[1] The Music of the Most Ancient Nations, fig. 75, p. 227.
CYNEGILS (d. 643), king of the West Saxons, succeeded his uncle King Ceolwulf in 611. With his son Cwichelm (d. 636), he defeated the advancing Britons at Bampton in Oxfordshire in 614, and Cwichelm sought to arrest the growing power of the Northumbrian king Eadwine by procuring his assassination; the attempt, however, failed, and in 626 the West Saxons were defeated in battle and forced to own Eadwine’s supremacy. Cynegils’ next struggle was with Penda of Mercia, and here again he was worsted, the battle being fought in 628 at Cirencester, and was probably compelled to surrender part of his kingdom to Mercia. Cynegils was converted to Christianity through the preaching of Birinus, and was baptized in 635 at Dorchester in Oxfordshire, where he founded a bishopric. He was succeeded as king by his son Cenwalh.
CYNEWULF (d. 785), king of Wessex, succeeded to the throne in 757 on the deposition of Sigeberht. He was constantly at war with the Welsh. In 779 Offa of Mercia defeated him and took Bensington. In 785 he was surprised and killed, with all his thegns present, at Marten, Wilts (Merantune), by Cyneheard, brother of the deposed Sigeberht.
See Earle and Plummer’s edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 755, 779 (Oxford, 1892).
CYNEWULF, the only Old-English vernacular poet, known by name, of whom any undisputed writings are extant. He is the author of four poems preserved in two MSS., the Exeter Book and the Vercelli Book, both of the early 11th century. An epilogue to each poem contains the runic characters answering to the letters c, y, n (e), w, u, l, f. The runes are to be read as the words that served as their names; these words enter into the metre of the verse, and (except in one poem) are significant in their context. The poems thus signed are the following. (1) A meditation on The Ascension, which stands in the Exeter Book between two similar poems on the Incarnation and the Last Judgment. The three are commonly known as Cynewulf’s Christ, but the runic signature attests only the second. (2) A version of the legend of the martyr St Juliana, also in the Exeter Book. (3) Elene, in the Vercelli Book, on the story of the empress Helena and the “Invention of the Cross.” (4) A short poem on The Fates of the Apostles, in the same MS. The page containing the signature to this poem was first discovered by Professor A. S. Napier in 1888, so that the piece is not included in earlier enumerations of the poet’s signed works.
In Juliana and Elene the name is spelt Cynewulf; in The Ascension the form is Cynwulf. In The Fates of the Apostles the page is defaced, but the spelling Cynwulf is almost certain. The absence of the E in The Ascension can hardly be due to a scribal omission, for the name of this letter (meaning “horse”) would not suit the context; this, was perhaps the motive for the choice of the shorter form. The orthography (authenticated as the poet’s own by the nature of his device) has chronological significance. If the poems had been written before 740, the spelling would almost certainly have been Cyniwulf. If it were safe to judge from the scanty extant evidence, we should conclude that the form Cynwulf came in about 800; and presumably the poet would not vary his accustomed signature until the new form had become common. In Elene Cynewulf speaks of himself as an old man; and the presence of the runic signature in the four works suggests that they are not far apart in date. They may therefore be referred provisionally to the beginning of the 9th century, any lower date being for linguistic and metrical reasons improbable.