In an important and potentially controversial book, Susan Thompson painstakingly analyzes the 118 extant single-sheet diplomas that comprise the corpus of Anglo-Saxon royal charters issued before 1066. Although scholars have already studied most of these charters from a variety of perspectives, Thompson is the first to consider them in relation to one another. As a result, she establishes a reasonable chronology of their production and makes some interesting deductions about the nature of changes in their appearance and content over time. The most significant of these deductions is that there was a royal chancery in late Anglo-Saxon England. While many of her conclusions are necessarily speculative, Thompson is appropriately cautious and this book advances our understanding of Anglo-Saxon royal in a variety of ways.
Part I, which is comprised of five chapters, describes the physical characteristics of the diplomas. It begins, however, with a very useful survey of current scholarship on what is known about their production. Diplomas, or charters, which primarily record transfers of land, were undoubtedly introduced into Anglo-Saxon England by interested ecclesiastics. The earliest extant genuine charter dates only to 675, but Thompson is probably on safe ground assuming that earlier charters simply do not survive. Charters become more plentiful in the eighth and ninth centuries, and there is some evidence of an interest by kings in producing their own charters. But as Thompson notes, there is no reason to reject the generally-held view that most charters produced before the tenth century, including royal charters, originated in monastic and episcopal scriptoria, with the lion's share coming from the one scriptorium of Christ Church, Canterbury. Chapter one concludes with a discussion of the debate surrounding the existence of a royal chancery in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Thompson leans toward the pro-chancery view (and here she is in good company with Simon Keynes and David Dumville) that while beneficiaries generally drew up their own charters in the eighth and ninth centuries, uniformity of style in the tenth suggests that "by the reign of AEthelstan royal charters were being produced by an agency which was apparently able to operate at the witenagemot" (11). This is perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from this study, but Thompson will return to it only briefly in the last several pages.
The core of this book is a technical description and comparison of the physical features, layout and script of the charters. Physical features include dimensions, methods of folding, use of hair side versus flesh side, and the preference for pricking or ruling. Based on careful comparisons, Thompson concludes that over time scribes tended to write larger charters, used the flesh side rather than the hair side of the vellum, and preferred ruling to pricking. Chapter three surveys the sixteen elements, several pictorial but most verbal, which appear in the extant charters and how they, too, changed over time. The pictorial invocation of the chi-rho, for example, was always common, but it tended to become larger and more ornate by the tenth century. It is also interesting to note that after c. 993, scribes preferred to use Anglo-Saxon minuscule for vernacular boundary clauses rather that Anglo-Caroline minuscule, which was typically used for all Latin text. Thompson continues the discussion of script styles in the fourth chapter, noting that the concern by scribes to adopt a standard Caroline minuscule in the Benedictine Reform period makes it harder for scholars to date manuscripts and documents. The remainder of the chapter is a detailed survey of the various letter forms, common abbreviations, ligatures, and punctuation marks, specifically how and why they appear where and when they do in the corpus. If the reader follows these chapters carefully, chapter five is unnecessarily repetitive. But for those who wish to skip the technical details and go straight to the conclusions, chapter five is an extremely useful summary.
In the two chapters comprising Part II, Thompson moves from the general to the specific by analyzing a handful of charters in detail. Chapter six analyzes one charter Thompson considers representative of each of four distinctive periods: the seventh century (S8); the eighth and ninth centuries (S177); the tenth century (S717); and the eleventh (S950). Although this chapter is a bit dense, it clearly illuminates the author's methodology. It is difficult to see, however, exactly how the general reader would use the information presented there. Because the chapter includes photographs of the relevant charters, though, it would serve as a good introduction for students to the nature of charter evidence in general. The final substantive chapter considers five "problem charters" and what they can tell us about issues of dating and authenticity. The discussion, for example, of S331, purportedly a ninth-century document written at Rochester, illustrates the complexity involved in deciding whether a charter is a later forgery or not. Despite the many elements that suggest it is indeed a forgery, Thompson declines to commit, leaving the reader a bit unsatisfied. But she does agree with Simon Keynes and David Dumville that S350, a late ninth-century royal charter written at Canterbury, is probably genuine because such a poorly executed charter would make no sense otherwise! An Abingdon charter of the mid tenth century (S587) suffers from the opposite problem: it is so competently written ("seemingly too assured for England in 956" [135]) that scholars have tended to consider it a slightly later forgery and Thompson concurs. What these two chapters do best is to illustrate how difficult it is, even for specialists, to date and attribute charter evidence.
The brief conclusion to this book reiterates the two major points derived from the analysis: a very different set of expectations regarding the way charters should look emerged in the early tenth century and textual elements changed on the basis of time, not archive. Thompson thus concludes that "the accumulated details support the view that some form of royal chancery must have existed during the tenth century, and its continuation to some extent into the eleventh century would account for the similarity between documents from many archives and the continuity and development of scribal practices" (148). While it is clearly only one possible interpretation of the evidence, it is perhaps the most important contribution of this book. Either way, this is a reference work of great value to students and specialists alike, although it is unlikely to be the last word on several subjects.