No less important than great, beautiful Gospel books and their celebrated illuminations are collections of letters and council, secular and ecclesiastical, that report oral processes and transmit them into writing. One example, useful because it comes from the period between Bede's and Alfred's, is a letter sent by papal legates or emissaries to Pope Hadrian in 786 that mentions a famous character, Alcuin, one of the most learned of all the Anglo-Saxons. Several features of this text make it important: it shows that letters were used at meetings to enforce papal wishes in England, and used afterwards to certify that the pope's will had been carried out. The decrees were sent by the Pope to Bishop Teophylact of Todi and carried by Bishop George of Ostia and Theophylact to England, where they went first to Canterbury and then north to York. A council was called there by King Aelfwold and there George read out the pope's wishes for the Church in England.
You can compare this letter to letters from Pope Gregory sent to Augustine in Canterbury at the end of the sixth century, almost 200 years earlier. Gregory's letters are in Bede's History.
1/98