Preface

Summary

It has long been customary amongst students of the Anglo-Saxon period to regret the lack of a satisfactory edition of one of the principal classes of source material available to them: the series of royal diplomas recording grants of land and privileges made by successive kings to individuals and to religious foundations, extending from the second half of the seventh century to the second half of the eleventh, and comprising approximately one thousand texts. John Mitchell Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, published in six volumes between 1839 and 1848, must for the comprehensiveness of its coverage be rated one of the most formidable achievements of nineteenth-century scholarship, and Walter de Gray Birch's Cartularium Saxonicum, published in three volumes between 1885 and 1893, was no less remarkable for the further advance it represented in editorial method carried out on so large a scale, though Birch was never able to realize his intention of continuing his work beyond the reign of King Edgar.