Anglo-Saxon Charters

This volume, first published in 1939, draws together a significant number of vernacular documents from early medieval England. Augmenting the work with constant reference to contemporary sources such as laws and Latin charters, Dr Robertson examines a wide range of miscellaneous Anglo-Saxon texts including declarations (geswutelunga), chirographs and entries in Gospel Books.

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This volume, first published in 1939 (2nd ed., 1956), contains the original Old English texts, with translations and commentaries, of over 130 documents dating from the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. It includes royal and 'private' (nonroyal) charters, some episcopal leases, a few wills, and several records generated by processes of litigation; it also includes a number of miscellaneous texts, such as inventories and estate surveys. The reissue of Dr Robertson's book is complemented by reissues of Florence Harmer's Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (1914), and of Dorothy Whitelock's Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930). Between them, the three volumes represent the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon documents in the vernacular, to set beside the corpus of royal diplomas (in Latin) and writs (in English), and the corpus of Anglo-Saxon legislation, and to serve at the same time as evidence of the uses of written English in the Anglo-Saxon period.