Golden ASE

To mark this fiftieth volume of ASE – a golden anniversary of sorts – it seems appropriate to cast the briefest of glances backwards over all that the journal has achieved across the time since Professor Peter Clemoes (1920–1996) wrote to Michael Black, then Chief Editor of Cambridge University Press, on 12 November 1969, to propose ‘a new periodical concerned with the civilization of England before the Norman Conquest’ with the aim to ‘encourage studies distinguished by intellectual scope and quality and especially those which cross the artificial boundaries set up by modern academic disciplines’. In various ways ASE has served also as the journal of record for the field in the broadest sense, not only through the reports of the biennial congresses of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England), listing all the papers given (many of which subsequently became articles in the journal), but also through nearly twenty articles that are either handlists or catalogues of some kind, for example, the first iteration of Helmut Gneuss’s fundamental handlist of manuscripts (with subsequent addenda and corrigenda), Patrick Wormald’s handlist of lawsuits, and Elisabeth Okasha’s regular supplements to the handlist of non-runic inscriptions. In its early years the journal also commissioned regular review articles and surveys of the state of scholarship in one area or another, a practice which we have sought to reinstitute in the current volume with the piece commissioned from Andrew Rabin to mark another anniversary, that of the death of Archbishop Wulfstan in 1023.