Historical Literacy in the Archive: Post-Conquest Imitative Copies of Pre-Conquest Charters and Some French Comparanda *

This chapter examines an aspect of historical activity whose association with the long twelfth century is well established but which has no acknowledged place within received models of the twelfth-century discovery of the past. ¹ It was not triggered by changes in education or exposure to the Latin classics. It cannot be claimed to be a novel activity because it belongs to a continuum, but it does attest important historical processes: archival control, the sorting and processing of information about the Anglo-Saxon past, and, in an unusually literal sense, how contemporaries viewed English antiquity. I refer to the production of imitative copies of Anglo-Saxon charters. ²