This paper aims to honour Bella Millett’s quite outstanding contribution to early medieval textual studies by focusing on the scriptoria of western England in the late Anglo-Saxon period. As Professor Millett has so convincingly illustrated in relation to the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, our understanding of the ways in which texts are produced, transmitted and used is much enlightened by recognizing broad networks of ecclesiastical and scholarly influence and exchange. In her work on Ancrene Wisse and the ‘Katherine Group’, Millett has asked us, effectively, to reappraise our apprehension of the regional locus of these texts’ origin. Instead of seeing it as simply one of marginal and potentially geographically narrow significance we should consider the west of England in a European-wide complex of interconnections that functioned to spread important theological and scholastic innovations in the decades surrounding the Fourth Lateran Council. And while this brief paper can do little on the scale of Millett’s research, I do hope to investigate the ways in which manuscripts are localized to particular scriptoria in late Anglo-Saxon England. I shall ask if we might not spread the net a little wider than the individual scriptorium – such as Worcester or Winchester – when considering particular attributions for vernacular manuscripts in the later eleventh century; and as I shall suggest, we might rather think of known centres of production as something more like the hubs of interconnecting networks of operation, or the lead partner in collaborative endeavours to manufacture codices with shared scholarly and theological agenda.

Any interest in medieval manuscripts starts, of course, with absence: the absence of so much comparanda upon which we might have built conclusions about origin. Although all medievalists are keenly aware of the loss of countless manuscripts, particularly during the turbulence of the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1542, John Leland’s Laboriouse Journey and Serche for Englandes Antiquitees is a salutary reminder of what modern scholars are facing when they attempt to work with manuscript production and localization in the early medieval period. Undertaken while he travelled around Britain during the reign of Henry VIII and published with numerous interpolations and comments by John Bale in 1549, Leland’s Journey describes the contemporary turmoil of early Reformation England.