A seventh-century poem by a Northumbrian cattle herder has turned up in Rome, in what scholars say is a lost copy of the earliest surviving poem in the English language.

Scholars from Trinity College Dublin found the manuscript containing Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome. Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century.

The Old English version found in Rome is believed to have been transcribed by a monk in northern Italy between AD800 and AD830.

“When we saw it we looked at each other and I said, ‘No one knows about this’,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, who discovered the manuscript with Mark Faulkner from Trinity’s School of English.

“To make sure I wasn’t dreaming I double-checked the catalogues and there was no mention of it. It was a huge surprise, a very good one.”

It is the third oldest surviving text of the poem, after older copies held at Cambridge and St Petersburg. Those versions contain the poem in Latin, with the Old English text added in the margin or at the end.

Faulkner said the Rome copy matters because it places the Old English version in the main body of the text, reflecting the language’s growing status in the ninth century.

“The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in.”

Faulkner said the poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, showing word spacing was a relatively new invention.

“It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”

The researchers detailed their findings in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, an open-access journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Caedmon is said to have been an illiterate cattle herder who worked at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. According to Bede, he had a divine visitation that inspired him to compose and sing the Hymn, which praises God for creating the world.

Bede included a Latin translation in Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but left out the original Old English version. Faulkner said that within a century a monk at the abbey of Nonantola in northern Italy included the Old English version.

“It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.”

There are at least 160 surviving copies of Bede’s history. Conflicting evidence about a copy in Rome prompted Magnanti, an expert in medieval manuscripts, to ask the National Central Library in Rome to check its archives.

The library located, digitised and emailed pages that included the poem.

“This discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by digitising their collections and making them freely available online,” Magnanti said.

Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and rare books at the Rome library, said the institution was digitising holdings from Italy’s National Centre for the Study of the Manuscript, which will give researchers access to more than 40 million images.

Riccardo Fangarezzi, head of archives at the abbey in Nonantola, said he looked forward to further discoveries.

“The present times may be rather dark, yet such intellectual contributions are genuine rays of sunlight: the continent is less isolated,” he said.

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