Caedmon's Name and a Borrowed Manuscript

Caedmon's reputation as the founding figure of English religious poetry grew large enough to attach itself, mistakenly, to poems he never wrote. In the seventeenth century the philologist Francis Junius acquired a tenth century illustrated codex containing four Old English biblical poems, Genesis, Exodus, Daniel and Christ and Satan, and, on the strength of Bede's account of Caedmon's own gift for turning scripture into verse, named the collection the Caedmon manuscript, a title that stuck for centuries. Modern philological analysis has since dismantled the attribution: close study of vocabulary, metre and regional dialect features shows the four poems were composed by at least five different poets working in different centuries and different parts of Anglo-Saxon England, none of them demonstrably Caedmon himself, and the codex is now known properly as the Junius manuscript rather than his. The correction does not diminish Caedmon's actual standing so much as illustrate how large it became: readers for three centuries found it more plausible that an entire anthology of vernacular biblical poetry belonged to the herdsman Bede named than that Anglo-Saxon England had produced several other poets working in a tradition Caedmon is credited with starting. Bede's own, narrower claim, that Caedmon was the first English poet whose name is known and the first to turn scripture into English verse, is the claim that has actually held.