Anglo-Saxon England

Roughly 1500 charters survive from Anglo-Saxon England. The majority of these records are royal diplomas, that is, documents recording permanent grants by kings of either land or privileges, and these are supplemented by a small but rich miscellany of other types of charters, including wills, leases, dispute memoranda and writs. While most surviving examples date to the tenth and eleventh centuries, approximately 400 authentic charters come from before the year 900, with the oldest extant specimens dating to the 670s. It is widely recognised that these earliest examples in terms of both their language and form were based on Roman private charters and that the use of such documents was facilitated and driven by church councils, which in the period before c. 850 often served as the venue for the issuing of land grants that were recorded in writing.

Unlike surviving contemporary royal law-codes, the charters of the seventh and eighth centuries are predominantly Latin records, though many include vernacular terms when referring to geographic locations (which may or may not be place names). This raises important questions about the functions of such documents, the contexts in which they were used, as well as the literacy levels of those who engaged with documentary culture. From the beginning of the ninth century onwards, these largely Latin texts were supplemented by a range of documents that include substantially more Old English elements or are even entirely in the vernacular. This expanded presence of Old English is a key concern for the current project; its chronological aspect is particularly interesting, given that it occurred before the reign of King Alfred of Wessex (871–899), who is so often associated with the development of Old English as a language of writing. It should be stressed, however, that despite such increasing use of the vernacular, Latin remained central to documentary culture throughout the entirety of the Anglo-Saxon period, since royal diplomas were almost always composed for the most part in this language.

The geographic distribution of Anglo-Saxon charters is extremely uneven, a reflection of the varied histories of individual institutions. Charters survive from over seventy archives, all of which are ecclesiastical, while the corpus is dominated by the collections of a relatively small number of centres. The largest by far are Abingdon, Winchester's Old Minster, Worcester and Christ Church, Canterbury. In contrast, there are almost no surviving examples from Northumbria, very few from eastern Mercia, and the archives of several influential ecclesiastical centres (such as Lichfield) are pitifully small. Any lay and royal archives, furthermore, are long gone. For the present project, the archives of Christ Church and Worcester are particularly valuable, the former because of the large number of its documents that survive in their original single-sheet forms, the latter due to the remarkable levels of bilingualism found in its documents, particularly the exceptional body of seventy-six ecclesiastical leases surviving from the episcopate of Oswald (961–992).

For more discussion of Anglo-Saxon charters, visit http://www.kemble.asnc.cam.ac.uk.

To view the online catalogue of Anglo-Saxon charters, visit http://www.esawyer.org.uk.

Eastern Carolingian Francia

The documentary record of the eastern parts of the Frankish world in the Carolingian period (c.750–c.900) offers a stark contrast to that of Anglo-Saxon England. Eastern Francia – broadly encompassing the Rhineland, Hesse, Franconia, Alsace, Alemannia and Bavaria – seems to have experienced a dramatic surge in documentary production in the eighth and ninth centuries. Here, as in England, the native languages were Germanic dialects, but unlike England, the vernacular was seldom used as an administrative or legal language in the early Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the Carolingian East constitutes one of the best documented times and places anywhere in the early medieval world. Unlike Anglo-Saxon England, the vast majority of records from this area are ‘private' charters – that is, those not issued by rulers. Over 7000 are extant from before the year 900, most of which are known from cartularies produced between the ninth and twelfth centuries. The only sizeable cache of original documents is that of the archive of St Gall (about 700 charters for the period in question). In addition, there are about 1000 royal diplomas covering the same area and period.

Private charters have constituted the basis for our preliminary investigation because they offer remarkable snapshots of local society, economic organisation and village life across a region of considerable size. These documents also allow us to probe the spread and scale of ‘lay literacy' and to ask questions about the extent to which people beyond the cloister used documents and writing in their day-to-day lives. These charters survive because they were preserved in ecclesiastical archives, but recent research has shown that lay people and churchmen in fact engaged in a common documentary and archival culture. Indeed, it may be better to posit a distinction between ‘institutional' and ‘non-institutional' agency rather than evoking the traditional ‘clerical' vs. ‘lay' divide (Brown et al. 2013). On account of this pattern of preservation, most extant charters – perhaps unsurprisingly – record pious donations of property made by individuals to churches and monasteries. However, documents also record sales, exchanges, confirmations of earlier transactions, the outcomes of disputes, and more.

The eighth and ninth centuries represent a conspicuous peak in the early medieval documentary record for this region. Charters were also produced in preceding and subsequent centuries, but they do not survive in quantities approaching those characteristic of the Carolingian period. While the factors underlying the changing patterns of land transactions and documentary production are debated, the coincidence of this trend with the rise and fall of the Carolingian dynasty makes it a suitable corpus of material to examine within a distinct phase of early medieval continental history. We have therefore been investigating eastern Frankish documentary collections of all shapes and sizes, from large, well-thumbed cartularies to fragmentary, lesser studied dossiers. What follows is not an exhaustive list but rather an outline of the collections which have been of particular interest for the project aims, with a few comments on the numbers of charters from prior to c.900 and the forms in which these documents survive:

• Lorsch: a monastery in Hesse. 3000 charters, all of which are known from a twelfth-century cartulary. Many of these documents were heavily abbreviated. Papal and royal documents were placed at the front in a ‘cartulary-chronicle'. http://archivum-laureshamense-digital.de/view/saw_mainz72
• Fulda: a monastery in Hesse. 1800 charters, 600 of which are known from a cartulary produced in the 820s, and the rest from a twelfth-century cartulary which reproduced and truncated material from other now-lost parts of the ninth-century cartulary.
• Freising: an episcopal church in Bavaria. 1000 charters, 500 of which come from a cartulary compiled 824–848, and roughly another 500 added at various stages in the ninth and tenth centuries. https://www.bayerische-landesbibliothek-online.de/encozroh
• St Gall: a monastery near Lake Constance in north-eastern Switzerland. 700 charters extant in single-sheet original parchments. This is the only substantial collection of original private charters for an institution north of the Alps in this period.
• Wissembourg: a monastery in Alsace. 273 charters from a cartulary compiled around 860.
• Regensburg: an episcopal church in Bavaria. About 170 charters, 12 of which are from an extant cartulary fragment compiled between 817 and 847, and the rest from another cartulary produced in the early 890s.
• Werden: a monastery in Essen, Germany. 66 charters, most of which are from a cartulary compiled shortly after 848.

For more on Carolingian charters, see the following introductory guide: http://charlemagneseurope.ac.uk/charter-basics/