The Use and Abuse of Anglo-Saxon Charters by the Kings of England, 1100–1300

For much of our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon past we depend upon the recital in later royal confirmations of charters first granted by the Anglo-Saxon kings. Preserved today in the National Archives at Kew, these confirmations range in date from the reign of Henry III to that of James I, and extend across a large number of chancery Patent, Charter and Confirmation rolls. They are closely linked to a further series of copies of Anglo-Saxon royal charters, strictly speaking not official royal ‘confirmations’ but semi-official records of charters, enrolled in the so-called Cartae Antiquae Rolls, an Exchequer source beginning at an indeterminate date, c. 1200. Duly searched and listed, these confirmations, enrolments and copies occupy two and a half pages of the manuscripts index to Peter Sawyer’s Anglo-Saxon charters: more space than is occupied by any other group of sources save for those in the Cotton collection of the British Library. ¹ All told, they account for sixty-six of the entries in Sawyer: roughly five per cent of the corpus of just under 1,200 writs or charters recorded for the pre-Conquest English kings. ² Yet, despite their significance, they have never been surveyed as a distinct category of evidence, nor has any attempt been made to assess their collective contribution to twelfth- or thirteenth-century understanding of pre-Conquest history. In what follows, and covering the two centuries from 1100 to 1300, I shall endeavour to tackle both of these questions. In the process, I shall also engage with a related issue: the use (and occasional abuse) of Anglo-Saxon evidence cited as evidence in law courts and inquests from the 1150s onwards. Here there is a richer tradition of scholarly enquiry, extending from J.H. Round to Paul Brand and Bruce O’Brien. ³ Nonetheless, here too there are new points to be considered and new discoveries to report.