Where did all the Charters Go? Anglo-Saxon Charters and the New Politics of the Eleventh Century

Summary

In 1681, on the island of Mauritius, the last Dodo was killed. Exactly six hundred years before, the Anglo-Saxon solemn diploma met an equally final end, with what I would argue was the last example being produced in that year. Like the Dodo, the final demise of the diploma had been a drawn-out process and one which had begun in the second quarter of the eleventh century.

The Problem

The genesis of this article was some thought provoking papers in sessions on early medieval biography and charters at the University of Leeds in 1996, further stimulated by Robin Fleming's 2000 Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, and consists of three related questions. First, how far can we use Anglo-Saxon charters as ‘texts’ in their own right, rather than simply a resource to be quarried for the names of people and places? More particularly, should we dismiss much of the contents of Anglo-Saxon charters as more or less irrelevant pseudo-religious verbiage?Were the elaborate and often baroque proems of charters from the period c.930–90 simply the academic exercises of clever monastic scribes or did they have a more important function? Charters have for so long been seen as administrative records that it is sometimes difficult to think of them as anything else. Should we in fact regard Anglo-Saxon charters in part as we regard Anglo-Saxon lawcodes: with a practical dimension, certainly, but also with a deeper ideological dimension?

Second, why is the Anglo-Saxon solemn diploma of the tenth and eleventh centu ries structured in the way it is, containing, as it often does, a long and wordy proem which often seems to bear little relation to the purpose of the charter, in contrast to the arenga of many continental charters? Thirdly and finally, we must also ask why, having lasted from the seventh century to the mid-eleventh century, the diploma, in its Anglo-Saxon form, by which I mean invocation, pictorial, verbal, or both, proem, disposition, anathema, blessing and dating protocol, disappeared so rapidly from the second quarter of the eleventh century? Why, in effect, was the Anglo-Saxon solemn diploma, as well as being unusual in comparison with continental diplomatic, a diplomatic dead-end?

The answers (for there must be more than one) to these question must lie with the function of the charter. There has been a considerable amount written about the Anglo-Saxon charter over the last twenty or so years, much of it excellent.