A church would appear to have been established at Sherborne during the course of the seventh century, perhaps in the reign of King Cenwealh (642-72). When the bishopric of the kingdom of Wessex was divided in two, following the death of Bishop Hædde of Winchester (c. 705), the new diocese was assigned to Aldhelm (Bede, HE v.18), with his see at Sherborne. For the next 200 years Sherborne enjoyed status as one of the principal churches in the West Saxon kingdom, serving as the burial-place of King Æthelbald in 860 and of King Æthelberht in 865, and receiving an important grant of privileges in 863-4 (S 333). The diocese of Sherborne was itself divided into three bishoprics, following the death of Bishop Asser (909): the bishop of Sherborne retained charge of Dorset, but new sees were established at Crediton (for Devon and Cornwall) and at Wells (for Somerset). In the 990s, during the episcopate of Bishop Wulfsige III (St Wulfsige), the church of Sherborne was converted into a monastic community; and in this connection its privileges and endowment were confirmed by charter of King Æthelred, dated 998 (S 895). In the 1060s Bishop Hereman contrived to unite the diocese of Sherborne with that of Ramsbury; and following his death in 1078 the see was re-established, under Bishop Osmund, at Old Sarum (Salisbury). In 1122 the minor foundation at Horton was combined with Sherborne (above, pp. 00-00), and Sherborne itself was raised from a priory to an independent abbey. See WM, GP, pp. 175-84; Mon. Angl. i. 62 and 423-4; Not. Mon. (Dorset), no. XXV; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) i. 331-41; VCH Dorset ii. 62-70 and iii. 40-2; MRH, p. 76; HRH, p. 70. See also J. Fowler, Mediaeval Sherborne (Dorchester, 1951); Harmer, Writs, pp. 266-70; D. P. Kirby, ‘Notes on the Saxon Bishops of Sherborne’, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History & Archaeological Society 87 (1965), pp. 213-22; Edwards, Charters of the Early West Saxon Kingdom, pp. 237-53. For St Wulfsige, see C. H. Talbot, ‘The Life of Saint Wulsin of Sherborne by Goscelin’, Revue bénédictine 69 (1959), pp. 68-85.
There is some evidence at Sherborne for the practice of preserving records in liturgical books. The Sherborne Pontifical (Paris, BN, Fonds latins 943: Golden Age, no. 34, and Ker, Catalogue, no. 364) has at the beginning a copy of a letter from a nameless archbishop (Sigeric or Ælfric) to Bishop Wulfsige III (2r-3r, ptd Councils & Synods, ed. Whitelock, et al., no. 41); and among the texts added to the manuscript in the early eleventh century we find a list of the bishops of Sherborne to Æthelric (1v), two penitential letters of Bishop Wulfsige intended for the benefit of persons who had killed their own kinsmen (170r, ptd ibid., no. 42, and Memorials, ed. Stubbs, p. 409), and the text of a writ of Bishop Æthelric (170v, ptd Harmer, Writs, no. 63 (S 1383)). It would also appear that the vernacular record of King Edgar’s grant to Sherborne of land at Oborne (S 813) was derived from a gospel-book; curiously, the record itself was supplied with a patently anachronistic witness-list, copied from S 333.
A text of King Æthelred’s charter confirming the establishment of a monastic community at Sherborne (S 895) occurs in BL Cotton Otho A. xviii, 132r (formerly ‘fol. 157’), written in the early twelfth century; the manuscript was badly damaged in the Cotton fire of 1731, but the text was printed beforehand in Anglia Sacra i. 170-1. Other documents copied in Otho A. xviii, apparently in association with the Sherborne charter, include King William I’s charter for Bury St Edmunds (Regesta i. 137), a letter from Pope Alexander II to Baldwin, abbot of Bury St Edmunds, and a letter of thanks from King Alexander I of Scotland to the prior and convent of Worcester. The nature and provenance of this curious collection of texts warrant further investigation It may reflect an interest taken at Worcester in the circumstances of the monastic communities at Sherborne and Bury St Edmunds, in relation to their respective bishops; or it may represent the remnants of a collection put together by some other party for purposes yet unknown. Whatever the case, the collection serves as useful evidence for the transmission of copies of particular charters from one house to another, before and after the Conquest.
<Pursue Otho A. xviii further. Consult DB for William I charter?>
The majority of the Sherborne charters are preserved in London, BL Add. 46487 (Davis 892); for a description and discussion of this manuscript, see F. Wormald, ‘The Sherborne “Chartulary”’, Fritz Saxl: a Volume of Memorial Essays, ed. D. J. Gordon (London, 1957), pp. 101-19. As Wormald observed, the form and nature of Add. 46487 must be understood against the background of a dispute between the monks of Sherborne and Joscelin, bishop of Salisbury. Following the death of Abbot Robert in the early 1140s, the bishop had imposed Abbot Peter on the community, whereupon Prior Joseph and the monks appealed to Pope Eugenius III, who ordered Joscelin not to interfere with their affairs, and who issued a privilege confirming the monks in their possessions (Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) i. 338-9); Abbot Henry was elected by the community in 1146, and Add. 46487 seems to have been compiled under his auspices soon afterwards, not least to protect the abbot and the community against the threat of any further encroachment on their lands and privileges by the bishop of Salisbury. Add. 46487 is by any standards a sumptuous book; and its particular interest lies in its juxtaposition of charters and other documents pertaining to Sherborne abbey with a collection of liturgical texts (including prayers for use in particular ceremonies performed by the abbot), as if to elevate the status of the charters by associating them with the sacred texts. The documents copied in the first section of the manuscript (Wormald, arts. 2-20) begin with King Æthelred’s charter confirming the establishment of Sherborne as a monastic community (S 895), which recites the greater part of the abbey’s pre-Conquest endowment and which for this and other reasons was evidently regarded as the community’s most important muniment. Æthelred’s charter is followed by a series of other charters relating to the abbey’s estates, mainly pre-Conquest but also including a few issued by Bishop Roger of Salisbury, ending with three grants of privileges (S 228, 294 and 333), and with a transcript of the Sherborne entries in Domesday Book (on 21r-22v); the spare leaves at the end of the third quire of the manuscript was soon used for the addition of some related texts (Wormald, arts. 21-5). The second section (and fourth quire) of the manuscript (Wormald, arts. 26-31) comprises charters pertaining to Sherborne’s cell at Horton, beginning with the charter of Henry I and continuing with the five pre-Conquest texts (above, pp. 000-0). The third section of the manuscript in its original state (Wormald, arts. 32-40) contains copies of various twelfth-century documents mainly relating to the dispute with the bishop of Salisbury in the 1140s. The fourth comprises the liturgical texts, summarised by Wormald, p. 117. It should be emphasised that there are instructive differences between the series of Sherborne charters in the first section of the manuscript and the group of Horton charters in the second. All but one of the Sherborne charters are cast directly in favour of the church; several of them are demonstrably spurious in their received form, though the process of forgery ranges across the spectrum from the subtle adaptation of a genuine text to outright fabrication. The exception is the charter by which King Æthelwulf granted land at Halstock in Dorset to the deacon Eadberht in 840, with a confirmation apparently added in 854 (S 290); and while the text has suffered in the course of its transmission, it is a matter of some interest that the charter was allowed to stand in this form. The Horton charters, on the other hand, comprise a relatively straightforward series of title-deeds for the abbey’s estates, cast in favour of lay beneficiaries (above, pp. 00-00). Under these circumstances it might be considered unlikely that the compiler of Add. 46487 was himself responsible for doctoring the Sherborne charters for the particular purposes in hand; his texts are perhaps to be regarded as copies made in good faith of a series of muniments which had been ‘improved’ as necessary at earlier stages in their transmission.
<Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. J. C. E. Doble and D. W. Rannie (Oxford, 1885-98) III, 369, 373, 417-19, 421, 444-52.>
It is to be expected that some ‘early’ charters issued in favour of the bishops of Sherborne would have been transferred to Crediton and to Wells when the diocese was divided c. 910. S 255 (MS. 1) purports to be a charter by which King Æthelheard granted land at Crediton to Bishop Forthhere; it was produced at Exeter in the second half of the eleventh century, but may have been modelled to some extent on a charter which had passed from Sherborne to Crediton in the early tenth century, and from Crediton to Exeter in the eleventh. Similarly, S 380 is a charter by which King Edward the Elder granted land in Somerset to Bishop Asser; the original which lies behind it presumably passed from Sherborne to Wells in the early tenth century, and was subsequently used by Bishop Giso for production of S 1034 (Keynes 1988, p. 213, n. 170). A charter of King Æthelstan in favour of a bishop ‘Alfricus’ or ‘Alfridus’ (S 445) might refer to Alfred, bishop of Sherborne, or to a suffragan bishop of some kind called Ælfric or Alfred; whatever the case, the land was granted by the bishop to another party, and the charter was preserved at Shaftesbury. We must otherwise assume that charters pertaining to estates which formed the endowment of the see of Sherborne were retained by the bishops and were subsequently transferred (together with the archives of the bishopric of Ramsbury) to Salisbury; the lands of the cathedral church of Salisbury are covered by the ‘Registrum S. Osmundi’ (Davis 867), but unfortunately its compiler did not see fit to include any pre-Conquest texts which might have been available to him.
An important list of benefactors is preserved with other material relating to Sherborne abbey in BL Cotton Faustina A. ii, 25rv; ptd Mon. Angl. i. 62, and O’Donovan, pp. 81-2. Related information on Sherborne’s benefactors is displayed in a set of decorative medallions in the ‘Sherborne Missal’ (BL Loan 82 <Add. 0000>), pp. 363-93; for a facsimile, see J. A. Herbert, The Sherborne Missal (Oxford, 1920), with texts ptd pp. 24-5. The particular significance of the information transmitted in these contexts is that it appears to preserve evidence of an early stratum in the endowment of the bishopric of Sherborne, before the division of the bishopric c. 910, and before the ‘refoundation’ of the church as a monastic community in 998. Reference is made, for example, to King Cenwealh’s grant of land at Lanprobi, which has led to the hypothesis that Sherborne was founded on or near the site of an earlier British church; and other grants recorded in this form pertain to Sherborne’s acquisition of estates which are known subsequently to have belonged to the bishopric of Salisbury. For further discussion, see H. P. R. Finberg, ‘Sherborne, Glastonbury, and the Expansion of Wessex’, Lucerna (London, 1964), pp. 95-115; and esp. O’Donovan, pp. xxxvii-liii.
Edition: Charters of Sherborne, ed. M. A. O’Donovan, Anglo-Saxon Charters 3 (London, 1988). See also S. Kelly, in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990), pp. 85-9; P. Wormald, in English Historical Review 107 (1992), pp. 430-1; and P. Kitson, in Medium Ævum 60.1 (19xx), pp. 104-5.
Royal diplomas. 228; 263; 290; 294; 295; 333; 422; 423; 516; 813; 895; 933; 975. See also under Horton (above, p. 00).
Writs. 1383.
Miscellaneous. 1382; 1422; 1474.