A remarkable manuscript discovered in Rome has brought to light a rare early copy of Cædmon's Hymn, widely considered the oldest known poem in the English language. Dating to the early ninth century, this ancient text offers profound new insights into how early English literature was preserved, valued, and transmitted across medieval Europe.
Historians from Trinity College Dublin successfully identified the manuscript, which is currently held at the National Central Library of Rome. The document includes the Old English poem embedded within a copy of the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Their groundbreaking research, recently published in the journal Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, sheds new light on the cultural connections between early medieval England and the Continent.
The Significance of Cædmon's Hymn
Composed over 1,300 years ago, Cædmon's Hymn is a nine-line poem praising God as the creator of the world. According to Bede, the hymn was composed by Cædmon, an illiterate cowherd at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. The story goes that Cædmon would leave feasts in embarrassment when it was his turn to sing. One night, a divine figure appeared to him in a dream, commanding him to sing of the beginning of creation. Miraculously, he began to sing, producing the short hymn that is now celebrated as the beginning of English literature.
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The copy of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica that Magnanti discovered in Rome. (Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale ‘Vittorio Emanuele II’, Vitt. Em. 1452, 122v. Courtesy of Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale ‘Vittorio Emanuele II’/CUP)
What makes this particular manuscript discovery especially important is how the hymn appears. In earlier manuscripts, the Old English poem survives only in margins or appended sections. Here, it is written directly into the main Latin text - offering the earliest known example of this integration. Dr. Mark Faulkner notes that while Bede chose to translate the original Old English poem into Latin for his History, this manuscript shows that the original Old English poem was reinserted into the Latin within 100 years of Bede finishing his work, signaling how much early readers valued English poetry.
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Pushing Back the History of the Text
The manuscript preserves a version of the poem known as the eordu recension, and its early date pushes the existence of this textual tradition back by more than three centuries. It demonstrates that English texts were traveling across Europe at an early stage, reaching monastic centers in Italy within a century of Bede’s work being completed.
The manuscript provides rare linguistic evidence for the early history of English. The text preserves very early spelling forms, including features that suggest its origins in northern England, possibly in southern Northumbria or northern Mercia. At the same time, the manuscript shows signs that the scribe copying it in Italy was not fully familiar with Old English, as certain letter forms are misrepresented.
A Manuscript with a Turbulent History
The manuscript itself has had a long and complicated journey. It was originally produced at the Abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy in the early ninth century. In the early nineteenth century, during the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars, it was moved for safekeeping, eventually stolen, and entered private collections. It later became part of the collection of the well-known manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps before being returned to Italy, where it has been housed at the National Central Library of Rome since 1972.
The rediscovery highlights the importance of modern digitisation projects. Dr. Elisabetta Magnanti explains:
"The magic of digitization has allowed two researchers in Ireland to recognize the significance of a manuscript now in Rome, containing a poem miraculously composed in Northern England by a shy cowherd a millennium and a half ago."
This medieval manuscript discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by making their collections freely available online.
Top image: Dr Elisabetta Magnanti and Dr Mark Faulkner with the Trinity copy of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History. Source: Trinity College Dublin
By Gary Manners
References
Faulkner, M. & Magnanti, E. 2026. We found a lost copy of the earliest surviving English poem in a medieval manuscript in Rome. The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-lost-copy-of-the-earliest-surviving-english-poem-in-a-medieval-manuscript-in-rome-281086
Magnanti, E. & Faulkner, M. 2026. A New Early-Ninth-Century Manuscript of Cædmon’s Hymn: Rome, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Vitt. Em. 1452, 122v. Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/early-medieval-england-and-its-n/article/new-earlyninthcentury-manuscript-of-caedmons-hymn-rome-biblioteca-nazionale-centrale-vitt-em-1452-122v/2496FC9C9E4876935BB4190048C7C8A9
Medievalists.net. 2026. Medieval Manuscript in Rome Contains Rare Copy of Cædmon’s Hymn. Available at: https://www.medievalists.net/2026/04/medieval-manuscript-caedmon-hymn/
Trinity College Dublin. 2026. New copy of earliest poem in English language discovered by Trinity researchers in Rome. Available at: https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/top-stories/featured/caedmons-hymn-discovery/
