An early medieval schoolboy used a stylus to sketch a crude image of his teacher in the margin of the Regula pastoralis he or his peers had annotated for sense. Frustrated students carved slashes in the margins of another copy from present-day western Germany, marking the ends of long Latin periods. Teachers from northeastern France erased errant student notes and doodles in yet other copies, while leaving the more useful ones for subsequent readers. And a scribe in a Welsh schoolroom untangled the Regula pastoralis with a developed system of symbolic marks, the same one grammarians used to construe the complex syntax of Latin auctores like Arator and Iuvencus. Meanwhile, King Alfred of Wessex, likely through a scribe recorder, bemoaned the fallen state of contemporary Latinity. He proposed a solution that featured the translation of this same text into the vernacular, and the education of eligible youths. Accounts of the Alfredian Pastoral Care have resisted framing the translation as consonant with Latin education – not unreasonably – but the proximity of these classroom copies of the RP to the clerics that supported the Alfredian intellectual programme allows us to do so no longer. Archbishop Plegmund and his Mercian companions, Asser of St David’s, John the Old Saxon, and Grimbald of Saint-Bertin, named either in the ‘Prose Preface’ to the Pastoral Care or in Asser's Vita Alfredi, represent some of the same locales – Wales, northeastern Francia and the Old Saxon language region – from which classroom copies of the RP emerge.