From memorandum to written record: function and formality in Old English non-literary texts

In this chapter, I consider a set of four Old English non-literary texts of indeterminate date spanning the Conquest from the abbey of Bury St Edmunds within the context of more securely datable and localisable texts surviving from the archive. Texts such as these, which range from booklists to funerary arrangements, liminal both in terms of date and of type, are excluded from the charter corpus and therefore frequently overlooked. However, these texts together are testament to a wider use of the written word in early medieval England than is still often acknowledged in scholarship, and also present important evidence for the development of the language during the transition from Old to Middle English. The article includes appendices itemising additions to the Sawyer catalogue and of texts comprising the records series used in the compilation of the ongoing Dictionary of Old English