Anglo-Saxon Charters

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Anglo-Saxon Charters are documents from the early medieval period in Britain which typically make a grant of land or record a privilege. They are usually written on parchment, in Latin but often with sections in the vernacular, describing the bounds of estates, which often correspond closely to modern parish boundaries. The earliest surviving charters were drawn up in the 670s; the oldest surviving charters granted land to the Church, but from the eighth century surviving charters were increasingly used to grant land to lay people.

Charters provide fundamental source material for understanding Anglo-Saxon England, complementing the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and literary sources.

[edit] Survival and Authenticity

The Anglo-Saxon charter can take many forms: it can be a lease (often presented as a cyrograph), a will, an agreement, a writ, and, most commonly, a grant of land. Our picture is skewed towards those that regard land, particularly in the earlier period (though it must also be admitted that the emergence of wills and cyrographs also owed much to later development). Land charters can further be subdivided into royal charters, or diplomas, and private charters (donations by figures other than the king). Over 1000 Anglo-Sacon charters are extant today, for which we rely entirely on those maintained in the archives of religious houses. These houses preserved charters to record their right to the land. Some surviving charters are later copies, sometimes with interpolations. Anglo-Saxon charters were sometimes used in legal disputes, and the recording of their contents in the process is another reason for survival of text where the original documents have been lost. Unfortunately, this practice gave rise to a rather more unhappy one of charter forgery, more often than not by those same monastic houses. Overall, some 200 charters exist in the original form, the remainder as post-Conquest copies, often made by the compilers of cartularies (collections of title-deeds) or by early modern antiquaries.

As charters are records of land ownership, they were forged on a fairly frequent basis. As a result, the first step in studying charters is establishing their authenticity. The primary motivation for forging charters has been to establish rights to the land. Often forging was focussed on the holdings allotted to a religious house in the Domesday Book.

[edit] Historical Significance

Charters are often used by historians as sources for the history of Anglo-Saxon England. It is frequently kings who give land in charters. By seeing what land is given it is possible to see the extent of a king's control, and how he was exercising power in that region. For instance, King Aethelwulf of Wessex granted land in Devon by charter in 846, perhaps dividing the spoils from this recently conquered territory among his men. Charters give lists of persons attesting the document, and so it is possible to see who was present at the king's court. For instance, we can see that several Welsh kings, including Hywel Dda, were attending Athelstan of Wessex's court in the early tenth century.

"Burderns" that were due by land owners to the king, such as providing soldiers, resources and man-power, were sometimes relieved in charters. This gives us the chance to examine social structures in Anglo-Saxon times.

A joint committee of the British Academy and Royal Historical Society was set up in 1966 to oversee a definitive edition of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters, eventuially in approximately 30 volumes. Professor Nicholas Brooks is the chairman of the committee in charge and Professor Simon Keynes is the secretary. Eleven volumes had appeared by 2005.

[edit] Further reading

• P.H. Saywer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography, (London, 1968)
• N. Brooks, 'Anglo-Saxon Charters: the Work of the Last Twenty Years', Anglo-Saxon England, 3, (1974)
• S.E. Kelly, 'Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word', The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe. ed. R. McKitterick, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
• Simon Keynes, 'Charters and Writs' in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)
• Simon Keynes, secretary, Anglo-Saxon Charters series (British Academy) British Academy Review, 1998
• Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters website