Between 900 and 1100 England experienced a variety of political, social and economic transformations, the effects of which have quite rightly dominated its historiography ever since. Unification followed by the renewal of Viking activity in the tenth century, and Cnut's conquest in the early eleventh, are only overshadowed in the historiography of the period by the events of the Norman Conquest later in the eleventh, a rupture whose completeness is poignantly reflected in the Domesday phrase “when King Edward was alive and dead.” In addition to these momentous events, tenth and eleventh-century English men and women had to contend with famine, disease, rebellion and other calamities, not to mention the turn of the first millennium which, if it had anywhere near the same impact as the turn of the second, was no small cause for alarm. Although England certainly experienced periods of peace and prosperity in the last century and a half of Anglo-Saxon rule, the weight of evidence suggests that these were centuries of deep uncertainty to say the least.

That we know as much as we do about the transformations of the tenth and eleventh centuries is due primarily to English churchmen, who, for all intents and purposes, maintained the institutional memory of the English people in this period. Many of our sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which provides the basic shape of early medieval English political history; Domesday Book, which bears witness to the political, social and economic turmoil of the Norman Conquest; and charters, which document the expression and expansion of royal as well as ecclesiastical authority, to name but a few, were either written by churchmen or survive largely because they were archived by them. There is no need to dwell here on the sources for Anglo-Saxon political history except to say that enough contemporary material survives to construct a coherent narrative upon which most historians can agree.

Given its role as chief repository of memory, it is deeply ironic that the same cannot be said for the Church. Historians do not agree on some fairly basic aspects of late Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical history, including how far the parish system had advanced by 1066 and whether the ideology of monastic reform was as successful in practice as it was in theory.