The traditional date for the coming of Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England is A.D. 597, the year in which St Augustine, sent by Pope Gregory, arrived in Kent. It must, however, be remembered that in northern Britain, among the Picts, the Irish monastic foundation of St Columba had been functioning on the island of Iona since 563. Both the Roman and the Irish missions influenced the development of learning among the English directly, whereas links with the churches and monasteries of the Britons seem to have been by far less important. Missionaries from Kent, led by St Paulinus, first took Christianity into Northumbria to the court of King Edwin in 627, but that mission failed when Edwin was defeated in 633 by Penda of Mercia. A couple of years later Oswald, who had grown up in exile ‘in the faith as the Irish taught it’, seized Northumbria. Given his upbringing, Oswald sent to Iona for teachers, foremost among them St Aidan, rather than south to Kent. Thus, the Roman church, its influence fanning out from Canterbury, and the Columban church, through the work begun by Aidan of Lindisfarne, were both instrumental in the christianization of the English. The books brought by Augustine and his companions from the Roman world came from within the living tradition of the Roman system of scripts, whereas the books of Oswald's missionaries must have shared in divergent traditions that had developed in Britain and Ireland.

Overall, the Roman system of scripts extends from the reign of the Emperor Augustus (31 B.C.-A.D. 14) at least up to the time of Pope Gregory (died 604) and possibly into the eighth century. Literacy was widespread in the Roman world, and the production of manuscripts a professionalized activity. Square capitals, highly suitable for carving in stone (hence they are also called monumental capitals) but also painted on walls and used in ink on papyrus, were not really a book script. Although we see them as at the top of the Roman hierarchy of scripts and recognize their continuing importance as a part of display script (see pl. 3, and later, for example, pl. 11), few books were written entirely in square capitals. The narrower and more condensed capitals termed ‘Rustic’ served typically as the formal book script of the antique world, and they came also to be used on monuments.