Abstract
The bulk of Old English literature, both poetry and prose, has come down to us in manuscripts of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries. Most of the texts in these late manuscripts are written in a form of Old English called late West Saxon. This dialect was used not only by West Saxon scribes and authors of that period but also by their contemporaries from other dialect areas, and the scribes employed it even when they were copying much earlier Old English texts, such as the early West Saxon Alfredian prose texts or the early Anglian glosses in the Vespasian Psalter. Late West Saxon thus cannot be looked upon as a regionally restricted dialect but – with certain reservations – as a written standard current in all of late Anglo-Saxon England.
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