Charters constitute one of the most valuable sources of information for our knowledge of Anglo-Saxon England in the period between c. 700 and 1066. The great majority are in Latin, but about 200 (of the surviving corpus of about 1500) are in Old English, dating from the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. One hundred years ago H. M. Chadwick, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, conceived the idea of producing a new edition of the vernacular charters, furnished with translations and detailed notes, as a contribution towards a larger end. The charters were divided up among three of his students, and over a period of 25 years, from 1914 to 1939, they produced the volumes which in combination still represent the only comprehensive edition of these most interesting texts. The volumes are made available again, as a set, with introductions by Simon Keynes, and with concordances to the modern online catalogue.
This 1914 volume contains a selection of some of the most interesting Anglo-Saxon documents of the ninth and tenth centuries. Included among them are the only two surviving wills of Anglo-Saxon kings, and the 'colophon' in the Lindisfarne Gospels, in which a priest called Aldred gives an account of the making of the gospel-book. The volume also includes the 'Fonthill Letter', addressed by Ealdorman Ordlaf to King Edward the Elder, to serve as evidence for use in a dispute about an estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and still extant in its original form. All of the documents are written in Old English, furnished here with translations and commentaries. The reissue of Dr Harmer's book is complemented by reissues of Dorothy Whitelock's Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930), and of Agnes Jane Robertson's Anglo-Saxon Charters (1939, 2nd edition 1956). Between them, the three volumes represent the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon documents in the vernacular.
