Covering more than a millennium of the history of the book in Britain, this book deals with a longer period than do all the rest of this series put together. Extending from Roman Britain to the first generation of the Anglo-Norman realm, it embraces both of the two memorable dates in English history. Stretching in bibliographical terms from the Vindolanda Tablets through the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Domesday Book, it includes some of the most famous and fascinating artefacts of written culture ever produced in these isles. The book establishes comparison and contrast between the worlds of books in the main periods such as Roman, pre-Viking, post-Viking, early Norman. The Christian missions from Rome and from Ireland defined the earliest channels for the importation of books to Anglo-Saxon England. Many of the books used in Roman Britain are likely to have been imported from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, arriving via well-organised routes of communication.

There were two languages in extensive use for writing and reading in Anglo-Saxon England: Latin and English. It is convenient to distinguish between literacy in Latin and literacy in English. At the time of the conversion, Latin was an entirely foreign language to the English, who had had relatively little contact with the Roman Empire or with Latin-speaking Britons. Competence and indeed skill in reading and writing Latin came remarkably quickly to the English after conversion. Within seventy years Aldhelm was composing highly sophisticated Latin verse and prose. Ælfric's vernacular works are explicitly addressed to the laity or the secular clergy, while his Latin writings are for monks. Byrhtferth of Ramsey makes the distinction explicit in his Enchiridion. The production of documents in the vernacular seems to have begun very soon after the conversion. From King Alfred's time onwards the vernacular is in regular use for books of Bible translations, homilies, saints' lives, history, computus, medicine and much else.

An overall growth in the ability to read and write English during our period is certain enough. To what precise extent the same applies to Latin literacy is less clear. That books large and small were composed is beyond dispute. That there was a reading public for them, varying in size from one person to many, from book to book and according to means, motive and opportunity, is therefore equally certain. Church institutions recognize the danger of misorder and abusion in Church and state implicit in the ability to read. The confiscations and bonfires of books under Wolsey and Cuthbert Tunstal, Bishop of London, in the 1520s, the warnings to booksellers, the processes against De Worde, Berthelet and others in the 1520s and 1530s and the rest, all imply a readership, if of indeterminate size, at least with determination to read. So do known instances of the prosecution of known individual readers.