Anglo-Saxon charters
Anglo-Saxon charters are documents from the early medieval period in England which typically made a grant of land or recorded a privilege.
Diplomas were usually written on parchment in Latin, but often contained sections in the vernacular, describing the bounds of estates, which often correspond closely to modern parish boundaries.
The writ was authenticated by a seal and gradually replaced the diploma as evidence of land tenure during the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods.
The Anglo-Saxon charter can take many forms: it can be a lease (often presented as a chirograph), a will, an agreement, a writ or, most commonly, a grant of land.
The oldest extant original charter, now in Canterbury Cathedral archive, was issued in 679 by King Hlothhere of Kent granting land to the Reculver Abbey.
Overall, some two hundred charters exist in the original form, whilst others are post-Conquest copies, that were often made by the compilers of cartularies (collections of title-deeds) or by early modern antiquaries.
Often forging was focussed on providing written evidence for the holdings recorded as belonging to a religious house in the Domesday Book.
Historians attempt to extract useful information from all types of charters, even outright fabrications, which may be of interest because they are apparently based on genuine documentation or for some other reason.
The eschatocol was composed of a dating clause and witness-list, which usually included powerful lay and ecclesiastical members of the king's court.
Much of the language of the diploma was explicitly religious[8] – that a grant was made for the benefit of the grantor's soul or that anyone breaking the charter would be excommunicated.
Charters typically opened by situating themselves firmly within the Christian order, with a pictorial (cross, chrismon or alpha-omega) and a verbal invocation to God.
[11] Since 1939, contributions to the list were few and far between; in her 2011 Wills and Will-making in Anglo-Saxon England Linda Tollerton published the most up-to-date corpus, with 68 examples in total.
Furthermore, only 22 wills can be found in manuscripts written before 1066; originals are even rarer, as some, like those of Alfred the Great or Wulfric Spot, are known to be pre-Conquest copies, while still other may in fact be mere extracts or ancient forgeries.
In 846, Æthelwulf of Wessex granted land in Devon by charter, perhaps dividing the spoils from this recently conquered territory among his men.
[22][page needed] The way these documents use Roman remains in and outside of boundary clauses can tell us a lot about how the past was understood and constructed.
Wulfstan was rather independently-minded, and his absence from the West Saxon court can be linked with possible participation at Brunanburh and his later activity as a kind of kingmaker in York.
A joint committee of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society was set up in 1966 to oversee a definitive edition of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters.
