Cover -- Contents -- Foreword and acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- Part I. Sounds and spellings -- Homo Loquens, Homo Scribens: On the role of writing in language change, with special reference to English -- The reflection of Pre-Old English sound changes in Pre-Old English runic inscriptions -- Middle English evidence of the elimination of velar fricatives: a prose corpus study -- Part II. Words and phrases -- The chain-mail coat terminology in Old English and the dating of Beowulf -- Old English geweald habban/āgan as a stylistic set phrase, compared with Old High German and Old Saxon cognates -- An etymological analysis of shell nouns -- Secondary agent constructions from a diachronic perspective -- Part III. Conjunctions, clauses, and sentences -- Connectives before Chaucer: conjunctive for and its competition in early Middle English -- A history of because-clauses and the coordination-subordination dichotomy -- The replacement of pe by pat in the history of English -- Impersonal and passive constructions from a viewpoint of functional category emergence -- Part IV. Dialects and their representation -- The southern dialect in Thomas Churchyard's The Contention bettwixte Churchyearde and Camell (1552) -- Scoto-Cumbrian? The representation of dialect in the works of Josiah Relph and Susanna Blamire -- Part V. Scholars, authors and their use of the past -- J.R.R. Tolkien and the historical study of English -- Chinese translations of Beowulf: International Anglo-Saxon studies and modernity -- Notes on contributors -- Index.