Old English also preserves material the church did not compose. The metrical charms, copied into medical manuscripts, address swarms of bees, sudden pain attributed to elf shot, the loss of cattle and the blessing of fields, and they mix Christian invocation with formulas that are plainly older. The field remedy known as the Aecerbot begins by cutting turf and ends with prayer addressed both to the mother of earth and to Christ within one rite, and it survives because a monastic scribe wrote it down.
The runic alphabet was expanded in England to about thirty letters, and the Old English Rune Poem, edited by Maureen Halsall, names each with a short verse. Some of those verses read as ordinary description and others appear to hold something older, and the poem survives only because it had been copied and printed before the manuscript containing it was lost to fire in 1731.
The language ceased to be a written standard after the Norman conquest, when French and Latin took the official registers and English re-emerged changed. What Old English leaves the atlas is a rare thing: a converted people's religious literature written in its own tongue, close enough to the conversion that both layers are visible in the same manuscripts.