Writing about King Æthelberht of Kent, the first Anglo-Saxon king to convert to Christianity, Bede (d. 735) records that ‘among the many benefits that his wisdom conferred on the nation, he introduced … a code of law after the example of the Romans which was written in English and remains in force to this day’. This noteworthy event took place within a fewyears of the arrival inKent of the Christian mission headed by Augustine in 597, and Æthelberht's lawcode – though it is preserved only in a copy made five hundred years later – is the earliest-known example of English used as a language of written record. This section begins with extracts from it (Text 7). The writing of Germanic languages across Europe had previously been restricted to inscriptions made laboriously on wood or stone in versions of the ‘runic’ alphabet, but Christianity had brought Latin letters to the Anglo-Saxons and the opportunity for literacy. Bede's remark about ‘the example of the Romans’ seems to stress just that: the Anglo-Saxons, too, had now written their laws down, and no longer relied simply on oral tradition.

The lawcodes of successive Anglo-Saxon kings, right up to the time of Cnut (1016–35), would now be cast in OE – centuries before vernaculars were used in such a way by England's continental neighbours – but the widespread use of the vernacular for general purposes took a little longer to become established.