The ‘charters of the kings between Edward the Elder and Edward the Martyr’, wrote Sir Frank Stenton in the middle of the 1950s, ‘form a monotonous series’.¹ He continued: ‘as illustrations of curial scholarship these charters are disappointing.’² his words bode very badly indeed for a book which takes as its subject the charters of the kings between Edward ‘the Elder’ and Edward ‘the Martyr’. However, whilst Stenton got much right over the course of his long and distinguished career, when it came to tenth-century charters he may have been a little too quick to condemn; for the charters issued...

George Godfrey Cunningham, in the first volume of hisLives of Eminent and Illustrious Englishmen, published the year after Queen Victoria’s accession, eulogised Alfred (his first eminent and illustrious Englishman) in a tone which has since become all too familiar: ‘England’, he wrote, ‘has had no monarch, or patriot, of whom she has more reason to be proud, nor indeed does the history of any nation record a more perfect character, than this Anglo-Saxon sovereign.’¹ A little more than half a century earlier, no less a figure than David hume had adopted a similar tone in his own acclamation of...

In 937, just half a century after Alfred had been forced to flee into the marshes of the West Country after his forces had been overrun at Chippenham, his grandson, Æthelstan, scored a stunning victory over an alliance of Scots, Vikings and Strathclyde Britons at the Battle of Brunanburh, consolidating his position asRex, not justAnglorum, but also, as his charters had been keen to remind their audience since the late 920s,totius Britanniae. It is fair to say that most of what we know about Æthelstan, from the composition of his court down to his daily itinerary, we...

‘Æthelstan A’ was one of the most enigmatic Latinists ever to have worked in pre-Conquest England. had he been a writer of hagiography, history or poetry, we might expect a deluge of scholarship scrutinising in minute detail the finer points of his influences and influence, his background, his education, his psychology, his latin style and his career; yet, as a charter draftsman, even though he was responsible for producing the literature for which Æthelstan’s reign is perhaps best known, he has received surprisingly little scholarly attention. ‘One would like to know more of “Æthelstan A” himself’, wrote Simon Keynes at...

The two decades between the death of Æthelstan in October 939 and the accession of Edgar to a reunited kingdom in the summer of 959 are amongst the most fascinating of the whole Anglo-Saxon age. There are differing interpretations of the reigns of Edmund, eadred and eadwig. on the one hand, their time in power was wracked by political instability, factionalism at the court, and moral impropriety: Edmund, having lost York to the Vikings, was murdered at Pucklechurch in Gloucestershire in 946 by a disenchanted exile; his sickly brother, eadred, who succeeded him, relied on a kitchen cabinet to run...

In many ways, Edgar’s reign can be seen as the high-water mark of the whole Anglo-Saxon age. From the infighting that had fractured English politics in the 950s, Edgar emerged as a force for unity under whose judicious guidance art, literature, scholarship and scribal culture flourished throughout England. Edgar ‘the peaceable’, as he later became known, has been seen by many as the archetypal medieval king: pious, wise, firm, fair and scholarly, his virtues were apparently legion.

Except, of course, that they almost certainly were not. The main reason why Edgar is remembered as such a fine king is that...

The uniqueness of the Anglo-Saxon charter has always lain in its ability to torment both historians and critics of literature in equal measure with its strange style, curious claims and unusual appearance. At almost every moment in Anglo-Saxon history, the charter is there in the background not simply recording grants of land but also leading all kinds of folk, from the king to the royal dish-bearer, blinking into the historical light. yet, it cannot do so quietly: for almost every ‘unremarkable’ Anglo-Saxon charter, there is usually another, not so very far away, screaming out for attention. In the seventh century,...