This book attempts an overview of the history and development of the liturgy of daily prayer, the Divine Office, as it was performed in England from the Augustinian mission to the end of the tenth century. It is not exhaustive. The treatment of the early period, while intended to be complete as far as extant liturgical sources go, has not extended to the full range of potentially relevant literary and architectural evidence. The end date of c.1000, chosen as more or less the end of the first generation of monastic reform in England, has meant the exclusion of most of the comparatively abundant eleventh-century manuscript evidence, which remains mostly unedited and unstudied. The conclusions reached are therefore necessarily provisional. But I hope that they will provide a useful framework for future study of the Divine Office in English liturgical and literary sources, study that will enrich our understanding of the influences and aspirations that shaped Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical and monastic culture, and especially of the distinctive ideology and praxis of the tenth-century English Benedictine reformers and their successors.

A number of the ideas and conclusions in the book were first presented in conference papers that have since been published. The substance of the tables in Chapter 7 was first published in D. Rollason, C. Leyser, and H. Williams (eds.),England and the Continent in the Tenth Century(Turn-hout, 2011) - and here I would note my gratitude to the proof-reader of that volume, Deborh A. Oosterhouse of DAO Editorial Services, whose attention to detail prevented several unfortunate errors from remaining in the tables.