Wulfstan (d. 1023) was Bishop of London until 1002 and then Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of York (the two titles had been held by the same person since 972 because York under the viking kings was barely a functional see). He was an advisor to Æthelræd during the later years of his reign and wrote several of that king's law codes; he also wrote law codes for Cnut. Wulfstan was not primarily a writer of homilies; he wrote many fewer than his contemporary and correspondent Ælfric (see Dorothy Bethurum, ed., The Homilies of Wulfstan (Oxford, 1957)). The Sermo Lupi ad Anglos, however, reveals him as a writer of extraordinary power. As you read, notice the strong binary rhythms, the many rhymes and alliterations, and the chains of grammatically parallel words and phrases.

For editions of this homily, see Bethurum pp. 255-75 (which presents three different versions), Dorothy Whitelock, ed., Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (London, 1963) (especially valuable for its very full annotations), and Melissa J. Bernstein, ed., The Electronic Sermo Lupi ad Anglos. In this text, -an is often written for -um and -on, and the -o- of class 2 weak verbs often appears as -e-.