By the late tenth century, Old English had developed into a standardized literary language, removed to some extent from everyday speech and upheld by the twin pillars of secular and monastic elites. Following the Danish invasions of the early eleventh century, the pre- Conquest vernacular reached its apogee as a medium for political commentary; the letters of King Cnut, the treatises and sermons of Archbishop Wulfstan, and the competing, partisan recensions of the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle all testify to an increasing confidence in the use of English for political purposes. In a similar manner, the Old English Apollonius of Tyre, a work found uniquely in a mid- eleventh- century manuscript, reveals an incipient appetite for prose romance and the tales of antiquity. Had Harold Godwinson and his army prevailed at the Battle of Hastings, it seems likely that Old English would have continued to mature as a literary language of the secular elite. As it was, the Normans displaced the Anglo- Saxon nobility, and Latin and French rapidly supplanted English in the castle and the court.

The same cannot be said of the second pillar upon which Old English literary culture rested: Benedictine monasticism. Despite the gradual replacement of native churchmen with foreign prelates after the Norman Conquest, Old English texts continued to be reissued throughout the twelfth century. After more than a decade of intensive research, scholars are now in a position to make various generalizations about these manuscripts. Most Old English books produced after 1066 come from monastic cathedrals, an institution that combines a Benedictine priory with the seat of a bishop, who was himself a monk. The cathedral priory was one of the most distinctive legacies of the tenth- century monastic reform movement in England, a direct consequence of Bishop Æthelwold's (d.984) awareness of the monastic identity of the Roman mission and the church in the age of Bede. From a continental perspective, the idea of integrating a monastery with an episcopal seat was utterly eccentric, conflicting with the more conventional notion that monks should live in isolation from secular society, with which a bishop was necessarily concerned. Despite their singularity from a European perspective, the Normans embraced the Anglo- Saxon model of the monastic cathedral, increasing their number from four to nine (out of a total of seventeen).