ANGLO-SAXON
CHARTERS
The Anglo-Saxon Chancery
W. H. STEVENSON
The Sandars Lectures in Bibliography, University of Cambridge, 1898
W. H. Stevenson (1858-1924), elected research fellow at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1895, was appointed Sandars Reader in Bibliography, University of Cambridge, for 1898. He delivered four lectures on 'The Anglo-Saxon Chancery', on 4, 6, 18 and 20 May 1898, before a small audience, which included F. W. Maitland and Mary Bateson. Stevenson became Fellow and Librarian of St John's College, Oxford, in 1904, and died in 1924.
In a letter to R. Lane Poole, written from the Canary Isles on 29 January 1899, Maitland remarked 'Should you see Stevenson, be good enough to tell him that if, when I return in April, I do not find the Anglo-Saxon Chancery in print I will swear in Spanish' (The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. C. H. S. Fifoot (Cambridge, 1965), p. 194). Yet the Sandars Lectures were never published. Poole himself was said in 1935 to have had a plan to publish the lectures, but nothing came of it. The manuscript of the lectures passed through the hands of several scholars, including V. H. Galbraith, F. T. Wainwright, Dorothy Whitelock, Sir Frank Stenton, and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill; having received the manuscript from Stenton in 1954, Wallace-Hadrill passed it to the Library of St John's College, Oxford, in 1955, where it remains.
The importance of Stevenson's contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies cannot be overestimated. He is best known, of course, for his edition of Asser's Life of King Alfred (Oxford, 1904), but he is renowned no less for his work on Anglo-Saxon charters. In the words of Sir Frank Stenton: 'It is with Stevenson that the modern study not only of Anglo-Saxon diplomatic but also of Anglo-Saxon history really begins' (The Latin Charters of the Anglo-Saxon Period (Oxford, 1955), p. 8).
The files which follow constitute an uncorrected transcript of the manuscript of Stevenson's lectures, made by SDK in 1975 and later re-typed on disk. The sections have been created editorially, and headings have been supplied. In 1983 SDK and Harald Kleinschmidt devised a plan to publish the lectures, accompanied by reprints of some of Stevenson's articles on Anglo-Saxon charters, and by essays on 'W. H. Stevenson and Anglo-Saxon studies' (by SDK) and on 'W. H. Stevenson and the continental diplomatics of his age' (by HK), with a complete bibliography of Stevenson's writings (prepared by HK); unfortunately, the project has not yet been brought to completion. The notes in the files below were supplied by Dr Kleinschmidt, in part following Stevenson's rough notes; further notes remain to be supplied.
<The Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters is grateful to the Librarian of St John's College, Oxford, for permission to make a text of Stevenson's lectures available on the WWW.> The existing text file was converted into html, and adapted for mounting on the web, by Sean Miller, of Trinity College, Cambridge, in March 1997.
An introductory passage on 'The use of written documents', for which HK provided four notes <[1], [2], [3], [4]>, is to be added hereafter, assuming it is part of the lectures. The passage was not seen by SDK in 1975, but is presumably to be found among WHS's papers at St John's College, Oxford.
SDK
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHANCERY
W. H. STEVENSON
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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