West Saxon Gospels

The West Saxon or Wessex Gospels are the earliest surviving free-standing complete translation of the four Gospels into English, produced in the late Anglo-Saxon period in the West Saxon dialect of Old English. Their scope is limited to the four Gospels, rendered from Latin, with the Latin Vulgate Gospels serving as the base text; the Vulgate is likewise the predecessor or base translation from which the work proceeds. In approach it is a fresh translation cast in vernacular prose, and its distinguishing characteristic is that, unlike the interlinear glosses added between the lines of Latin gospel books, it reads as continuous Old English prose intended to stand on its own. The work survives in a number of medieval manuscripts, and in the Reformation era it drew the attention of antiquarians who pointed to it as evidence of an early native tradition of scripture in the vernacular, well before the later English versions of the fourteenth century onward.