the Rood was disclosed by the same scholar in a paper read November 24, 1842, and published in Archæologia, vol. 30 (1844).
The two inscriptions given below on pp. 3 and 4 are found respectively at the right and the left of one face, and the remaining two on the right and the left of the other face, the words Crist wæs on representing the horizontal line referred to above.
The first person to attribute the verses on the Ruthwell Cross to Caedmon was Daniel H. Haigh (1819-79). Writing in the Archæologia Æliana for November, 1856[1], Haigh said: 'Are we not justified in regarding the lines upon the Ruthwell Cross as fragments of a lost poem of his, a poem, however, which a later poet in the tenth century undertook to modernize and adapt to the taste of his own times, as Dryden did with some of the poems of Chaucer? I submit to the judgement of others this conjecture, based upon these grounds, viz. that on this monument, erected about A. D. 665, we have fragments of a religious poem of very high character, and that there was but one man living in England at that time worthy to be named as a religious poet, and that was Cædmon.' Haigh's reason for dating the Ruthwell Cross so early was its resemblance to the Bewcastle Cross, which, as he read the name of Alcfrid[2] upon it, he dated about 665.
- ↑ p. 173.
- ↑ He says (The Conquest of Britain by the Saxons, p. 37): 'The first [inscription] on the western face of the Cross at Bewcastle, in Cumberland, is simply a memorial of Alcfrid, who was associated by Oswiu with himself in the kingdom of Northumbria, and died probably in A. D. 664.' The inscription on the Bewcastle Cross is very uncertain (see Sievers in Paul's Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie I2. 256; Anglia 13. 12, 13; cf. Victor, Die Northumbrischen Runensteine, p. 46), and in its present form probably late.
