ABSTRACT
Distinct types of evidence are available for different groups of houses it is clear that it is possible to differentiate between the communities of female religious that have dominated the literature, and the impoverished, transitory, and generally ill-attested residue. In the period beyond the accession of King Alfred there were female religious communities at various sites where Anglo-Saxon minsters for women or double houses had been active in the pre-Viking Age; it can be determined whether these congregations had sustained an unbroken existence across the lacuna which characterises most of their archives during the first period of viking wars. Women religious are recorded in the later Anglo-Saxon period living at some sites which had housed male congregations before the First Viking Age. Royal patronage would seem primarily to have been directed towards royal foundations, since all but one of these nine houses can lay some claim to have been founded by a member of the West Saxon royal house.
