This article explores the ninth-century embassy to India purportedly sent by King Alfred, examining the evidence for this voyage, as well as its context, feasibility and credibility. It is argued that India, rather than Judea, was the intended destination of the alms dispatched to St Thomas and St Bartholomew in 883, given contemporary Anglo-Saxon knowledge of the lives of these two saints, and that such a destination would fit with the intellectual climate of Alfred’s court and be a suitable symbolic gesture. A journey to India would have a good context in the evidence for both a Syriac Christian community and a significant shrine of St Thomas in southern India that people from early medieval Europe might visit, with the likely location of the shrine being investigated. The archaeological and documentary evidence for the availability of early medieval trade routes to India is also analysed, as are the identities of Alfred’s emissaries.

Among little-known fragments of sacramentaries, two examples in insular half uncial in German libraries offer us significant evidence of the activities of early English missionaries and scribes. The first has long been known in German as the Sacramentary of Boniface, and its unique and archaic content shows it is among the only surviving evidence of liturgical practice in England itself in the eighth century. The second, in scattered fragments from the monastery of Groß Sankt Martin in Cologne, offers an important witness of the Gelasian of the eighth century (as distinct from the Old Gelasian Sacramentary), a compilation exclusively known on the Continent. Liturgical evidence offers a framework to go beyond the uncertain attempts to date and localize the particularly conservative script of these fragments. Analysis of their content shows how English scribes made a decisive input to the transformations of the continent’s liturgy and the dissemination of new forms of mass book.