This chapter emphasises the principal finding of the book, that the practices for writing English developed before 1066 survived the Norman Conquest. It offers a reading of the short poem, ‘Sanctus Beda was iboren her’, taking it as typical of the texts considered in the book, with no agreed title, an uncertain date of composition and viewed here as “Old” English, there as “Middle” English. It argues the poem, often read as an indictment of post-Conquest cultural rupture, in fact speaks powerfully to the continuities between twelfth-century texts and earlier works. The chapter closes by considering other genres the book has not mentioned but for which English was occasionally used in the long twelfth century, including non-homiletic religious texts, prognostics, glosses, medical works and memoranda.