ABSTRACT
Since then various studies have appeared, culminating in the 1990 publication of essays by Simon Keynes and Susan Kelly in The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe, edited by Rosamond McKitterick. Virtually nothing was published on the subject until 1977, when Patrick Wormald published his influential article, ‘The Uses of Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and its Neighbours’. Keynes’ study of royal government in the later Anglo-Saxon period surveys the same material, but reaches entirely different conclusions: Royal government in the tenth and eleventh centuries depended to a very considerable extent on the use of the written word, and…late Anglo-Saxon society was well accustomed to such manifestations of ‘pragmatic literacy’. Keynes completed his survey of the later Anglo-Saxon period by considering the role of the written document in wider society.
