Lost Copy of the Oldest-Known English Poem Discovered in a Rome Library

The poet who composed the oldest surviving English poem was apparently illiterate, unmusical, and a common cowherd from Whitby, North Yorkshire, in what is now the U.K. And we now have the original manuscript written in Old English. To be clear, this is the third discovered copy of the poem Hymn by Caedmon the cowherd. The manuscript was included in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, a northern English monk, and dates between the years 800 and 830. Although the two previously found copies are slightly older, these were mostly written in Latin with some Old English in the margins or at the end. By contrast, the newest discovery has the poem’s main body text in Old English, demonstrating a growing interest in the language at the time, according to a recent study on the findings, published in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours. “Unearthing a new early medieval copy of the poem has significant implications for our understanding of Old English and how it was valued,” Mark Faulkner, the study’s co-author and a historian at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, said in a statement. “It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.” Caedmon’s Hymn re