Around 800, a small booklet containing the Penitential of Egbert was copied out in an Anglo-Saxon hand practicing Insular minuscule either in England or at Lorsch, an Anglo-Saxon monastic foundation in the modern German state of Hesse. Shortly after the date of its copying, this booklet was supplemented with further penitential material, and the original penitential plus these additions constitute what is now Vatican, Pal. lat. 554. At just thirteen folios, including the additions, and measuring 250 × 185 mm, this brief collection would have been portable and inexpensive to produce, taking a scribe only a few days to copy it. Despite their obvious utility, booklets like this one from the Vatican are rare: only a few Anglo-Saxon booklets of any kind survive and this is the only penitential booklet with English connections of which I am aware. Nonetheless, the Vatican booklet is illustrative of the way in which short texts may often have been efficiently and cheaply produced for priestly use.

Unlike missals, lectionaries, or collections of homilies, the types of priestly texts discussed in this chapter do not stand alone in surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. Instead, most of the examples that survive are bound with other books and no surviving late Anglo-Saxon manuscript contains penitentials, computistical material, or liturgical texts for occasional offices alone. Thus penitentials, manuals, and computi have been grouped here in one chapter – not due to a similarity of content, but rather to a similarity of context. As these types of texts were often relatively short, they could easily be combined with other volumes, as are our surviving examples, or they could be used in booklet or loose-leaf form, a state in which their chances of survival are slim to none. One can imagine the ease with which a few folios with no protective binding could be lost, and continental sources from the twelfth-century express concerns about the vulnerability of libelli to theft, destruction, or wear. We are also faced with the problem of how representative these rites are, especially when considering regional differences, poor survival rates, and questions concerning their oral performance. As Carol Symes has pointed out, written liturgical texts are essentially prescriptive in nature and it is often difficult to know precisely how these texts were used in worship.