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This paper aims to demystify the concept of bookland, and to suggest that it matters less for understanding what was distinctive about early England than historians have often supposed. The first part emphasises diplomas as beneficiary-led symbols of culture and status rather than instruments of royal policy. As the primary monastic context faded during the ninth century, so did the distinctive aspects of bookland. By c. 950, bōcland could translate fundus or simply terra, and thereafter diplomas had little effective function beyond signalling the status of landowner and thegn: bookland was absorbed into straightforward allodial possession. In the second part, it is argued that large areas of eastern England never had lay bookland tenure at all, though there was a limited extension of diploma use into parts of the east midlands after c. 940. Rather than a homogeneous Anglo-Saxon charter tradition, we should envisage distinct traditions in the south and west reflecting Italian, Frankish and Brittonic influences. Eastern England, by contrast, faced the North Sea, Scandinavia and the Low Countries: like other English regions it had a high monastic culture during c. 670–800, and that could have included diplomas, but its main documentary tradition is likely to have been more vernacular and decentralized.
1 P. Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe: Kingship and Royal Property from Æthelwulf to Edward the Elder’, Edward the Elder, 899–924, ed. N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill (London, 2001), pp. 264–79, at 264–5. The literature on this and associated problems is now huge, to the point of precluding reference to every general and unspecialised work that touches on related areas; here I have only cited items of bibliography that are essential to the arguments. I am most grateful to Stephen Baxter, John Hudson, Susan Kelly, Tom Licence, Rory Naismith and Levi Roach, all of whom commented with enormous care and detail, and between them improved this paper beyond recognition; and to Kanerva Blair-Heikkinen, Amy W. Clark, Catherine Cubitt, Teresa Webber, Christopher Whittick and the anonymous referee, who contributed some very helpful suggestions.
2 The main discussions are: papers by Patrick Wormald reprinted in his The Times of Bede (Oxford, 2006), pp. 154–8, 231–3; T. M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kinship Revisited’, The Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: an Ethnographic Perspective, ed. J. Hines (Woodbridge,1997), pp. 171–210; Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’; Baxter, S. and Blair, J., ‘Land Tenure and Royal Patronage in the Early English Kingdom: a Model and a Case Study’, ANS 28 (2006), 19–46 Google Scholar; J. Hudson, The Oxford History of the Laws of England: II: 871–1216 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 93–148; J. Mumby, ‘The Descent of Family Land in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, Hist. Research 84 (2011), 399–415; M. J. Ryan, ‘“Charters in Plenty, if Only they were Good for Anything”: the Problem of Bookland and Folkland in Pre-Viking England’, Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters, ed. J. Jarrett and A. S. McKinley (Turnhout, 2013), pp.19–32. They provide comprehensive bibliographies of earlier literature.
3 Reynolds, S., ‘Bookland, Folkland and Fiefs’, ANS 14 (1991), 211–27Google Scholar; S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford, 1994), pp. 326–35.
4 Baxter and Blair, ‘Land Tenure and Royal Patronage’, p. 21.
5 Ryan, ‘“Charters in Plenty”’, p. 30.
6 Cf. Naismith, R., ‘Payments for Land and Privilege in Anglo-Saxon England’, ASE 41 (2012), 277–342 Google Scholar.
7 It should be clear that this paper addresses the legal function of royal diplomas, not their production: debates about who wrote them, and how that activity correlated with the holding of assemblies, are largely outside its scope. Recent discussions are S. Keynes, ‘Church Councils, Royal Assemblies, and Anglo-Saxon Royal Diplomas’, Kingship, Legislation and Power in Anglo-Saxon England eds. G. R. Owen-Crocker and B. W. Schneider (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 17–182; L. Roach, Kingship and Consent in Anglo-Saxon England, 871–978 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 77–103.
8 Bede, ‘Epistola ad Ecgbertum Episcopum’, ch. 12 (ed. C. Grocock and I. N. Wood, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (Oxford, 2013), p. 146).
9 Roach, Kingship and Consent, pp. 96–101, summarizes the incidence of tenth-century charter production.
10 tam librum quam agrum (824: S 1434); land and boc (?958, 950 × 68: S 1506, S 1447); mid bocum and landum (c. 959: S 1211).
11 Cf. the discussion of diplomas as title-deeds in Kennedy, A., ‘Law and Litigation in the ‘Libellus Æthelwoldi Episcopi”’, ASE 24 (1995), 131–83, at 161–2Google Scholar.
12 Hudson, Oxford History, p. 141, observing that ‘a crucial element for bookland appears to have been the transfer of the charter itself’ – which is true, but does not mark out bookland as different from any other kind of document-based tenure in a ceremonious culture.
13 Here I follow Ryan, ‘“Charters in Plenty”’, pp. 29–30. Similar points are made by S. Kelly, ‘Anglo-Saxon Lay Society and the Written Word’, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe ed. R. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 36–62, at 45–6: ‘The charter was a title-deed insofar as it gave symbolic proof of ownership; the content was relatively immaterial. In cases of dispute resort was frequently made to the testimony of witnesses, local inhabitants or supporters who could give evidence about the previous history of the estate’.
14 Charles-Edwards, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingship Revisited’, pp. 196–7, discussing S 89 and S 1411; Mumby, ‘Descent of Family Land’, p. 400.
15 J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society (Oxford, 2005), pp. 89–90; Hudson, Oxford History, p. 96; Mumby, ‘Descent of Family Land’, pp. 411–12.
16 Ryan, ‘“Charters in Plenty”’, pp. 24–8.
17 Charters are cited by their number in P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: an Annotated List and Bibliography (London, 1968), in its revised form as available online as the ‘Electronic Sawyer’ (https://esawyer.lib.cam.ac.uk) abbreviated S + number. Relevant editions are cited in any detailed discussion of particular texts.
18 Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. N. P. Brooks and S. E. Kelly, 2 vols, AS Charters 17–18 (Oxford, 2013), I, 593–4 [hereafter CantCC].
19 Compare the similar formulations in S 109, another Offa charter for a Gloucestershire thegn datable to the late 770s.
20 CantCC I, 506, 531, 573, 619.
21 Translation from CantCC I, 624. As the editors note (p. 625), Wulfred was concerned to channel his property to heirs of his choice rather than the Christ Church community, which suggests a context for the sentiments expressed in this passage.
22 Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’, pp. 265–6.
23 CantCC II, 663–70. It might be argued that Abba is distinguishing between three kinds of ærfe, but in that case it would be odd that he does not specify what he had inherited himself, and the category ‘which God lent me’ would be perplexing. Certainly the ensuing clauses make no distinction between different kinds of land.
24 The Old English Orosius, ed. J. Bately, EETS ss 6 (Oxford, 1980), 118.
25 Alfred 41 (F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1903–16), I, 74).
26 Probable examples of this are a dispute about inheritance of Winchcombe land around the time of Alfred’s law (S 1442), and the will of Brihtric and Ælfswith which leaves ‘Titsey with the charter to Wulfsige, [to remain] in that kindred’ (S 1511).
27 Mumby, ‘Descent of Family Land’.
28 Hudson, Oxford History, p.127, criticising Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’, pp. 266–8. If the argument of the present paper is valid, the land bequeathed in East Anglian wills cannot have been bookland in the precise sense.
29 H. Spelman, Glossarium (London, 1626), p. 283: ‘ Folcland : Saxon. Terra popularis, scilicet, quæ iure communi possidetur, vel sine scripto. Ei contraria quæ Bocland dicitur. Fortè alodium, & feodo oppositum’.
30 Hudson, Oxford History, pp. 102–10. The most important earlier contributions are: Vinogradoff, P., ‘Folkland’, EHR 8 (1893), 1–17 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897), pp. 244–58; G. J. Turner, ‘Bookland and Folkland’, Historical Essays in honour of James Tait, ed. J. G. Edwards, V. H. Galbraith and E. F. Jacob (Manchester, 1933), pp. 357–86.
31 Hudson, Oxford History, p. 147.
32 CantCC I, 512–22, 525–31. Their likely relevance to folkland was in fact noted by Vinogradoff in The Growth of the Manor, 2nd ed. (London, 1911), p. 244, and again by Hudson, Oxford History, p. 108, but the point has not been developed.
33 Unfortunately there is a lacuna here, and also perhaps a grammatical error. What can be read is ad rei puplic[….]ae condicionis donare decreuerat. The editors comment: ‘Hole in parchment with space for about four letters; … an accusative noun required after ad, unless condicionis is an error’ (CantCC I, 526–7). The phrase is hard to make sense of unless this is indeed an error, in which case it might have been intended to read ad rei puplic[ae terr]ae condicion<em>.
34 The argument for this is developed in J. Blair, Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton, 2018), pp. 221–2.
35 A likely case is S 128, a grant by Offa to a minister and his wife of one sulung in the region of Eastry, apparently with non-perpetual tenure, in 788 (CantCC I, 410–12). Others could surely be identified.
36 For consent formulae see Roach, Kingship and Consent, pp. 20–1. The permanent alienation of land intended to support royal officials seems to be a major reason for the inclusion of these formulae, but certainly not the only one. Of the cases listed by Roach (footnotes 73–7), somewhere over half can plausibly be interpreted in this way (S 437, S 448, S 460, S 465, S 487, S 488, S 503, S 512, S 534, S 556, S 557, S 588, S 604, S 617, S 660, S 680). The entire group shows other slightly abnormal patterns: more than a third relate to land in Hampshire and Wiltshire, and nearly a quarter are grants to ‘religious women’. Evidently various factors were at work.
37 CantCC II, 707–14.
38 CantCC II, 733–42.
39 K. P. Witney, The Jutish Forest (London, 1976), pp. 31–78; J. Blair, Early Medieval Surrey: Landholding, Church and Settlement before 1300 (Stroud, 1991), pp. 12–34.
40 Blair, Building, p. 221.
41 Blair, Building, pp. 193–219, including (pp. 212–19) Bourton-on-the-Water; Baxter and Blair, ‘Land Tenure and Royal Patronage’, pp. 29–44 for Bampton.
42 Blair, Building, pp. 199–201; J. Bourne, The Place-Name Kingston and Royal Power in Middle Anglo-Saxon England, BAR Brit. Ser. 630 (Oxford, 2017), 118–19.
43 S 25 (Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and Minster-in-Thanet, ed. S. E. Kelly, AS Charters 4 (Oxford, 1995), 44–7 [hereafter CantStA]); ‘the [arch]bishop’s estate at Chart’ in bounds of S 328; S 293, S 1200 (CantCC II, 685–7, 780–2).
44 S 1482 (CantCC II, 670).
45 At Oswaldingtune (CantCC II, 888–90).
46 S 332, endorsement; CantCC II, 759, 761–2 for this Eadweald and his family; CantStA pp. 183–4.
47 Compare, on a much larger scale, Archbishop Wulfred’s policy of consolidating his lands: CantCC I, 154.
48 CantCC II, 809–18.
49 Blair, Early Medieval Surrey, pp. 14–18, for the Kentish territorial geography of the eastern third of Surrey, and the possibility that it was once part of the Kentish lathe system.
50 Blair, Early Medieval Surrey, p. 20.
51 Blair, Early Medieval Surrey, pp. 19–20.
52 Cf. Roach, Kingship and Consent, p. 54.
53 Horsley, Gatton, Waddington (Coulsdon), Sanderstead: see map in Blair, Early Medieval Surrey, p. 3.
54 ‘… in addition to the bookland’ is the most straightforward and probably most likely translation of to ðem boclonde. But might it carry some sense of attachment or adjacency? The clause as a whole possibly implies some pre-existing relationship between these two bookland estates and the folkland in question.
55 CantCC II, 816.
56 Hudson, Oxford History, pp. 109–10. Apparently the first evidence for this practice is a later statement that King Offa ‘sibi viventi conscribere fecit suisque heredibus post eum’ 110 hides in Kent (S 1258: CantCC I, 428, 431).
57 T. R. Slater, ‘Controlling the South Hams: the Anglo-Saxon Burh at Halwell’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association 123 (1991), 57–78; Blair, Building, p. 242; Griffith, F. M. and Wilkes, E. M., ‘The Land Named from the Sea? Coastal Archaeology and Place-Names of Bigbury Bay, Devon’, Archeol. Jnl 163 (2006), 67–91 Google Scholar; A. Langlands, The Ancient Ways of Wessex (Oxford, 2019), pp. 93–9.
58 For this boundary-clause, and the associated one in S 704: D. Hooke, Pre-Conquest Charter-Bounds of Devon and Cornwall (Woodbridge, 1994), pp. 105–12, 165–8.
59 Rumble, A. R., ‘Old English Bōc-land as an Anglo-Saxon Estate Name’, Leeds Stud. in English ns 18 (1987), 219–29, at 224–5Google Scholar.
60 Bourne, Place-Name Kingston, pp. 94–5.
61 The group around Dorchester (Dorset) makes a good comparison: Blair, Building, pp. 200, 224–6.
62 J. L. Nelson, ‘The Church’s Military Service in the Ninth Century: a Contemporary Comparative View?’, Stud. in Church Hist. 20 (1983), 15–30, at 17 n. 10. She reflects (p. 15) on a comment by Hincmar of Rheims in 857–8 that in England the costs of rewarding fighters (stipendia militiae) are allocated from public resources (ex roga publica).
63 S 368, S 647, S 685; S 478.
64 Oddly, one of these (S 715) is rubricated in the Winchester old Minster cartulary transcript – and was therefore presumably endorsed – with the full vernacular dispositive formula discussed below. Was that to clear up any doubts that it conveyed free disposal?
65 1 Edward 2 (Gesetze I, 140).
66 P. Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I: Legislation and its Limits (Oxford, 1999), p. 289.
67 Wormald, Making, pp. 372–3; for date, note especially the point about the word twæde.
68 Hudson, Oxford History, p. 105.
69 R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (London, 1997), pp. 15–88.
70 Turner, ‘Bookland and Folkland’, pp. 374–81. John Hudson observes (pers. comm.): ‘Given how slowly Turner worked, I think we can be pretty certain that he had discussed the issue with Maitland, even though the resultant publication came a quarter of a century after Maitland’s death and differs from Maitland’s view in Domesday Book and Beyond’.
71 Turner, ‘Bookland and Folkland’, p. 385.
72 Baxter and Blair, ‘Land Tenure and Royal Patronage’, pp. 35–44.
73 P. Wormald, ‘Papers Preparatory to The Making of English Law II: from God’s Law to the Common Law’, ed. S. Baxter and J. Hudson, accessible at https://ilcr.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/, pp. 218–19.
74 S 222, S 225, S 361, S 367, S 367a, S 368, S 369, S 371: see the full discussion in CantCC II, 839–42.
75 S. Keynes, ‘Edward, King of the Anglo-Saxons’, Edward the Elder, ed. Higham and Hill, pp. 40–66, at 55–6; Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’, pp. 275–6.
76 D. N. Dumville, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 153. Cf. Keynes, ‘Church Councils’, pp. 52–6.
77 K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society (London, 1979), p. 103.
78 Insley, C., ‘Where did All the Charters go? Anglo-Saxon Charters and the New Politics of the Eleventh Century’, ANS 24 (2002), 109–27Google Scholar, at 111–20.
79 Wormald, ‘On þa Wæpnedhealfe’, p. 267; CantCC II, 814, arguing that the inheritance goes to his wife and daughter and the booklands to other kinsmen. The use of the word ‘bookland’ in the text is not, however, so consistent as to support this clear-cut division.
80 King Alfred’s Version of St Augustine’s Soliloquies, ed. T. A. Carnicelli (Cambridge, MA, 1969), p. 48.
81 For a full recent discussion of these see R. Gallagher and K. Wiles, ‘The Endorsement Practices of Early Medieval England’, The Languages of Early Medieval Charters, ed. R. Gallagher, E. Roberts and F. Tinti (Leiden, 2021), pp. 230–95, at 255–61. They observe (p. 257): ‘This near-total orthographic conformity is impressive. It adds weight to the argument for a centralized point of production from which these endorsements were disseminated, and it speaks to the enduring authority of the formula in its prototypical form’.
82 Hudson, Oxford History, p. 98 n. 30.
83 These late glosses and translations are listed by the Toronto Old English Dictionary Corpus, which is available online. In the twelfth-century ‘Quadripartitus’, bōcland is translated twice as terra testamentalis, once as alodium, and once left in the vernacular: Af 41; I Edw. 2; VI As., 1.1; II Cn.13.1 (Gesetze I, 75, 141, 173, 317). The author was an encyclopaedic compiler who based his translations on wide reading (Wormald, Making, pp. 236–44), and terra testamentalis presumably reflects his knowledge of older texts.
84 The Vercelli Homilies and Related Texts, ed. D. G. Scragg, EETS 300 (Oxford, 1992), 206 (Homily X, l. 70), and p. 195 for date, commenting that ‘this homily appears to have been written in the Mercian literary language familiar from poetry, rather than in West Saxon’. Of the other occurrences of bōcland in the Old English Dictionary Corpus, I pass over the OE version of Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’, and Ælfric’s paraphrase of Bede in his homily on St Cuthbert, since these translate specific references to bookland in the original monastic sense.
85 BL, MS Cotton Cleop. A III fol. 38v; P. G. Rusche, ‘The Cleopatra Glossaries: an Edition with Commentary on the Glosses and their Sources’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. Yale, 1996), p. 282. I am very grateful to Teresa Webber for her comment: ‘you can be confident that the gloss dates from the tenth century, but it could be from any part of the second half of the century’.
86 BL, MS Harl. 3376 fol. 94v; R. T. Oliphant, The Harley Latin-Old English Glossary (The Hague, 1966), p. 208.
87 II Cn. 77.1 (Gesetze I, 364).
88 For instance in S 204, of 844 × 845. A formula closer to the standard later one occurs in the will of Badanoth Beotting (S 1510), where it is an almost direct translation of the dispositive phrase in S 296 and written by the same Canterbury scribe: CantCC II, 712–13.
89 Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: the Acta of William I, ed. D. Bates (Oxford, 1998), p. 710, No. 223.
90 S 1387 presumably uses the perpetuity formula to show that the mortgaged land has a clean title, and qualifies it by adding þe in þan londe stent. In S 1303, a lease of three lives, the immediate lessee adds a note that he leaves it to his son æfter minan dæge to habbanne his dæg, and æfter his dæge to syllanne þæm þe him leofast seo, and þæt sio on þa spere hand; the other three leases expand the standard æfter dæge þam þe him leofust sy to æfter his dæg anum/ twam erfewearde(n) þam þe him leofust sy.
91 II Cn. 79 (Gesetze I, 366).
92 For these background processes see Naismith, R., ‘The Land-Market and Anglo-Saxon Society’, Hist. Research 89 (2016), 19–41, at 35–40 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
93 For this phase see Keynes, ‘Church Councils’, pp. 56–61.
94 Naismith, ‘Land Market’; Blair, Building, pp. 354–80.
95 For the symbolic and performative aspects of charter-grants at assemblies, see Roach, Kingship and Consent, pp. 85–6, 89–91.
96 ‘Norðleoda Laga’ ch. 10 (Gesetze I, 460).
97 ‘Libellus Æthelwoldi’ ch. 35 (Liber Eliensis, p. 99). See below, n. 139, for this text.
98 Historia Ecclesie Abbendonensis, ed. and trans. J. Hudson, 2 vols (Oxford, 2007), I, ch. 136, 208–9.
99 R. Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 16–17.
100 For payment for royal charters in the tenth century see Naismith, ‘Payments for Land and Privilege’, pp. 283–5; Roach, Kingship and Consent, pp. 94–5, 98.
101 C. Cubitt, Sin and Society: Penance and Penitentials in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England (forthcoming), chapter 9, discusses this charter and others in the context of a drive in Æthelred’s reign to reform the abuse of royal precarial grants that encroached on former monastic land.
102 See Keynes, ‘Church Councils’, pp. 102–35.
103 Insley, ‘Where Did All the Charters Go?’, pp. 120–7; Blair, Church, pp. 496–7.
104 I owe these points to Stephen Baxter.
105 Byrhtferth of Ramsey, writing probably in the 1010s, envisaged a much earlier synod at which the Archbishop of Canterbury was present: ‘the king ordered him to draw up a privilege; this he most willingly obeyed’ (‘Vita S. Ecgwini’ iii.6, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge, Byrhtferth of Ramsey: the Lives of St Oswald and St Ecgwine (Oxford, 2009), pp. 262–3).
106 T. Licence, Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood (London, 2020), pp. 263–81.
107 The problems have recently been discussed by S. Keynes, ‘The Use of Seals in Anglo-Saxon England’, Seals and Status: the Power of Objects, ed. J. Cherry, J. Berenbeim and L. De Beer (London, 2018), pp. 73–83, at 78–80; Licence, Edward the Confessor, pp. 277–81.
108 R. Sharpe, ‘The Use of Writs in the Eleventh Century’, ASE 32 (2003), 247–91.
109 Sharpe, ‘Use of Writs’, pp. 286–7.
110 Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law, p. 547, collects references to writs and seals. Stephen Baxter informs me that nineteen of these are from King Edward’s reign.
111 I owe the point about the writ to Levi Roach.
112 Licence, Edward the Confessor, p. 280.
113 Licence, Edward the Confessor, pp. 270–1, 272, 275.
114 Licence, Edward the Confessor, pp. 202–3, 263, 272–7. Licence reserves judgement on S 1037, which lacks a witness-list and has a non-standard proem, and does not mention S 1032, an oddity written in the vernacular. For the problematic Waltham charter (S 1036), see Keynes, S., ‘Earl Harold and the Foundation of Waltham Holy Cross (1062)’, ANS 39 (2017), 81–111 Google Scholar. Although Keynes differs from Licence on this text, he also sees this final phase of diploma production as departing from established norms: the Waltham diploma ‘would stand alongside the Romanesque architecture of [Edward’s] abbey at Westminster as evidence of ‘Continental’ influence at the English court before the Norman Conquest’ (p. 103). All this is consistent with the present argument.
115 There are, of course, many later analogies for the essentially decorative and symbolic perpetuation of archaic documentary forms. In a post-medieval context, one could compare ‘an exemplification of common recovery with the big impressive seal, in contrast with the run-of-the-mill deed which does the job’ (Christopher Whittick pers. comm.).
116 Used frequently in Domesday Book’s ‘Circuit I’ shires are the designation alodarii and the formula tenuit in alodium de Rege E., which might seem to be a problem here. In fact, though, they bear no consistent relation to other tenurial indicators, and some of these holdings are small-scale and ministerial. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 153, n. 7, gives evidence suggesting that alodarii can be translated ‘thegns’. This appears to be an idiosyncratic mode of reference to thegnly status (in both the aristocratic and ministerial senses), confined to one Domesday circuit, and irrelevant to the present argument.
117 S. Baxter, The Earls of Mercia (Oxford, 2007), pp. 204–69; Hudson, Oxford History, pp. 108–20.
118 Not least on how the core/non-core dichotomy proposed here maps onto the inland/warland dichotomy around which Faith, English Peasantry, is structured.
119 Roach, Kingship and Consent, p. 100.
120 Charters of Burton Abbey, ed. P. H. Sawyer, AS Charters 2 (Oxford, 1979). Only the apparently genuine charters are counted here.
121 Charters of Bury St Edmunds Abbey and St Benet at Holme, ed. K. A. Lowe and S. Foot, AS Charters 20 (forthcoming). I am grateful to the editors for providing a draft in advance of publication.
122 There are also post-Conquest forgeries: S 507, S 980, S 995, S 1045, S 1046, S 1055. Tom Licence (pers. comm.) suggests on the basis of narrative sources that Bury probably did have one genuine Edward the Confessor diploma.
123 Rumble, ‘Old English Bōc-land’.
124 CantCC I, 594, 603.
125 Charters of Glastonbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, AS Charters 15 (Oxford, 2012), 317–22, 330–4, 387–93, for the relative reliability of these charters.
126 E. Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place- Names, 4th ed. (Oxford, 1960), p. 175; Surrey Record Office, thirteenth-century Addington deeds in 2609/11. Those include a grant of c. 1220 × 1235 by one William de la Folcland (2609/11/5/7a), and an abuttal on ‘the land called Folclond’ in a deed of 1214 × 1244 (2609/11/2/52).
127 For the following I rely heavily on the ‘Electronic Sawyer’ and the judgments cited there, with checking of recent editions as appropriate, and amendments for Edward the Confessor in the light of Licence’s new analysis (above, n. 106). Inevitably there is some subjectivity in decisions to exclude or exclude, especially given the uncertainties resulting by the less standardized diplomatic forms of the latest diplomas, but a few changes in either direction would not affect my conclusions.
128 Cornwall: S 1005, S 1019, S 1027, S 1061; Devon: S 963, S 971, S 998, S 1003, S 1021, S 1033, S 1037; Somerset: S 979, S 1006, S 1034; Dorset: S 955, S 961, S 975, S 1004, S 1032.
129 Hampshire: S 956, S 960, S 962, S 970, S 994, S 1007, S 1008, S 1012, S 1013, S 1018; Wiltshire: S 999.
130 Sussex: S 949, S 950, S 982; Kent: S 974, S 1044.
131 Berkshire: S 993; Oxfordshire: S 1001, S 1022, S 1028; Essex: S 1015; Hertfordshire: S 1031; Northamptonshire: S 977; Rutland, S 1014.
132 S 968, S 1017 (for which see Licence, Edward the Confessor, p. 269).
134 C. Hart, The Danelaw (London, 1992), pp. 6, 97.
135 Charters of Peterborough Abbey, ed. Kelly, AS Charters 14 (Oxford, 2009), 335 [hereafter Pet].
136 Kennedy, ‘Law and Litigation’, pp. 163–4.
137 Blair, Building, pp. 24–35, 94–8, 149–56, 275–81, 302–5.
138 Simon Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey 672–1109’, A History of Ely Cathedral, ed. P. Meadows and N. Ramsay (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 3–58; Charters of Bury, ed. Lowe and Foot; Pet. For maps of the Domesday Book and other estates of all three houses, see J. Blair, S. Rippon and C. Smart, Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape (Liverpool, 2020), pp. 166–7.
139 The standard current edition of this text is in Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake, Camden 3rd ser. 92 (London, 1962), 72–117. Simon Keynes and Alan Kennedy have a major new edition of the Ely sources in preparation, and I am very grateful for access to a translation produced for the purpose. Meanwhile, see Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey’; Kennedy, ‘Law and Litigation’, pp. 132–4.
140 In context, the term cannot mean ‘cyrograph’ in the precise sense. We do not know, of course, what OE word(s) this twelfth-century translation represents.
141 ‘Libellus Æthelwoldi’ ch. 4 (Liber Eliensis, pp. 75–6). Wulfstan of Winchester’s ‘Life of St Æthelwold’ makes the same statement, of which Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey’, p. 21, observes: ‘The expression is so vague as to be effectively meaningless; but if Wulfstan had a single charter in mind, it has to be said that there is no demonstratively or even putatively authentic document which might answer to this description.’
142 ‘Libellus Æthelwoldi’ ch. 6 (Liber Eliensis, pp. 80–1).
143 The Bishampton charter ended up in the Worcester archive, and is now just known from a note; the Linden charter remained at Ely.
144 Kennedy, ‘Law and Litigation’, pp. 162–3.
145 Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey’, p. 22 n. 93, reaches a similar conclusion: ‘the charters do not represent straightforward grants of land by the King to the Abbey, but were part of the means by which a more complex transaction was effected’.
146 Above, n. 97; cf. Kennedy, ‘Law and Litigation’, p. 137, observing of the ‘Libellus’ that the absence of direct royal involvement, and the importance of local institutions and local secular powers, was perhaps ‘not entirely typical of the later tenth and eleventh centuries, but it does seem to have been characteristic also of the contemporary affairs of other fenland monasteries’.
147 See discussion by Lowe and Foot in Charters of Bury, under Nos. 4 and H1.
148 Pet pp. 331–46.
149 As proposed by Kelly in Pet, pp. 224, 233. Also in the time of Eadred, Yaxley was in the hands of another thegn of this name, Ælfsige son of Brihtsige (S 1447), but there is no surviving charter.
150 Bourne, Place-Name Kingston, pp. 116–17.
151 S 533, S 1377; Pet pp. 223–4, 275–9. Cf. Roach, Kingship and Consent, pp. 132–3.
152 M. Gardiner, ‘Hythes, Small Ports and Other Landing Places in Later Medieval England’, Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England, ed. J. Blair (Oxford, 2007), pp. 85–109, at 94–6 and Fig. 20; J. Bond, ‘Canal Construction in the Early Middle Ages: an Introductory Review’, Waterways, ed. Blair, pp. 153–206, at 180–8 and Fig. 37; Pet pp. 290–4; S. Oosthuizen, The Anglo-Saxon Fenland (Oxford, 2017), pp. 122–32 and Fig. 7.9; Naismith, R., ‘The Ely Memoranda and the Economy of the Late Anglo-Saxon Fenland’, ASE 45 (2017), 333–77Google Scholar, at 367.
153 See Pet pp. 227–33 for a discussion of the complex issues.
154 Bury archive: Charters of Bury, ed. Lowe and Foot, No. 1. Tom Licence observes (pers. comm.) that Theodred’s role in reconstructing the East Anglian see and linking it to the centre of government underlines the exceptional character of this diploma.
155 Ely archive?: Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey’, p. 17.
156 Peterborough archive: Pet no. 14.
157 Pet pp. 242–7.
158 Victoria History of the County of York: East Riding: vol. 10 part 2: Howden: Town and Liberty, ed. D. Crouch (London, 2020).
159 York archive: Charters of Northern Houses, ed. D. Woodman, AS Charters 16 (Oxford, 2012), no. 5 [hereafter North].
160 North pp. 129–30.
161 Peterborough archive: Pet no. 15.
162 Pet pp. 249–56.
163 Peterborough and Thorney archives. Thanks to Tom Licence for his observation.
164 York archive: North no. 8.
165 Victoria History of the County of York: East Riding: vol. 5: Holderness, Southern Part, ed. K. J. Allison (Oxford, 1984), pp. 101, 106–8.
166 Pet pp. 131–85. On those grounds, S 68, S 72 and S 803–5 are ruled out of the discussion. S 1806 (Pet no. 3) does potentially contain elements of a genuine early text in favour of Medeshamstede, but it relates to an unidentified place, its formulations are unusual, and it is unclear that the underlying material was necessarily from a diploma rather than some other kind of document.
167 S 1412; Pet pp. 202–5.
168 Pet pp. 215–21; J. Blair, ‘Beyond the Billingas: from Lay Wealth to Monastic Wealth on the Lincolnshire Fen-Edge’, The Land of the English Kin: Studies in Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England in honour of Professor Barbara Yorke, ed. A. Langlands and R. Lavelle (Leiden, 2020), pp. 387–406.
169 Thanks to G. Molyneaux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century (Oxford, 2015).
170 Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, p. 393.
171 T. Williamson, Environment, Society and Landscape in Early Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 55–9, 66–71.
172 Wormald, Times of Bede, pp. 142–5; CantStA pp. lxxiii–lxxvi; Charters of Shaftesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, AS Charters 5 (Oxford, 1996), 7–8; Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, ed. S. E. Kelly, AS Charters 11 (Oxford, 2005), 52–3.
173 W. Davies, ‘The Latin Charter-Tradition in Western Britain, Brittany and Ireland in the Early Medieval Period’, Ireland in Early Medieval Europe: Studies in Memory of Kathleen Hughes, ed. D. Whitelock, R. McKitterick and D. Dumville (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 258–80. The Welsh evidence is clear, but the existence of this tradition in Ireland or Scotland has been contested: D. Broun, ‘The Writing of Charters in Scotland and Ireland in the Twelfth Century’, Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Early Medieval Society, ed. K. J. Heidecker (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 113–31.
174 C. Insley, ‘Languages of Boundaries and Boundaries of Language in Cornish Charters’, Languages of Early Medieval Charters, ed. R. Gallagher, E. Roberts and F. Tinti (Leiden, 2021), pp. 342–77, at 355–66; A. W. Clark, ‘Familiar Distances: Beating the Bounds of Early English Identity’ (unpubl. PhD dissertation, Univ. California, Berkeley, 2020), especially pp. 14–16; A. W. Clark, ‘The West Saxon Boundary Clause in Context’ (forthcoming). I am very grateful to Amy Clark for sharing her work with me ahead of publication, and for her important observation on the distribution of early perambulatory boundary clauses.
175 T. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 411–36; Aldhelm and Sherborne, ed. K. Barker and N. Brooks (Oxford, 2010), especially the essays by Barker, Probert and Yorke.
176 Insley, ‘Languages of Boundaries’, pp. 365–6.
177 Compare North pp. 6–16, with Broun, ‘Writing of Charters’.
178 E. Orrman, ‘Rural Conditions’, The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, I: Prehistory to 1520, ed. K. Helle (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 250–311, at 297–301.
179 Cf. Blair, Building, pp. 46–51.
180 See for instance T. Pestell, Landscapes of Monastic Foundation (Woodbridge, 2004).
181 See for instance The Making of England: Anglo-Saxon Art and Culture AD 600–900, ed. L. Webster and J. Backhouse (London, 1991), pp. 79–107; but a great deal more has been found since.