ABSTRACT
The monastic revival of the tenth century, when it came, produced a decisive transformation in all aspects of English culture. It begins with St Edmund’s establishment of Dunstan as Abbot of Glastonbury in 940, and is consolidated in the reign of Edgar with Dunstan appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 960 and Oswald and Aethelwold made Bishops of Worcester and Winchester respectively in 963. The vigour and dramatic power of the former is all attributable to the Old Saxon original: it is one of the ironies of literary history that England should receive such a splendid return on its investment in Saxon Germany at the very time that its own vernacular culture is being constrained to the same rigidity as that of those German nations uninfluenced by the Anglo-Saxon missions. The close relation in the late Old English period between prose and verse has been the subject of a good deal of comment, as well as some arid terminological controversy.
