This chapter analyses memorial writing at Worcester between 1050 and 1150 as products of, and tools for, monastic practices of memory that were ramified throughout a wide range of the monks’ cultural activities. Like many sites of tenth-century reform, Worcester had adopted new usages gradually, unevenly, and in ways constrained by local conditions. Nevertheless, the pontificates of Bishops Ealdred (1041–61) and Wulfstan II (1062–95) mark an intensive phase of this institutional development. During this period, Worcester monks vastly expanded their store of practical texts for a monastic life in line with the ideals of the tenth-century Benedictine movement in England. As part of this process the monks multiplied the literary connections to centres in West Francia, Flanders and Lotharingia, regions that had shaped the community's religious practices since the mid-tenth century. The late eleventh- and early twelfth-century community's reputation among modern scholars as a bastion of conservative cultural nationalism, because of its unusually deep store of Old English texts and the long tenure of Wulfstan II, underplays these important examples of central medieval England's richly ‘international’ character and require nuancing, if they should not be abandoned altogether. A picture of Worcester's literary culture as the fruit of its long, essentially outward-looking development as a monastic institution – rather than a product of irredentist ardour and the shock of Conquest – is in keeping, however, with historical studies of its cartularies, its annalistic writing, and its book collecting as a whole. It also bears out Elaine Treharne's point that post-Conquest Old English writing was not antiquarian but responded to contemporary needs in contemporary ways.

Worcester's manner of embracing its monastic transformation in its literature can be surprising. Rather than propose a monastic identity that was altogether homogeneous (still less homogeneously ‘English’), the authors and scribes of Worcester's literary culture brought texts together whose contents emphasised the diverse origins and experiences of the individuals within the community. A text like Hemming's Cartulary seems to articulate a consolidated collective identity towards the end of Worcester's long process of reform, while the CC attributed to John of Worcester presents key ethnic and political features of the community's identity as though they were subject to frequent augmentation, revision and dispute.