Two authentic works have survived to the modern era, an Epistola ad milites Corotici, ‘Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus’, in which Patrick excommunicates a post-Roman British tyrant who had murdered some Christian catechumens and sold others into slavery, and a Confessio, ‘Confession’, in which Patrick explains himself to those whom he had converted in Ireland and justifies his mission to those who had opposed it in Britain. The letters survive in eight manuscripts: the earliest giving an abridged text copied at the beginning of the ninth century in Armagh; a second during the tenth century, perhaps in the diocese of Soissons; a third about the year 1000 at Worcester; a fourth during the eleventh century, owned if not written at Jumièges; three during the twelfth century in northern France and in England; and one during the seventeenth century. As among these eight manuscripts seven are independent of each other, the text of the letters is fairly secure. In these compositions Patrick describes his fatherland as Brittanniae ‘the Britains’ and neighbouring regions as Galliae ‘the Gauls’, and he refers incidentally to coinage, solidi and scriptulae, implying that he was born while Roman administration still functioned in a Britain divided into several provinces, perhaps about ad 390, certainly before 410. He states that he was born into a family of landowners, slaveholders, civil servants and churchmen.

The present volume stands as the latest contribution to a distinguished tradition of scholarship on the manuscripts of early Britain that stretches back to Matthew Parker (1504–75). In the last fifteen years of his life, Parker not only collected and salvaged manuscripts but studied them, he and his entourage scouring their pages for material that could inform his intellectual concerns and buttress his ecclesiastical standpoints. A range of works that he owned in manuscript can be shown to lie behind his De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae cum 70 Archiepiscopis Cantuariensibus (1572), for example. Parker’s intention may often have been polemical – justifying his views and the Elizabethan church settlement in general by tracing them back to an early English church that had been purer, he could claim, than the Roman Catholic one of his own day – but the material was nevertheless scrutinised and published after a fashion. Indeed, his revealingly named A Testimonie of Antiquitie shewing the auncient faith in the Church of England touching the sacrament of the body and bloude of the Lord … (1566/7) included the first edition of any Old English texts – namely the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, Ten Commandments, two Ælfric letters and a homily – printed (by the enterprising John Day) using a typeface specially created for the purpose.

When the Vindolanda tablets, dating from between ad 90 and 120, were discovered on Hadrian’s Wall in the 1970s, they changed dramatically our understanding of the place of Roman Britain in the literate world of the Roman Empire. The range and variety of the texts represented on the hundreds of ink-written wooden tablets included military documents and reports, occasional literary texts and references (to Vergil and Catullus, for instance) and a wealth of personal letters exchanged with people elsewhere in Britain, north-west Gaul and Rome itself. These letters include autographs by individuals, even the wives of the military commanders, as well as professional writers. The several hundred men and women responsible for these remnants of the Vindolanda community were not members of the social and literary elites but were nevertheless people for whom the individual power to generate and control texts was important. The Roman capital and cursive scripts on the tablets, coupled with the evidence of stone inscriptions, are an eloquent witness both to the presence, and possibly the introduction, of writing to the region as a consequence of the Roman army’s occupation of Britain, and to the connection between the production of literary texts and of administrative documents. The collection as a whole is a salutary reminder not only of Britain’s communication with the rest of the Roman world, but also of the Romano-British population’s participation in the literary culture of that world. Further, the Roman script system survived and was in the process of development in western Britain and Ireland before the arrival of the English in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. Italian and Frankish forms of Roman script were then introduced by the missionaries into the areas of Britain occupied by the English.