In AD 786, Bishop Georgius of Ostia, papal legate to England, wrote a letter to Pope Hadrian recording the decrees of two synods he had just attended in Mercia and Northumbria. The list of decrees reads unremarkably until the ninth item:

Why does the author introduce the idea of Saracen eating habits? Benjamin Kedar suggests that Georgius or his colleague, Theophylact, had some notion of Muslim fasting practice during the month of Ramadan, when food and drink may only be consumed between dusk and dawn. In the course of the synod, one or the other conveyed this information to the assembly as an example of how not to fast as a Christian. There is no evidence that any Muslim had travelled as far west as England by this time. Arabic was not studied in Christian Europe before the late eleventh century; the Qur'ān was not translated into Latin until the twelfth. The assembled Anglo-Saxon clerics can hardly have had the tenets of Islam at their fingertips. Still, they were able from this synodal decree to understand Saracenus as a pejorative term three centuries before the Crusades.

Within a few years of the synod, Offa, king of Mercia, had a peculiar gold piece struck in his name.