3 - ‘Æthelstan A’

Summary

‘Æthelstan A’ was one of the most enigmatic Latinists ever to have worked in pre-Conquest england. had he been a writer of hagiography, history or poetry, we might expect a deluge of scholarship scrutinising in minute detail the finer points of his influences and influence, his background, his education, his psychology, his latin style and his career; yet, as a charter draftsman, even though he was responsible for producing the literature for which Æthelstan's reign is perhaps best known, he has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. ‘One would like to know more of “Æthelstan A” himself’, wrote Simon Keynes at the end of the 1990s, ‘because he clearly deserves recognition as a figure of singular importance at King Æthelstan's court.’

It was W. H. Stevenson who, in a private letter of 1916, first drew attention to a pattern in charters from Æthelstan's reign: ‘in Æthelstan's time’, he wrote, ‘we find charters in the hand of one and the same scribe in different parts of England.’ In 1935, Richard Drögereit christened the owner of this hand ‘Æthelstan A’, following the convention of the time in naming him after the king he served. Despite being a little prosaic (not to mention impossible to put into the genitive on account of its rather awkward inverted commas), the name stuck and the nature of this draftsman's employment became a subject of fierce debate. Pierre Chaplais argued that at such an early period of the tenth century, the only active scriptorium in england was at Winchester. He concluded, therefore, that ‘Æthelstan A’ must have been an ecclesiastical scribe based at Winchester. he subsequently changed his mind and wondered if ‘Æthelstan A’ might have been based at Christ Church, Canterbury, instead. Simon Keynes, deeming Chaplais's initial argument ‘not decisive’, put forward a compelling case for the existence of a royal writing office in the 920s and 930s, at the centre which was ‘Æthelstan A’.