See discussion.

Appendix B item (stones wrongly associated with pre-Conquest period).

Mention should also be made of an inscription bearing the date 881 (Milner 1798–9, i, pl. facing 449; Cottrill 1947, 8, pl. on back cover; Okasha 1971, 149). The inscription is on a stone in the Winchester City Museum and is set in a panel with a heavily moulded frame; it reads: 'ÆLFRED REX DCCCLXXXI:'. It is said to have been found in the ruins of Hyde abbey more than forty years before 1798–9 (Milner 1798–9, ii, 228). It is unusual for year dates in medieval inscriptions to appear without some kind of introductory anno formula. (The date intended was probably that of Alfred's accession in 871.) The first two words are in a form of Anglo-Saxon minuscule, a script not otherwise known in Anglo-Saxon inscriptions on stone. The alleged find-spot as well as various features of the lettering (see below) indicate that this is a pastiche rather than an inscription of the ninth century. Milner thought that the inscription was probably carved following the move of the New Minster community to the new site of Hyde abbey in the early twelfth century. The lettering, with its contrast of thick and thin and its use of fine hair-lines looks like an attempt to reproduce a book-script. The model would have been an Anglo-Saxon square minuscule or perhaps a twelfth-century minuscule used for Old English like that in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Hatton 38 (Ker 1957, pl. VII). The sunken panel, the centred layout, and aspects of the lettering, such as the proportion of the letters and the unseriffed straight tops to I and L, make it probable that the inscription is a product of post-medieval (probably eighteenth-century) rather than twelfth-century antiquarianism.