility: they have nothing to do with the modern obsession with whether the deceased is signalling Christianity or something else. Certainly, the canon lawyers never banned furnished burials. But that doesnt mean the theologians had to approve of them. In a little while I am going to return to the question of who, in the early tenth century, in our homilists generation, might have had the kind of burial being lambasted here. But before I do that, I want to look a little more closely at the irony and satire I think this passage is expressing.

So, can we tell whether this passage describes a grave, or a bedroom? There are numerous Old English words for grave, but this homilist rejects all the common ones in favour of a very ambiguous word, rest. This word has not changed its meaning much over the last thousand years. Its primary Anglo-Saxon sense is one of peace and quiet, its secondary meaning is sleep, its tertiary meaning is the place where you sleep, your bed. Only rarely does it have a funerary connotation. As a result, even though the death of the rich man has been mentioned in the part of the homily leading up to this passage, there is here a prolonged moment of ambiguity as to whether these marvellous, glittering, sweet-scented structures are beds rather than tombs. Only from the context can one be sure that the tomb is indeed being described, and the preacher implies that the rich cant quite believe theyre going to die, that they order these tombs with the expectation of spending the time from death till Doomsday in the same kind of comfort they now experience in life. This was perhaps too subtle a point for all the homilys audiences, and if you look at number five on your hand-out you will see that, in one mid-11th-century version (CUL Ii.4.6.) the phrase has been reworked to read eah e as caseras oe rice cyningas oe nige ore wlance men him haton gewyrcan heora byrgene of marmanstane (although emperors and powerful kings and other haughty men order their tombs for themselves to be made of marble). This edited version spells out explicitly what we have seen more ironically hinted at elsewhere: these are indeed the burials of the people at the top of the social

pyramid.

It is this satirical note, more than anything else, which shows that the practice being condemned here is a contemporary one, that the original homilist had the rich and powerful of his own day in his sights. I doubt that this kind of satire would have worked if the homilist was simply reiterating a tired old idea with no contemporary application. But homilies are treacherous texts, and just when you think you have found a genuine trace of an Anglo-Saxon attitude, you are likely to find that your author is actually translating word for word from a Late Antique original. Is that happening here? In his edition of the Vercelli Homilies for the Early English Text Society, Donald Scragg cites a work by the 7th-century bishop, Isidore of Seville, as the source for Vercelli Ten, and I have put this as item 6 on the hand-out. However, this is not very close to the text of Vercelli Ten, either in specific vocabulary or in general sense. Isidores rich, unhappy men are clearly alive and sleepless in their beds, suffering from bad consciences. What is more, this passage from Isidore makes it into Old English elsewhere, in the extract from an 11th-century manuscript listed as item 7, in an extremely literal translation, making it perhaps less likely that it also directly underlies our text. Isidores word, lectus, is translated here as bed, and this is its normal translation when it appears in glossaries for example, in Old English texts which are underpinned by a Latin original. So, again, it seems likely that the homilists choice of the ambiguous reste is intentional, and that by framing the passage with references to death and decay, he is giving it direct cultural application.

I now want to put this homily to one side, and turn to a wider consideration of furnished burial practice in Anglo-Saxon England. The general outline is something like this: the 5th and 6th centuries see many people buried with a wide range of items; by the late 6th century wealth is apparently polarising, with fewer graves having much more luxurious furnishings; and the late 6th to 7th centuries see the creation of monumental barrows with wealthy burials. These die out with the 7th century, and the field and urban cemeteries of the late 7th and 8th centuries see a fading away of furnished burials, with people apparently

being buried in their clothes or, increasingly, shrouded. In the late 9th and 10th centuries weapons and jewellery, and occasionally other items, appear in a tiny minority of graves, and this is usually seen as an intrusive burial practice, introduced by Scandinavian or Hiberno-Norse settlers.

This narrative has the great merit of being based on excavated data. However, what I think is often forgotten is that our data set is incomplete. We know that wealth polarises in the 7th century because we have so many spectacularly wealthy graves: Sutton Hoo, Snape, Caenby, Benty Grange, Wigber Low, Taplow, Swallowcliffe Down, White Low Down, Desborough, Broomfield, Cuddesdon, Prittlewell The descriptions of the funerals in Beowulf suggest that the theatricality of these burials made a powerful cultural impact (precisely as it was designed to do), and that the aftershocks of that impact were probably still being felt when the poem as we have it was written down, as late as the year 1000. But do we have to think that, when barrow burials ended, lavish burial practices also disappeared?

These spectacular 7th-century barrow burials stand out because they are dramatic, poetic, cultural expressions, full of what Martin Carver has called the sensuous allure of the Dark Age burial. I suspect they also appeal to us because they are seen as the last flourishing of a vibrant pagan culture of furnished high-status burial, about to be snuffed out by the cold hand of the Church. But in fact we have no way of knowing if this is true. In comparing the great 7th-century investment burials with the largely unfurnished 8th-century burials from field cemeteries we are not comparing like with like. The debate over the identity of the man in Mound One at Sutton Hoo rages almost as fiercely as the debate over the date of Beowulf, but one fixed point in the argument is that Mound One Man was wealthy and well-connected. Whether or not we see him as a king, his social peers in his generation are likely to have been men such as thelbert of Kent, buried at St Augustines Canterbury in 616, or those members of the Northumbrian royal dynasty, buried at Whitby or York over the course of the 7th century. Truly, the strongest and the most powerful. We know nothing

about the structure and contents of thelberts grave or those of Northumbrian kings such as Edwin or Oswy: to assume that they were buried with austerity is as much an argument from silence as is any claim that they were buried with splendor. By the late 7th century great aristocrats were following the example set by the kings and subkings and founding minster-mausolea of their own. Not a single one of their burials survives, but these people would be the real comparanda with, and heirs of, Sutton Hoo and Prittlewell. And what about later generations? What did Offas tomb at Bedford look like, or Alfreds original burial at Old Minster, Winchester, or his daughter thelflds tomb at her minster of St Oswald in Gloucester?

This leaves us with two questions: What can we know about these lost royal and aristocratic burials? And, given that the Church never banned furnished burials, why should we assume that these burials must have been unfurnished?

It is worth reiterating that not a single royal, or top aristocratic, or even episcopal grave survives for a period of almost 400 years of English history. We know a fair amount about the burial of Bishop Cuthbert of Lindisfarne in 687 and his translation in 698, and we know a little about the burial of King Edward at Westminster in 1066. Some of the material culture of Cuthberts burial survives, and there is an account of the opening of Edwards tomb in 1102. Both burials were richly furnished. Undoubtedly some of the objects in Cuthberts burial were later votive deposits as part of continuing cultic practice, but other things, such as the damaged pectoral cross, are best interpreted as Cuthberts own, indicators of his episcopal rank, and part of the original deposition of 687. Some supporting evidence for the original burial having contained artefacts for use in another life comes from the Anonymous Life of St Cuthbert which describes the bishop as being buried wearing his priestly garments and with a Eucharistic wafer (oblate) on his breast, and in obviam Christi calciamentis suis praeparatus, with his shoes on, in readiness to

meet Christ (Book IV, ch.xiii).2 King Edward was not yet recognised as a saint when he was buried in 1066, nor when his tomb was first opened in 1102, suggesting that the regalia and rich cloth found then were the apparatus of a royal burial rather than a saints shrine. It is possible that Cuthbert represents the end of an old tradition of episcopal burial, and that Edward represents the beginning of a new one of royal burial, but it is also possible (and I think much more likely) that sumptuous burial continued for many (if not all) of the elite across this 400 year gap. Furthermore, we know from documentary evidence that high-investment burial did continue for a small group of people. And here I am referring particularly to the shrines of saints. If we think back to the condemnation of expensive burials on the hand-out, it becomes clear that they are condemned partly because this mode of commemoration is thought appropriate for the saints. The give-away words here are marmanstane (marble) and deorwyrum wyrt gemennessum (expensive spices), evoking numerous references in Anglo-Saxon literature to the material of saints shrines and sarcophagi, and to the odour of sanctity given off by saints corpses. Thus the homilist incorporates another layer of irony. It would be presumptuous for non-saintly people to aspire to such treatment for their corpse, though I suspect there were at least a few presumptuous people in later Anglo-Saxon England, both lay and ecclesiastic.

However, we do not have their burials, nor do we have descriptions of their burials. Why not? I think this is probably due to a series of accidents and coincidences. Some of the destruction of the material record happened within the Anglo-Saxon period, some of it has to do with William the Conqueror, some to do with Henry VIII, and some with Oliver Cromwell. Where the textual record is concerned, Bede evinces a fascination with the burials of saints but does not give us the minutiae of the burials of kings. Other than Alfred and Edward the Confessor, we do not have the biography of any Anglo-Saxon political leader, and Assers Life of Alfred was written before the kings death in 899. And the written sources that we do have may not give us the details we would like. Edwards
2

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/popups/pdf_viewer.jsf?cid=CBO9780511552953A020& ref=false&pubCode=CUP&urlPrefix=cambridge

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funeral in 1066 is recounted in great detail in the Life of King Edward, but the authors interest is in the liturgy and the alms-giving, not the material culture of the burial. For that, we have to wait till Osbert of Clares account of the opening of the tomb in 1102, when the body is said to have had a crown on its head, a sceptre in its hand and a ring on its finger. When Abbot Laurence of Westminster examined the tomb in 1161, the King was wrapped in cloth-of-gold, with purple shoes at his feet and a gold cloth over his face. Abbot Laurence removed the Kings ring, and three cloths which were made into copes.3

While we do not have the original tombs of any church-buried Anglo-Saxon kings, there is one spectacular Frankish burial which may shed some light on what was happening on this side of the Channel. This is the grave of the emperor Charlemagne, who died in 814. His contemporary and biographer, Einhard, says that Charlemagne had given no instructions about the place of his burial, and so after some quick post mortem regis discussion he was buried in the chapel at Aachen, the palace where he had died. Although Einhard has nothing to say about the interior of the kings grave, focusing instead on its inscription and the gilded arch raised above it, Charlemagnes tomb was to be the focus of great interest nearly 200 years later, at Pentecost in the year 1000, when the 20-year-old emperor, Otto III, decided to enter the sepulchre. In the earliest account of this visit, by Ottos contemporary and friend Bishop Thietmar of Merseberg, Otto takes a gold cross from the corpses neck and replaces the kings original vestments with new ones. A few years later, the Chronicle of Novalesa, which claims to include an eye-witness account by a nobleman who had entered the tomb with Otto, describes Charlemagne as seated on a throne, wearing a golden crown and holding a sceptre in his gloved hands. In this version Otto also removes a tooth from the emperors mouth. In around 1030 the chronicler Adhemar of Chabannes adds a sword and a golden gospel-book to the dead emperors accessories, and claims that Otto was led to the tomb by a dream he had had. While it seems possible that the story grew with the telling, at the very least it shows us that in the tenth and eleventh centuries writers like Bishop Thietmar and Adhemar took it for granted
3

Barlow, Edward the Confessor, p. 282

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that a great Christian king would have a splendidly furnished burial. The only surviving item that can claim to be part of Charlemagnes original grave assemblage is this 8th century silk, which was found in the shrine in which he was reburied after his canonisation in the 13th century.

There has been much ink expended by modern historians and archaeologists in attempts to find a working definition of what could and could not go into a Christian grave. Some argue, symbols of rank, yes - objects for use in another life, no - but where does this leave Cuthbert, off to meet Christ with his boots on? I suspect that trying to categorise burial practice in this way is a waste of time. What the Church objected to, where burial was concerned, was wasting money which could have been spent on alms-giving and masses. All furnished burials are futile, and the more expensive they are the more waste they represent. From this perspective, Charlemagnes golden gospel-book is just as objectionable as his sword. At Prittlewell, the gold-leaf crosses are as useless as the shoulder-clasps from Sutton Hoo. In the homiletic passage we have been looking at, the second sentence lists (rather gleefully) the collapse of all the gold and gems - it is immaterial to the homilist into what shape they had been made , they are all worldly wealth which could have been put to better uses.

And yet, of course, there are multiple contradictions here. At the same time as it condemns wealthy burial, the Church is indulging in it, at the highest level at least. Again, our evidence is either early (Cuthbert) or very late: William of St Carileph, Bishop of Durham in the late 11th century, and Walter de Grey, Archbishop of York in the mid-13th, are two great prelates whose graves on investigation proved to be richly-furnished. There are at least four very powerful social and cultural forces at work here. One is the idea, reiterated obsessively in Anglo-Saxon homilies, that naked we came into this world and naked we go out of it, and we carry nothing with us to Doomsday but our lifes narrative of good and bad deeds. Another is the idea, encouraged from at least from the 6th century, that the actions of the living can help the dead, and there is the recurrent idea (implicit in the very

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concept of a Christian burial) that this applies to the corpse as well as the soul, making the grave a locus of ambition and anxiety. Thirdly, there is the fact that many of the rich and powerful, the kings and Caesars as well as the bishops, did become saints, and some of them may have ordered their graves with this fate in mind. Finally there is the inescapable fact that many medieval churchmen, like most of the rest of us, were hypocrites, capable of believing one thing, thinking another, saying a third and doing a fourth. They and their monastic or collegiate communities were as deeply embedded in their culture as anyone else, and thus even a famous ascetic like Cuthbert could wind up in an expensive grave. If we see these burials as a religious statement, they are in no way incompatible with Christianity. If we see them as a means of asserting control and authority,4 there were very few undisputed successions of power in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and the argument that this kind of political situation is the reason for Sutton Hoo, say, is just as applicable to the deaths of many later rulers.

I have woven this fantastic picture for you, of all these glorious burials that we do not have. If there is any truth in it, we might expect to see some evidence that it filtered at least a little further down the social scale. The evidence is exiguous but I hope to convince you that it is there. In the 1030s, Adhemar of Chabannes believed, or wanted to believe, or wanted us to believe, that Charlemagne had been buried with a golden gospel-book. If this book really existed, it may have looked something like the Lindau Gospels, of the late 8th century. If it was a figment of Adhemars often vivid imagination, he may have been thinking of something like the Uta Gospel lectionary, still in its treasure binding of around 1025. We have no evidence that any member of the English elite was buried with a copy of the gospels, although at some point not too long after his death the red-leather bound copy of St Johns Gospel no longer in the possession of Stonyhurst college was added to Cuthberts coffin. What we do have, however, is this. In 1912 excavations in the churchyard at Newent in Gloucestershire uncovered this small, thick, rectangular stone, measuring approximately twenty centimetres by sixteen and a half. It was resting under
4

C. Hills, Beowulf Handbook

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the head of a skull, although the circumstances of excavation were such that it is impossible to be sure that this was its original position. The slab is carved on all six surfaces, which shows that it was not intended to be mounted or displayed in any fixed way. It is not a gravestone, part of a cross-shaft, or a section of an architectural frieze. It has no known sculptural parallels. While its iconography is complicated, one broad face clearly shows the Crucifixion and the other should probably be identified as the Last Judgement.5 In the centre of this scene there stands a large figure carrying a cross and a crosier, to his right a recumbent figure has the name EDRED carved above it, and the lettering dates it to the eleventh century. The narrow faces of the stone are also carved with names, reading MATTHEW MARK LUKE JOHN EDRED. The cross in the crucifixion scene is carved with four small circles; in his 1953 article George Zarnecki suggests that these are skeuomorphic rivets and that what he calls the funerary tablet may have had a metalwork model; he mentions the analogy with bookbinding without pursuing the thought. But the model for this object is surely indeed a book, a Gospel Book, with ornate images of the Crucifixion and Last Judgement fastened to front and back covers and the contents represented by the names of the evangelists.6 Here, surely, we have a Christian grave-good for use in another life, a very personal object and one of some sophistication. This personalised object was made for Edred, with the expectation that in some sense he would be accompanied by this symbol of faith when he went to his trial at the Last Judgement. Where did Edred, or the person who decided to bury him with this fossil Gospels, get the idea from, if not from narratives of burials like those of Charlemagne, or more likely closer to home? Grave 1, from Old Minster, Winchester, probably late 9th-century, had head and shoulderscovered with cloth of gold and silver Trewhiddle-style tags beneath the knees, while three other graves from Winchester and one from York contained pieces of gold thread.7 The late 9th-century
5

G. Zarnecki, The Newent Funerary Tablet, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucester

Archaeological Society 72 (1953), pp. 49-55. 6 Cf. the gold and enamel Christ in Majesty surrounded by the evangelist symbols of the Uta Codex gospel lectionary of c. 1025. Cohen, Uta Codex, Colour Plate 1. 7 Grave 1, from Old Minster, probably late 9th-century, had head and shoulderscovered with cloth of gold and silver Trewhiddle-style tags beneath the knees: M. Biddle, Excavations at Winchester

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Mound 11 at Heath Wood, Ingleby, contained an unusual piece of silver-thread embroidery, showing that the silver-thread rugs or tapestries listed by our homilist were going into some graves, though not, perhaps, the ones he had in mind.

To conclude, I suspect, although I cannot prove, that many 8th, 9th and 10th century kings, bishops and ealdormen had magnificent church burials, with lavish furnishings, along the lines of the burial described in Vercelli Ten and its fellows. In this homily, in continental parallels, and in a very few graves, we can catch a glimpse of their lost splendours.

1964, Third Interim Report, Antiquaries Journal 45 (1965), pp. 230-64, 256 and 263-4; three other Winchester graves produced gold thread, in one apparently in the hands (grave 664) and another (grave 717) across the forehead: M. Biddle Excavations at Winchester 1968, Seventh Interim Report, Antiquaries Journal 49 (1969), pp. 297-329, 322.

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10th to 12th Century Homiletic References to Furnished Burial

NB words in bold represent aspects of the burial assemblage, to be discussed in the paper 1. Vercelli Biblioteca Capitolare CXVII, Homily X. Late 10th century

eah a strengestan & a ricestan hatan him reste gewyrcan of marmanstane & of orum goldfrtewum, & mid gimcynnum ealne astnan & mid seolfrenum ruwum & beddum eal oferwreon, & mid deorwyrum wyrt gemennessum eall gestyred & mid goldleafum geread ymbutan, hwere se bitera dea t todle eall. onne bi sio gleng agoten, & se rym tobroden, & a gimmas togloden, & t gold toscned, & a lichaman gebrosnode & to duste gewordene 2. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 419/421. 1000x1050

eah e a mihtegestan and a ricestan hatan him reste gewyrcan of marmanstane and mid goldfrtwum and mid gimcynnum eal astned, and mid seolfrenum ruwum and beddum eall oferwrigen and deorwyrum wyrtgemengnessum eal gestyred, and mid goldleafum gestrewed ymbutan, hwere se bitera dea t todle eal. onne bi se glencg agoten and se rym tobroden and a gimmas toglidene and t gold tosceacen and a lichaman tohrorene and to duste gewordene 3. BL Cotton Faustina A IX. 1100x1150

eah a mihtegestan and a ricestan haten him restan gewyrcean of marmran stane. And mid goldfrtwum and mid gimcynnum eal astned, and mid seolefrenum hureowum and beddum eal oferwrygen and deorwyrum wyrt gemngnessum eal gestyred, and mid goldleafum gestrewed ymbutan, hwere se bitera dea tte dle eal. Donne bi se glng agoten and se rumwsto brocen and a gimmas toglidene and t gold toscacene and a lichaman tohrorene and to duste gewordene TRANSLATION OF PASSAGES 1-3 Even though the mighty and the most powerful order a resting-place to be made for themselves of marble and with gold ornaments and all set with gemstones and with rugs/tapestries of silver thread and piled with mattresses and all scattered with priceless spices and with gold leaf all strewn about, yet bitter death takes all that away. Then will honour be melted and glory dismembered and the gems fallen and the gold scattered and the corpse rotted and broken down to dust.

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4.

Oxford Bodleian Library MS Bodley 343. 1150x1175

eah a mihtige men and a ricosten haten heom rste wurcean of marmanstane and of goldfretwum, and heom haten mid gymmum and mid seolfrene ruwum at bed al wreon, and mid e deorewureste godewebbe al uton ymbhon, eah cyme e bitter dea and todle all t. enne beo a weln and a gleng agotene, and e rym tobrocene and a gymmas toglidene, and t gold tosceaken, and e lichame todroren and to dyste iwordon Cambridge University Library Ii.4.6. Mid-11th century

5.

eah e as caseras oe rice cyningas oe nige ore wlance men him haton gewyrcan heora byrgene of marmanstane and utan emfrtewian mid readum golde, eahhwere se dea hit eal todl. onne bi se gleng agoten and se rym tobrocen, and t gold tosceacen, and a gymmas toglidene, and a lichama gebrosnode and to duste gewordene

6.

Isidore Synonyma, Book II (Patrologia Latina 83, 865)

Quamvis quis purpura auroque resplendeat, quamvis quis cultu pretioso redimitus emineatsemper tamen in poena est, semper in angustia, semper in moerore, semper in discrimine; in sericis stratis cubat, sed turbidus; in pluma iacet, sed pallidus; in lectis aureis, sed turbatusDic ubi sunt reges? Ubi principes? Ubi imperatores? Although he may shine in purple and gold, although he may stand out girded in precious apparelnevertheless he is always in pain, always in dire straits, always in grief, always in danger; in silken sheets he reclines, but restless; in feathers he lies, but pallid; in golden beds, but disturbedSay, where are the kings? Where are the princes? Where are the emperors? BL Cotton Tiberius A iii. Mid 11th-century

7.

eah e he on purpuran and on golde glitinie, eh e he on deorwurum girlan gefrtwod oferhlifieeweere he fre on wite wuna and on nearunesse and fre on giornunge and fre on grornung and on orleahtre. On godwebbenum beddum he lina ac eweere oft gedrefe. On plum federan he li ac eweere oft ablce. On gyldenum beddum he rest ac eh ac oft rdlice gedrefedSege la wr synd cyningas, hwr ealdormenn hwr synd caseras Although he shines in purple and gold, although he stands out girded in precious apparelnevertheless he dwells always in pain and in dire straits and ever in yearning and ever in mourning and in danger. In silken beds he lies but often is troubled. In down-feathers he lies but often [vexed?].On golden beds he rests but often troubled forthwithSay, lo, where are the kings, where the ealdormen, where are the caesars?