Anglo-Saxon and Insular artist-scribes were the undisputed masters of the initial letter. They created and made into an art form the historiated initial, those letters that guide the reader into the content of a text by using two different forms of signification simultaneously. They did the same with the inhabited initial, letters in which humans and/or creatures guide the eye of the reader into a text visually while maintaining a much less direct relationship to that text’s content or meaning. Far more common than these two types of letter, and far less studied, are the decorated initials made up of creatures, humans, objects, interlace and pen flourishes, or any combination thereof, that fill the pages of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from the late ninth through the eleventh centuries.

These decorated initials can be both figural and non-figural, representational and non-representational, often simultaneously. They were classified by Francis Wormald in 1945 as Type I and Type II initials – Type I initials being composed in part of complete creatures, and Type II featuring gripping heads, linear interlace and acanthus ornament. Scholars still refer to these classifications, despite the fact that they tell us nothing about the possible meanings or functions of the decorated letters, and despite the fact that even as a system of classification they are in many ways inadequate. Many of the initials in the late ninth or early tenth-century Durham Collectar, for example, resist classification (see below, Figs 3 and 4). For Wormald, these initials, which are among the earliest examples of their type to survive, straddled a borderline between the fundamentally Insular structure of gripping heads and interlace (Type I) and the ‘Romanesque characteristics’ – meaning the more naturalistic solid bodies and developed acanthus leaf pattern – of the later manuscripts (Type II). Some of the Durham Collectar’s initials combine aspects of Types I and II in a way that Wormald himself described as characteristic of the eleventh century. Wormald was, however, impressed by the effect of Anglo-Saxon decorated initials, which he described as ‘one of ceaseless and elaborate movement’. His words refer specifically to Type II initials, but they are equally apt for Anglo-Saxon initials more generally, as they all function in one way or another to bring the word to life.