FELIX'S Life of St Guthlac has been printed on several occasions, the last time being by W. de Gray Birch in 1881. Admirable in many ways as his edition was, it was confined to a hundred copies, and these are now so rare as to be practically unobtainable. Though he was aware of the existence of a number of manuscripts of the Life, Birch contented himself with using the British Museum manuscripts only. It therefore came about that he failed to make use of the Douai manuscript 852 (D), originally a Crowland manuscript and of much importance both for the sake of the text itself and for the general light it throws upon the construction and use of the Life and the cult of the Saint. It therefore seemed worth while to produce a new text, with translation, critical apparatus, notes, etc., to make this important eighth-century work more easily available to scholars and others interested in the obscure early history of East Anglia and the Fens. Unfortunately the Pseudo-Ingulf's Chronicle has done so much to overlay this early history with a mass of unhistorical fabrications, that nowadays even serious scholars fall into the traps laid for the unwary by these fourteenth-century forgers, such, for instance, as the supposed foundation of a monastery at Crowland by Æthelbald.

I have followed in the main the method of editing which I have already employed in Eddius's Life of Wilfrid and the Two Lives of St Cuthbert.