REGESTA REGUM ANGLORUM
22 May 2001
Introductory note
The New Regesta Regum Anglorum, devised by Dr Sean Miller in May 2001, offers new ways of approaching and examining the corpus of Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas. It combines and integrates online texts of the diplomas (made available on this website in January 1999) with material from the Electronic Sawyer [S 1-1602], being the revised and updated form of Peter Sawyer's annotated catalogue of Anglo-Saxon charters (1968), produced in 1994-8 by Dr Susan Kelly (and also made available on this website in January 1999). For full commentaries on the individual charters, and for much further guidance, it remains essential, of course, to refer to the constituent fascicules in the BA/RHS series, advertised elsewhere on this website.
It is possible, using this new form of the Regesta Regum Anglorum, to obtain a working Latin text, and the corresponding entry in the Electronic Sawyer, for any Anglo-Saxon royal diploma, simply by entering the Sawyer-number at the top of the form, by selecting the form in which you wish the result to be displayed (e.g. full text of charter plus full text of E-Sawyer), and pressing 'Search'. It is also possible to obtain a text, and the corresponding entry in the Electronic Sawyer, by entering other unique details (e.g. K 705, or B 1347).
The search-form enables one to conduct various kinds of search and analysis within the corpus of charters as a whole.
It may be used, for example, to generate:
Or it may be used to generate sets of charters containing a specified word or string in the Sawyer-entry:
And of course it is possible to generate sets of charters containing a specified word or string (e.g. a technical term, or a rare word) in the Latin text.
The results will be displayed in S-order. Each text can be made to appear directly beneath the corresponding entry in the Electronic Sawyer.
Further development
It is hoped that it will soon be possible to add translations of certain charters (see website Homepage), and links to facsimiles of surviving single sheets (see website Homepage).
It is intended at a later stage to devise a means of conducting diplomatic analysis of the entire corpus of charters, by systematic flagging of component diplomatic elements within each text (e.g. invocation, superscription and royal style, dispositive section, reservation clause, boundary clause, sanction, dating clause, witness-list), and by enabling direct comparison of texts selected by various criteria (particular words, reign, date, archive, diocese, county, estate, draftsman, scribe, etc.).
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