ABSTRACT
The corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters was first defined by John Mitchell Kemble (1807-1857), in his six-volume Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici (1839-1848); and although his work had many limitations it remains by any standards a remarkable achievement.1 Kemble’s edition was soon superseded by Walter de Gray Birch’s three-volume Cartularium Saxonicum (1885-1893), at least for the period to 975.2 Within two years of the publication of Birch’s third volume, two noted scholars had expressed their view, ‘It cannot be said that the O.E. charters have yet been edited’;3 and, two years after that, another ventured his conviction that a century from his time there would be ‘a critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon charters in which the philologist and the palaeographer, the annalist and the formulist will have winnowed the grain of truth from the chaff of imposture’.4 There matters stood for many years. The value of charters as evidence for understanding of the Anglo-Saxon period, in all its aspects, was fully appreciated;5 but although the students of H.M. Chadwick, in Cambridge, produced editions of the vernacular documents,6 a further call for a new edition appears not to have been heard.7
