Introduction

Through this chapter I have taken an active role in the scholarly debate on the ‘minster hypothesis’, which has occupied Anglo-Saxon historians for many years. I have explained the reasons to push the debate on the origins of English ecclesiastical organisation towards the tenth and eleventh centuries, after a long period in which the scholarly debate had concentrated on the seventh and eighth centuries, a time for which sources are far too exiguous and which necessarily requires historians to look further ahead. The chapter thus introduces and explains the reasons why in my edited volume late Anglo-Saxon homilies, canon law, saints' lives and liturgical and penitential sources are studied for their own sake rather than as a tool to be employed regressively to try to reconstruct the situation in the earlier period.