ABSTRACT

By the time of the Norman Conquest Anglo-Saxon England could look back over a tradition of charter production lasting nearly 400 years, a tradition which Nicholas Brooks, not least through his work on the Canterbury archive, has done so much to illuminate.1 Well over half the surviving charters of the Anglo-Saxon period are royal, but of the remainder over 200 were issued by bishops, abbots, nuns and clerics.2 Of these, some 30 can be dated to the reign of Edward the Confessor. Output of episcopal and abbatial charters was therefore far lower than in some parts of Europe, notably France,3 but it was not negligible: it is therefore worth asking what the impact of the Norman Conquest was on English ecclesiastical charters, both in quantity and in diplomatic forms. David Bates in his article ‘The Conqueror’s Charters’ has pointed to the changes in output of English royal charters in the period after the Norman Conquest: low output under William I, a noticeable rise in numbers under William II (with Domesday one of the principal factors behind this) and a sharp rise under Henry I.4 It occurred to me in 1993 when I was working on a paper on English episcopal charters over the period 700-1250 just how few bishops’ charters were issued in the period 1066-1086, a scarcity most noticeable at Worcester, where a buoyant charter production over most of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh century then came to a halt until the late 1070s and was sparse until the late 1080s.5 The British Academy English Episcopal Acta series editing post-Conquest

1 Among which see especially N.P. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury (Leicester, 1984) and Nicholas Brooks, ‘Anglo-Saxon Charters: a Review of Work 1957-73; with a Postscript on the Period 1973-98’, in Nicholas Brooks, Anglo-Saxon Myths: State and Church 400-1066 (London and Rio Grande, 2000), 181-215.