Old English Psalter Glosses to the Latin Lemmas incola and incolatus

The nouns incola and incolatus are rare in psalms: incola occurs four times in the Romanum and three times in the Gallicanum, incolatus twice in the Romanum and once in the Gallicanum. Although these lexemes are employed in the same sense ‘resident alien, immigrant’ and ‘being a resident alien/immigrant’ in all instances, Old English displays a wide variety of glosses ranging from the derivatives from the stem wræc- ‘exile’ to the compound londleod ‘(indigenous) inhabitant of a country’. The distinctions between psalter glosses are not limited to the usual divisions between the A-, D-, and I-traditions but extend to the lack of consensus between the Old English interpretamenta within the D-group where Ogura finds a high rate of homogeneity. This diversity is the subject of the present article, which seeks to determine its possible causes.