British Academy - Royal Historical Society

ANGLO-SAXON CHARTERS

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The term 'Anglo-Saxon charter' covers a multitude of documents ranging in kind from the royal diplomas issued in the names of Anglo-Saxon kings between the last quarter of the seventh century and the Norman Conquest, which are generally in Latin, to the wills of prominent churchmen, laymen, and women, which are generally in the vernacular. A large proportion of the surviving corpus of charters is made up of records of grants of land or privileges by a king to a religious house, or to a lay beneficiary. The corpus also includes records of settlements of disputes over land or privileges, leases of episcopal property, and records of bequests of land and other property.

The corpus comprises about 1500 texts, of which about 200 are preserved in single-sheet form (including originals, later copies, and forgeries), and of which the remainder are preserved as copies entered in medieval cartularies, or as transcripts made by early modern antiquaries. It has long been recognised that the charters form a vital part of the evidence for our understanding of all aspects of the history and culture of Anglo-Saxon England. For a listing of all charters, see P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), of which a revised electronic version is available on this website.

The first collected edition of Anglo-Saxon charters was compiled by John Mitchell Kemble, whose Codex Diplomaticus was published in six volumes between 1839 and 1848. Kemble's edition covers the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period, to 1066; but he was dependent to some extent on the services of a team of hired copyists, and it cannot be said that his texts are sufficient for modern purposes. Kemble's lead was followed by Walter de Gray Birch, whose Cartularium Saxonicum was published in three volumes between 1885 and 1893. Birch's edition provides a fundamentally reliable and accessible coverage of the period to the death of King Edgar, in 975; but for texts of charters issued in the period from 975 to 1066, we are still dependent on Kemble, and on other editions of charters that he missed.

The British Academy - Royal Historical Society edition provides texts of the entire corpus of documents, edited in accordance with modern standards. It differs from the editions produced by Kemble and Birch in two important respects. In the first place, the charters are edited not in chronological order, but on an 'archival' basis. That is to say, each volume contains the texts of charters formerly preserved among the muniments of a particular religious house, in order that the texts may be established and judged in relation to each other, and in relation to the recorded endowment of the religious house in question. Secondly, the separate volumes are provided with an introduction covering the history of the particular house and its muniments, with a detailed commentary on each charter, and a full apparatus of indexes.

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