Additions to the Corpus

In September 1845 John Mitchell Kemble wrote to his friend William Bodham Donne about the prospect of finding 'new' Anglo-Saxon charters: 'However I do not despair of seeing hereafter much more recovered in out of the way holes and corners.  There must be still hundreds of Anglosaxon charters which have escaped the cook's casserole & the size pot, and the impious hands of bookbinders, and lie snugly in crypts waiting for a saviour from the waters.  Who would have anticipated four years ago that two hundred charters should be found at Winchester, and which seem never to have been noted by any one!'

Kemble was referring here to the extraordinary appearance in late 1841 of the twelfth-century cartulary of the Old Minster, Winchester, known as the Codex Wintoniensis.  The cartulary had been in the custody of Mr Watkins, Canon Librarian, and was noticed among his effects, after his death, when they were about to be sold. The news was passed to Frederic Madden, of the British Museum, who first rejoiced in the fact that the manuscript was unknown to Kemble, and who then had the pleasure of drawing it to his attention.  Kemble was able to incorporate charters from the Codex Wintoniensis in his Codex Diplomaticus, from vol. 3 (1845), covering charters from 966 to 1016; so when he reached 1066, with vol. 4 (1846), he had to start the chronological sequence again, in vols. 5 (1847) and 6 (1848), in order to incorporate the earlier texts from the Codex Wintoniensis.  In 1844 Madden asked Kemble to write in support of a bid to secure the manuscript for the British Museum, which he did (BL Egerton 2843, fols. 375-6); and in 1845 the manuscript was purchased by the BM from the Dean and Chapter of Winchester, for £200.  It is now BL Add. 15350.

There have also been some spectacular 'discoveries' of single-sheet charters.  In 1891 a collection of original charters (derived from the archives of several different houses), which had been put together in the eighteenth century by (successively) Peter Le Neve, Gustavus Brander and Robert Austen, appeared in the sale of the library of W. H. Crawford, of Co. Cork.  The portfolio was acquired by the Bodleian Library, and the charters were published soon afterwards in The Crawford Collection of Early Charters and Documents, ed. A. S. Napier and W. H. Stevenson (Oxford, 1895).

After the dissolution of Burton abbey (Staffordshire) in 1539, its charters and cartularies passed with its estates into the hands of the Paget family, later Marquesses of Anglesey.  Five original charters from the Burton archive were discovered, c. 1940, in a drawer in the office of a descendant of a person who had been an agent for the Paget family estates in the early nineteenth century.

The late-tenth-century will of Æthelgifu came to light in 1939 among material found in an outbuilding at Alderley House, near Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, forming part of the literary effects of John Selden (1584-1654) and his executor Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76).  It passed into the collection of Mr James Fairhurst, and then into the hands of Morgan Grenfell & Co. Ltd., merchant bankers.  It was published as The Will of Æthelgifu, ed. D. Whitelock, et al. (Roxburghe Club, 1968).  The will is now in the Scheide Library, Princeton, NJ.

Several 'new' charters (or improved texts of charters known hitherto from inferior transcripts) have come to light since the publication of Sawyer's catalogue in 1968. For further details, see the Charters section, under 'Additions to the Corpus'.