During the last fifty years there have been considerable advances in the study of the earliest phase of written English, from its beginnings in the eighth century up to the immediate post-Conquest period, facilitated by the publication of Neil Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, which brought the foundation work of the eighteenth-century scholar Humfrey Wanley into the modern age. Ker's work on the vernacular has recently been put into the larger context of all manuscripts, Latin and English, written or owned in pre-Conquest England by Helmut Gneuss's Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, while the totality of single-page documents, excluded by Ker, was comprehensively surveyed in Peter Sawyer's Anglo-Saxon Charters, which concluded at 1066 but which was later extended by David Pelteret's Catalogue of English Post-Conquest Vernacular Documents. The present work cannot pretend to compete with these, in scope, range or scholarship, nor is it intended to do so. It is designed to supplement them in one particular respect, the information on the distribution of scribal hands that they supply. Although Ker, for example, gives very full information about the contents and the collation of all the manuscripts he considers, his information on those who wrote them is patchy. Whereas for the most part he is very full on the letter forms and the distribution of the work of the principal scribes of the manuscripts that he includes, his Catalogueis often far from detailed in listing the stints of more minor contributors. A full account of the work of writers making marginal and interlinear additions to vernacular manuscripts was outside his scope, although the occasional comments he does make are of considerable value. Sawyer and Pelteret assign dates to the documents they list, but they afford little information on the scribes, except where an individual is known to have copied more than one document, though the electronic version of Saywer's catalogue does supply some additional information and many digital reproductions, which allow readers to access and compare the hands for themselves. In the light of these limitations, it is clear that there is room for more work on scribal hands writing English in Anglo- Saxon England.