ABSTRACT
For many historians of Anglo-Saxon England, the letter of Archbishop Fulk of Rheims to Alfred has seemed a significant piece of evidence for the king's contacts and aspirations. 1 From time to time, however, the letter's authenticity has been impugned; and even those who do not doubt the letter's genuineness have found something faintly offensive in its 'arrogant and patronising tone'. 2 While the letter's 'tone' may help explain its relative neglect by English historians, its most suspicious feature also explains its near-total neglect by Continental scholars: rather than having been transmitted, like nearly all the rest of Archbishop Fulk's extant correspondence, uniquely in the form of excerpts and 'analyses' in Flodoard's Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, 3 this letter survives as a whole, in English manuscripts and only in those: an addition copied into an eleventh-century Winchester gospel-book, and, copied from that, in the probably fifteenth-century Liber Monasterii de Hyda. 4 The letter purports to have accompanied the Prankish V-136scholar Grimbald to Wessex, and its main purpose was to commend Grimbald to Alfred's patronage: hence, given Grimbald's well-known connexions with Winchester, the provenance of the letter's manuscript credentials has been thought to raise the possibility of Winchester fabrication. 5 A brief review of the question may be timely: especially so in a Festschrift for Janet Bately, who devoted one of her earliest publications to Grimbald. 6
