Æthelstan A
The diplomas are written in elaborate Latin known as the hermeneutic style, which became dominant in Anglo-Latin literature from the mid-tenth century and a hallmark of the English Benedictine Reform.
[5] Æthelstan A ceased to draft charters after 935, and his successors returned to a simpler style, suggesting that he was working on his own rather than being a member of a royal scriptorium.
According to Simon Keynes: In this period, a diploma can be characterised as a formal and symbolic record, in Latin, of an occasion when the king, acting in a royal assembly, and with the consent of the ecclesiastical and secular orders, created an estate of "bookland" at a specified place, and conveyed it on the privileged terms defined by the "book", or diploma, to a named beneficiary.
This act of establishing a particular estate as bookland, so that it could be held henceforth on these privileged terms, could be performed only by the king, in a royal assembly; but the diploma itself served hereafter as the title-deed for the land in question.
It established that the land was to be held, with its appurtenances, free from the imposition of worldly burdens, with the exception of military service, bridge-work and fortress-work, and with the power to give it to anyone of its owner's choosing.
[13] The witness lists of the Æthelstan A charters consistently place Bishop Ælfwine of Lichfield in Mercia in a higher position than his rank warranted.
To Keynes, the diplomas "are symbolic of a monarchy invigorated by success, developing the pretensions commensurate with its actual achievements and clothing itself in the trappings of a new political order."
The witness lists of King Æthelstan's father and grandfather were much shorter, with the longest in Alfred the Great's reign having only 19 names.
In John Maddicott's view the long lists in Æthelstan's reign reflect a change of direction to larger assemblies.
"[30] According to Scott Thompson Smith Æthelstan A's diplomas "are generally characterised by a rich pleonastic style with aggressively literary proems and anathemas, ostentatious language and imagery throughout, decorative rhetorical figures, elaborate dating clauses, and extensive witness lists.
[32] In Charter S 425 of 934, the second of the two originals to survive, Æthelstan A wrote (in Smith's translation): The wanton fortune of the deceiving world, not lovely with the milky-white radiance of unfading lilies but odious with the galling bitterness of woeful corruption, raging with venomous jaws tears with its teeth the sons of fetid flesh in the vale of tears; although with its smiles it may be alluring to the unfortunate, it brazenly leads down to the lowest depths of Acherontic Cocytus unless the offspring of the High-Thunderer should intervene.
[33]In S 416 of 931, the first original to survive, after the boundary clause in Old English, he reverted to Latin for the anathema against anyone who set aside the charter: If, however, God forbid, anyone swollen with diabolic spirit should be tempted to diminish or annul this brief document of my arrangement and confirmation, let him know that on the final and great day of judgment, when the archangel's shrill trumpet rings out, when graves burst open by themselves and give up the bodies now revived, when every element trembles, with the traitor Judas, who is called "son of perdition" by the Sower's merciful Offspring, he is to perish in eternal confusion within the hungry flames of unspeakable torments.
Their proems consist of long convoluted sentences, parading an ostentatious display of Greek and glossary-based vocabulary and containing numerous unmistakable verbal reminiscences of Aldhelm's writings.
In Woodman's view: "Never before had the royal diploma's rhetorical properties been exploited to such a degree and it seems no coincidence that these documents appeared following King Æthelstan's momentous political conquest of the north in 927.
