The date 1500 is arbitrary, an indication that this book deals with the scripts in use for writing the forms of English widely categorized as Old English and Middle English. In effect, just as no clear distinctions can be drawn between manuscripts in Old English and Middle English, there is no sharp cut-off point between Middle English and Modern English. So long as texts remained fashionable or of use, they were copied or printed anew. Older manuscripts could continue in use: the late-fifteenth-century Sinclair manuscript (pl. 56), a poetic miscellany, seems to have continued in the family through the next century, with members of the family and friends using its final pages almost as an autograph book; and even later, in 1612, three young men dignified some particular occasion in their lives by entering that year's date and mottoes into the mid-fifteenth-century miscellany, Fairfax 16 (pl. 58). As yet, however, few books in English were read outside Britain and Ireland, unless by exiles. Who else would have read the Vercelli Book of Old English poetry and homilies in northern Italy in the eleventh century? If pieces of English were committed to writing elsewhere in Europe, the circumstances were unusual. A prisoner in Italy with time on his hands took part, it seems, in making a new copy of the English bible he had taken there with him in the hope of demonstrating its freedom from heresy. And Henry V may indeed have encouraged the use of English for his correspondence between France and England across the years 1417-22. But in 1500 the English language was a vernacular little used outside these islands, unless on a battlefield. That was soon to change, when printers on the continent (some of them English exiles) sought to supply the English market with books that printers at home were chary of printing. It remained rare at this time, however, for manuscripts written in Britain to travel beyond the British Isles, unless to be illuminated, as for example books of hours in Bruges or Ghent; and manuscripts in English tended to travel only in special circumstances.

Equally, few works composed in English had as yet been translated into other languages. This is particularly the case for Old English.