Athelney

The cartulary of Athelney abbey, in Somerset, was used by the antiquary George Harbin in the eighteenth century.  Parts two and three of Harbin's excerpts were formerly in the Phillipps Library, and were seen there by Kemble in 1847.  The 'missing' first part came to light in 1991, in the Somerset Record Office.  See Simon Keynes, 'George Harbin's Transcript of the Lost Cartulary of Athelney Abbey', Somerset Archaeology and Natural History 136 (1992), pp. 149-59.

This was upstaged in 2001 by the reappearance of the cartulary itself, at Petworth House, as recounted on this website in that year.

Athelney Abbey was founded in the 880s by King Alfred the Great, on the small low-lying island in the Somerset marshes where he had taken refuge from the Danes in 878, where he is alleged to have burnt the cakes, where he had an encounter with St Cuthbert disguised as a pilgrim, and from where he led the recovery which culminated with his victory over the Danes at the Battle of Edington. It was always one of the smallest religious houses in England, yet it survived until its dissolution by Henry VIII in 1539. No traces of the abbey remain above ground, but its site is marked by a monument raised in 1801 by John Slade, then the owner of the land. The site is now a scheduled ancient monument, though it forms part of a private farm, owned by Mr Tim Morgan.

In the early fifteenth century a monk of Athelney compiled a cartulary for the abbey, containing copies of all the charters and other documents which had accumulated in the abbey's archives from the late ninth century until his own day. In the early eighteenth century this cartulary belonged to Sir William Wyndham, of Orchard Wyndham in Somerset; and in 1735 an abbreviated transcript was made of its contents by the antiquary George Harbin.

The cartulary itself was used again by John Collinson, for his History of Somerset, published in 1791, but then vanished without trace. The first part of Harbin's transcript (pp. 1-32) was also lost. Parts two and three of the transcript survived, and have since formed the basis of all that is known of the history of Athelney Abbey: a calendar of their contents was published by the Somerset Record Society in 1899, and the Latin texts of four Anglo-Saxon charters in Harbin's transcript were published by H. P. R. Finberg, The Early Charters of Wessex (Leicester, 1964).

The missing first part of Harbin's transcript of the lost cartulary came to light in 1993, among papers in the Somerset Record Office in Taunton, and proved to contain transcripts of three more Anglo-Saxon charters, including Alfred's purported foundation charter for the abbey (probably fabricated at Athelney in the eleventh or twelfth century, but important none the less as the only indication of the abbey's own tradition about the circumstances of its origins in the late ninth century).

It seemed most unlikely that the original fifteenth-century cartulary still survived, not least because it is difficult to see how a large medieval manuscript could escape notice and attention for so long. It was evident, however, that Charles Wyndham, son of Sir William Wyndham, had taken things with him when he moved to Petworth, in Sussex, in the later eighteenth century; and it seemed possible, therefore, that the Athelney Cartulary had been among them. A letter to the archivist at Petworth in August 1993, asking whether there was any evidence in library catalogues that the Athelney Cartulary had ever been at Petworth, produced a negative response.

In late June 2001 Mrs Alison McCann (West Sussex Record Office), who looks after the archives at Petworth House on behalf of the present Lord Egremont, reported to me (in further response to my letter of August 1993) that she had found the cartulary of Athelney Abbey at Petworth, at the back of a dark shelf in the old Strong Room. By a strange chance, I had been invited to give a lecture in the church of Stoke St Gregory (very close to Athelney) on 21 July 2001, to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the raising of the Athelney Monument; so with Mrs McCann's permission, and that of Lord Egremont, I was able to take advantage of this occasion to announce the discovery of the long-lost cartulary.

The cartulary (a book of 245 folios, written by a single scribe in the early fifteenth century, with some later fifteenth-century additions) contains 'better' (i.e. fuller) texts of all the documents previously known only from Harbin's transcript; and if only to judge from the fact that it has 490 pages (compared with Harbin's 250 pages), it must contain much more that is not known.

The texts of seven Anglo-Saxon charters were known from parts two and three of Harbin's transcript. The texts of three more Anglo-Saxon charters, including the one which purports to be King Alfred's foundation charter for the abbey, were contained in the first part of Harbin's transcript, which came to light in 1993. The cartulary contains better texts of all these charters. It also contains one wholly 'new' Anglo-Saxon charter (full text, including boundary-clause and witness-list): a grant by King Edgar, dated 962, of land at Ilton, in Somerset, to his thegn Godwine.

The cartulary shows that the monks of Athelney, in the fifteenth century, remained conscious and proud of the fact that their history stretched back to King Alfred's foundation of the abbey in the late ninth century. It is good to have better texts of all of the Anglo-Saxon charters which had been preserved in its archives, including the abbey's foundation charter, and a 'new' charter of King Edgar. The importance of the re-discovery of the cartulary lies more generally, however, in what its contents are likely to reveal, in detail, about the later history of the abbey, in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Simon Keynes
1 August 2001