It is a prayer written to summon protection from God and various other Christian figures from the hazards of the road.
[3] It mainly deals with a list of biblical characters, invoking their blessing, including everyone from Adam to Christ to Peter and Paul.
The text gives us a unique insight into popular religious practices of Anglo-Saxon culture, and the particular rituals prescribed for journeys.
The charm survives in only one manuscript: the eleventh-century Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41, where it is written into the margins of pp.
[1] This text is part of the movement from Oral Tradition to a Writing tradition, and so is marked as Transitional Literature- a type of go-between in which oral performances are copied, but some of the performance parts are lost, assumed to be inferred, or hinted at.