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The Anglo-Saxon Charters Website
Richard Drögereit
Richard Drögereit (1908-1977) published several articles of interest to Anglo-Saxonists. His article 'Gab es eine angelsächsische Königskanzlei?' ('Was there an Anglo-Saxon royal chancery?'), which appeared in 1935, arose out of his dissertation for the University of Göttingen. It is a seminal study of charter-production in the tenth century, and is made available here in an English translation (link below).
The opening page of Drögereit's article is shown here, from a copy inscribed by Drögereit, perhaps given by him to V. H. Galbraith (whose signature is on the front cover). The offprint passed from Galbraith to Dr Pierre Chaplais (by whom lightly annotated), and was acquired by SDK from PC's library in 2008.
'Gab es eine angelsächsische Königskanzlei?' was published separately as a dissertation (Berlin, 1935), and in Archiv für Urkundenforschung 13 (1935), pp. 335-436. It was reprinted in Richard Drögereit, Sachsen / Angelsachsen / Niedersachsen, ed. Carl Röper and Herbert Huster, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1978), I, pp. 11–125.
In a German dissertation on Anglo-Saxon philology (H. Kügler, Ie und seine Parallelformen im Angelsächsischen (Berlin, 1916), p. 10), Drögereit had noticed a quotation from a letter of W. H. Stevenson to Kügler, in which Stevenson had mentioned palaeographical evidence for the existence of royal scribes during the reign of King Æthelstan, and the implications which this had for the emergence of a ‘chancery language’, militating against the theory that the charters ‘were drawn up by the recipients’. Click here for an image of this page in Drögereit's article.
Drögereit pursued this point further, identifying several ‘royal scribes’ active in the 930s and 940s. The scribes designated ‘Æthelstan A’, ‘Æthelstan C’ and ‘Edmund C’ are known from extant single sheets; and in each case Drögereit associated the single-sheet charters in question with other charters preserved only in cartulary copies. The scribes designated ‘Æthelstan B’, ‘Edmund A’ and ‘Edmund B’, on the other hand, are known only from charters preserved in cartulary copies. In Drögereit’s view, the evidence for royal scribes dissolved in the 950s, and he presumed that charters began at that time to be produced under different circumstances, by different agencies, including the beneficiaries themselves. He identified the one later ‘recurring’ scribe, active in the early 960s and thus designated ‘Edgar A’, as a member of the community of Abingdon Abbey, and went so far as to suggest that the scribe in question might have been none other than Abbot Æthelwold himself.
For a discussion of Drögereit’s views, see S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 15-19. See also Charters of Abingdon Abbey, ed. S. Kelly, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2001-2), I, pp. cxv-cxxxi, arguing that ‘Edgar A’ was indeed an Abingdon scribe, probably Abbot Æthelwold himself.
• Richard Drögereit, ‘Was there an Anglo-Saxon royal chancery?’ <.pdf file>
The translation was made in 2004–5 by Mrs Rosemary Bootiman (German Language Services, 20 Atholl Walk, Bedford Mk41 0BG), with support from the BA–RHS Joint Committee on Anglo-Saxon Charters. The translation was edited for this website by Dr Rebecca Rushforth and Dr David Woodman.
The closing pages of Drögereit's article are shown below (with pencil annotations by Pierre Chaplais, assigning particular charters to their respective archives).