DEFINING THE TEXTUAL COMMUNITY

The literate, Latinate elite of Anglo-Saxon England represents specific social and intellectual groups – those men and women fortunate enough to be educated through an institutional system that was religious, and principally monastic. Many of these privileged learners would have been aristocratic, or at least freeborn, as Alfred recommends in his Preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care. This Preface was written by Alfred towards the end of the ninth century, when he recognized that the consolidation of the truce with the Danes would require rebuilding a country devastated by a century of strife. Part of this reconstructive process involved the conscious fostering of education, so that the rich cultural and intellectual traditions of Anglo-Saxon England could be permitted to flourish once again. In the extant manuscript, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hatton 20, given to Wærferth, bishop of Worcester, at the end of the ninth century, Alfred reveals his educational plans to his bishop, in what has become one of the most famous passages of early English: