First Poem Ever Written in English 1,300 Years Ago Found Hidden Inside Library in Rome

The oldest English poem has resurfaced in a medieval manuscript long thought lost.

Before English became the language of Shakespeare, empire, science, pop songs, and the lingua franca of the world, it was the speech of farmers, monks, and kings spoken only on a cold island at the edge of Europe. Its first known written poem began, tradition says, with a shy cowherd who slipped away from a feast after the guests began taking turns singing and reciting verse. Embarrassed because he knew no poems himself, he went to sleep in the stable — where, according to Bede, a mysterious figure appeared in a dream and commanded him to sing about Creation.

Now, more than 1,300 years later, that poem has turned up in Italy.

Researchers from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a previously unknown early copy of Caedmon’s Hymn. This is the oldest known poem in Old English. And it was discovered inside a ninth-century manuscript held by the National Central Library of Rome. The find is remarkable because this version appears in Old English within the main body of a Latin text, rather than as a later marginal note.

That seemingly small detail is actually consequential. It suggests that, barely a century after the Venerable Bede wrote his great history of the English church and people, some readers already treated English poetry as something worth preserving alongside Latin, the learned language of medieval Europe.

A Cowherd’s Song at the Edge of the World

Caedmon was no learned man or artist. According to Bede (born circa 673), one of the best-known writers during the Early Middle Ages, he was an agricultural laborer attached to Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire in the seventh century. When guests at a feast began reciting poems, Caedmon felt ashamed that he had nothing to offer. He left, went to sleep, and dreamed.

A divine figure appeared in his dream and commanded him to sing of Creation. Caedmon obeyed. What emerged was a nine-line hymn praising God as maker of heaven and Earth.

In modern English, the poem begins: “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom.” In Old English, its cadences are heavier, stranger, closer to the language of Beowulf than to the English we speak today.

To modern readers, nine lines may not sound like much. But for historians of language, Caedmon’s Hymn is a kind of fossil track. It’s a trace of English at the moment it first stepped into literature.

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“As the oldest known poem in Old English it is today celebrated as the beginning of English literature,” said Mark Faulkner, associate professor of medieval literature at Trinity College Dublin.

Only about three million words of Old English survive, Faulkner noted, and most come from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Caedmon’s Hymn reaches further back, toward the seventh century, when English was still one regional tongue among many in a Europe where the written word was still penned in Latin.

Translated into modern English, Caedmon’s Hymn sounds like this:

Now let us praise Heaven-Kingdom’s guardian,

the Maker’s might and his mind’s thoughts,

the work of the glory-father — of every wonder,

eternal Lord. He established a beginning.

He first shaped for men’s sons

Heaven as a roof, the holy Creator;

then middle-earth mankind’s guardian,

eternal Lord, afterwards prepared

the earth for men, the Lord almighty.

Why the Rome manuscript changes the story

The poem survives because Bede included the story of Caedmon in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in the eighth century. Bede wrote in Latin, and in many manuscripts the poem appears in Latin too. In the two older surviving copies that include the Old English, the vernacular poem was added in the margin or appended later.

The Rome manuscript is quite different.

It was produced between 800 and 830 at the Benedictine Abbey of Nonantola, near modern Modena in northern Italy. There, in a Latin manuscript of Bede’s history, the Old English poem appears embedded in the main text itself.

“We were extremely surprised. We were speechless. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we first saw that,” Elisabetta Magnanti, visiting research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, told the Associated Press.

“What’s more,” she said, the poem was within the main body of the Latin text: “It was extraordinary.”

“Bede chose not include the original Old English poem in his History, but to translate it into Latin,” Faulkner said. “This manuscript shows that the original Old English poem was reinserted into the Latin within 100 years of Bede finishing his History. It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.”

Before the Rome manuscript was identified, the earliest comparable manuscript was from the early 12th century. “So, this is three centuries earlier than that. And so, it attests to the importance that was already being attached to the English in the early 9th century,” Faulkner said.

A Lost Book’s Long Pilgrimage

The manuscript’s own history reads almost like an adventure book.

It began at Nonantola, one of the great copying centers of the Middle Ages. Later, as the abbey’s fortunes declined, manuscripts from its library moved to Rome. During the upheavals around the Napoleonic era, some were sent for safekeeping to the church of San Bernardo alle Terme. This manuscript was later stolen and passed through private hands.

It surfaced in the collection of the English antiquarian Thomas Phillipps, then passed to the Swiss bibliophile Martin Bodmer. In the 20th century it reached New York, in the stock of rare bookseller H.P. Kraus. Italy’s culture ministry eventually bought it in 1972 and returned it to Rome’s National Central Library.

It wasn’t until Magnanti untangled the manuscript’s provenance through old-fashioned scholarly persistence and modern digitization that its true significance came to light.

“I came across conflicting references to Bede’s History in Rome, some pointing to its existence and some indicating it was lost,” she said. “When its existence was confirmed by the library and the manuscript was digitised for us, we were extremely excited to find that the manuscript contained the Old English version of Caedmon’s Hymn and that it was embedded in the Latin text.”

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She added: “The magic of digitisation has allowed two researchers in Ireland to recognise the significance of a manuscript now in Rome, containing a poem miraculously composed in Northern England by a shy cowherd a millennium and a half ago.”

The Past Is Still Being Scanned

The discovery is part of a larger change in medieval studies. For generations, manuscripts could be studied only by those able to travel to the right library, secure access, and sit with fragile volumes under controlled conditions. Digitization has begun to loosen those gates.

“Today, the National Central Library of Rome holds the largest collection of early medieval codices from the benedictine abbey of Nonantola. This collection comprises 45 manuscripts dating from the sixth to the twelfth century,” said Valentina Longo, curator of medieval and modern manuscripts at Rome’s National Central Library.

Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and the rare books reading room at the library, said the institution has already made digital copies of around 500 manuscripts available and is working on a much larger project involving microfilm reproductions of about 110,000 manuscripts from 180 Italian libraries. “This initiative will give scholars and researchers access to more than 40 million images,” he said.

Medieval manuscripts traveled, were stolen, sold, miscatalogued, rebound, forgotten, and rediscovered. Many still hide their secrets in plain sight, gathering dust in both museum and private collections.

“The discovery made by the experts of Trinity College is just one starting point, a single manuscript that might pave the way for countless other discoveries, in countless other fields, through international cooperation like this,” Cappa said.