ÆLFRIC of Eynsham, also known as Ælfric the Grammarian, lived approximately between 955 and 1016, during the troubled years of Æthelred Unræd's reign (978–1016). Not much is known about Ælfric's life. Most of what there is can be gathered from his writings and from documentary evidence on the construction of Eynsham Abbey. He studied as a monk at Winchester in Æthelwold's school, where he learned Latin. In 987 he was sent to Cernel (Cerne Abbas, Dorset), where he came under the patronage of Æthelmær and possibly his father Æthelweard and where he wrote the bulk of his work. When he was sent to Eynsham, (Oxfordshire) in 1005, as its founding abbot, Ælfric had, therefore, already committed to parchment most of the surviving works attributed to him. The eighty sermons known as the Catholic Homilies were issued in two stages, as two separate collections, and are linked to the liturgical year, containing pieces for both movable and unmovable feasts. The compilation of these two series must be dated to the year 995 at the latest. As Ælfric himself stated, it seems as if he had in mind a fourfold homiletic plan. This, however, he did not carry forward after his third group of sermons which goes under the editorial title the Lives of Saints.

The Life of Saint Basil (LB) is part of this third collection, dated variously by scholars to either 998 or 1002. Like the Catholic Homilies, this collection is organised per circulum anni (according to the calendar year), and contains twenty-seven hagiographies concerning those saints venerated by the monks (presumably of Winchester or Cerne Abbas).

All of Ælfric's saints’ lives are based on a Latin antecedent, and it seems now likely that they derive from a very large collection of continental origin, which has survived in a group of manuscripts known as the Cotton-Corpus Legendary. This title conveniently defines an entire manuscript tradition and comes from the library shelf-marks of its earliest surviving witness, a very large English manuscript, now in two separate codices: London, BL, Cotton Nero E. i (parts 1 and 2), and Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 9 (respectively Gneuss 344 and 36). The Cotton-Corpus Legendary belongs to a much earlier manuscript tradition from the north of Europe, now identified with the archdiocese of Reims.