2 - Royal Control and the Disposition of Estates in Tenth-Century England: Reflections on the Charters of King Eadwig (955–959)

Summary

This article examines the politics behind the disposition of lands in the tenth-century English kingdom through an analysis of the corpus of charters from the reign of King Eadwig. The record of land grants made during the reign of Eadwig, including a large proportion granted to laypeople, is rightly acknowledged to be remarkable in the Anglo-Saxon period, since such a comparatively large number of charters was issued within a short period of time. In the evidence provided by sources associated with contemporary monastic reforms the king and his associates are portrayed as using lands, including church lands, in an all but unrestrained manner during a reign often noted for its iniquities. In much modern scholarship, however, the use of landed property during Eadwig's reign has instead been considered in relation to his composition of a new court, the members of which benefited from these lands. In a recent discussion of the maintenance of royal authority in the early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham uses the reign of Eadwig to show the manner in which Anglo-Saxon royal power was able to survive when kingship in the tenth-century West Frankish kingdom was not. Yet this survival was, Wickham argues, despite what might appear to have been an excessive number of land grants made during Eadwig's reign, a volume that would not be seen again in Europe until the twelfth century.