page_title: Cædmon's Hymn
section_title: Manuscript evidence
hierarchical_section_title: Cædmon's Hymn / Manuscript evidence
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of copy (c800) Cædmon's Hymn in the "Moore" manuscript (737), Cambridge, Kk.5.16, f. 128v, written in Northumbrian. This is the earliest known version of this work.
context_page_description: Cædmon's "Hymn" is a short Old English poem originally composed by Cædmon, a supposedly illiterate cow-herder who was, according to Bede, able to sing in honour of God the Creator, using words that he had never heard before. It was composed between 658 and 680 and is the oldest recorded Old English poem, being composed within living memory of the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England. It is also one of the oldest surviving samples of Germanic alliterative verse.
  The "Hymn" is Cædmon's sole surviving composition. It was designed to be sung from memory and was later preserved in written form by others, surviving today in at least 19 verified manuscript copies. The poem has passed down from a Latin translation by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It forms a prominent landmark and reference point for the study of Old English prosody, for the early influence which Christianity had on the poems and songs of the Anglo-Saxon people after their conversion.
context_section_description: All copies of the Hymn are found in manuscripts of the Historia ecclesiastica or its Old English translation, where they serve as either a gloss to Bede's Latin translation of the Old English poem, or, in the case of the Old English version, a replacement for Bede's translation in the main text of the Historia. Despite this close connection with Bede's work, the Hymn does not appear to have been transmitted with the Historia ecclesiastica regularly until relatively late in its textual history. Scribes other than those responsible for the main text often copy the vernacular text of the Hymn in manuscripts of the Latin Historia.
  In three cases — Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 243; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 43; and Winchester, Cathedral I — the poem is copied by scribes working a quarter-century or more after the main text was first set down.  Even when the poem is in the same hand as the manuscript's main text, there is little evidence to suggest that it was copied from the same exemplar as the Latin Historia: nearly identical versions of the Old English poem are found in manuscripts belonging to different recensions of the Latin text; closely related copies of the Latin Historia sometimes contain very different versions of the Old English poem.  With the exception of the Old English translation, no single recension of the Historia ecclesiastica is characterised by the presence of a particular recension of the vernacular poem.
caption: One of two candidates for the earliest surviving copy of Cædmon's  Hymn is found in "The Moore  Bede" (ca. 737) which is held by the Cambridge University Library (Kk. 5. 16, often referred to as M).  The other candidate is St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, lat.  Q. v. I. 18 (P)