Lapidary traditions in Anglo-Saxon England: part I, the background; the Old English Lapidary

Jewels have always fascinated man. They have been admired simply for their beauty – their depth of colour and their different propensities for catching and reflecting light. The combination of these qualities, rare in nature, has encouraged the attribution to them of many magical and medical powers. The rareness of gems and the distance and inaccessibility of the places from which many are obtained have caused them to figure curiously in legends and travellers' tales. The Anglo-Saxons appreciated the beauty of jewels, as their jewellery shows. Nor were they without interest in precious stones they could not possess; but it has been hard for modern readers to discover what their ideas about them were. The mid-eleventh-century manuscript, London, British Library, Cotton Tiberius A. iii, contains what is by common repute the oldest vernacular lapidary in western Europe. No edition has distinguished its sources accurately or analysed the process of its composition. It has been difficult, more generally, to see how the Anglo-Saxons' ideas fitted into those more widely current. There is no reliable published survey of lapidary writings between late antiquity and the late eleventh century.