This dialect was spoken mostly in the south and west around the important monastery at Winchester, which was also the capital city of the Saxon kings.
However, while other Old English dialects were still spoken in other parts of the country, it seems that all scribes wrote and copied manuscripts in this prestigious written form.
However, both these poems appear to have been written originally in other Old English dialects, but later translated into the standard Late West Saxon literary language when they were copied by scribes.
Monasteries did not keep the standard going because English bishops were soon replaced by Norman bishops who brought their own Latin textbooks and scribal conventions, and there was less need to copy or write in Old English[citation needed].
Latin soon became the dominant language of scholarship and legal documents,[9] with Anglo-Norman as the language of the aristocracy, and any standard written English became a distant memory by the mid-twelfth century as the last scribes, trained as boys before the conquest in West Saxon, died as old men.