Old English replacement of the letter ƿynn with w. This is a proclamation from King Cnut the Great to his earl Thorkell the Tall and the English people written in AD 1020. Unlike the previous two examples, this text is prose rather than poetry. For ease of reading, the passage has been divided into sentences while the pilcrows represent the original division. The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first these were often marginal or interlinear glosses, but soon came to be gathered into word-lists such
The Old English Boethius and digressions throughout explaining allusions. Many of these additions come from glosses to contemporary Latin manuscripts of the "Consolation", which were obviously used in the translation process. There is also a significant number of references to Christianity within the translation which are entirely absent in Boethius's work. Sometime after the composition of the prose translation, someone adapted the prose translations of Boethius's metres into Old English alliterative verse. They are an important example of relatively securely dateable Old English poetry. The Old English Boethius The Old English Boethius is an Old English translation/adaptation of the sixth-century "Consolation of Philosophy" by