It is difficult to underestimate the importance of saints to the Anglo-Saxon church in particular and Anglo-Saxon society as a whole. Saints could mediate between an intercessor hoping for a miraculous cure and a God who could not be approached directly. Praying whilst touching the relics of a saint (bones, clothes or other objects associated with the saint during his or her lifetime) was believed to be the most effective way of seeking a cure.
To possess the relics of a particularly respected saint was a considerable boon for a church. For one thing, they brought visitors from across the country. If a cure was forthcoming, a generous bequest was often forthcoming from the recipient of the miracle. It is therefore no surprise that there was a lucrative black-market in relics. Nor is it surprising that individual churches enthusiastically published the merits of their local saints. A formal procedure for sanctification would not exist for another three centuries (part of the 'Decretals' of Gregory IX); in the tenth-century, the number of cures effected by the relics of a saint were what counted.
While non-churchmen would have been aware of the cult of saints through stories of miraculous cures, the practice of swearing on relics and the occasional luxury of a day off work on a feast day, churchmen daily encountered the cult of saints through the liturgy. The names of saints were recited in the litany during ecclesiastical ceremonies and private devotions. But the litany gave no information about the details of a saint's life; it remembered his or her name alone. Rather more information was available from a martyrology, which gave very brief biographical details for each saint, arranged by the date of his or her dies natalis, date of death.
But the fullest account of a saint came from a holy biography, a vita (in the case of confessors, whose devoted service to God counted as a metaphorical martyrdom) or a passio (in the case of martyrs, who died in the cause of their faith). Texts related to a particular saint were often collected into a libellus, or manuscript compendium, while the lives of multiple saints were compiled into legendaries (books for reading - the term comes from Latin lego - rather than books of dubious historical accuracy) or passionals. Here again, the saints were arranged by their dies natalis. The most important example for late Anglo-Saxon England is the so-called 'Cotton Corpus Legendary', a copy of which was Ælfric's source for many of his Lives of Saints, though it was compiled in Northern France or Flanders in the late ninth century.
Anglo-Saxon England also produced a several notable insular hagiographers. From early Northumbria, Bede (verse and prose vitae of St Cuthbert, a prose version of Paulinus of Nola's Life of St Felix and a revised version of an earlier passio of St Anastasius) and Alcuin (vitae of St Richarius, St Vedastus and St Willibrod, the latter in both prose and verse) stand out. After a barren period between 800 and 950, hagiography again became a prominent genre and it was no doubt encouraged by the Benedictine reformers. Byrhtferth (a passio of the brothers Æthelred and Æthelberht and vitae of St Oswald and St Ecgwine) was perhaps the most prolific writer of the period, but Fredegaud (author of the awesomely difficult Breviloquium vitae Wilfridi), Wulfstan Cantor (responsible for the Narratio metrica de S. Swithuno and Vita Æthelwoldi) and Lantfred (a prose account of Swithun's translation and miracles) were also prolific.
All these writers, of course, wrote in Latin. Most vernacular hagiographies were translated and adapted from earlier lives. Some thirty anonymous lives are extant, along with the ninth-century Old English Martyrology, a metrical calender (misleadingly known as the Menologium), a list of native saints and their places of burial, Secgan be þam Godes sanctum þe on Engla lande ærost reston, and Cynewulf's poem on St Juliana. Ælfric's Lives of Saints nonetheless represents the first attempt to produce a set of lives of major saints in England.
Further Reading: Cross (1994), Lapidge (1991), Moloney (1984), Whatley (1994) and the essays collected in Szarmach (1996).