A monastery at Wolverhampton was founded towards the end of the tenth century by Wulfrun, mother of Wulfric Spott (founder of Burton abbey in Staffordshire) and of Ælfhelm, ealdorman of Northumbria. The church belonged to Worcester in the early twelfth century, to Lichfield in the 1140s, and to Worcester again thereafter; it was later granted by Edward IV to the Chapel Royal at Windsor.
The text of a charter (dated 986) by which King Æthelred granted land at (Wolver)hampton to Wulfrun herself is preserved in the cartulary of the Old Minster, Winchester (S 860); but two other charters derive from more obviously appropriate archives, and perhaps ultimately from Wolverhampton. Copies of the charter by which Archbishop Sigeric is alleged to have confirmed Wulfrun’s endowment of the monastery in ‘996’ (S 1380) occur in different contexts. One, said to have been ‘written on parchment in Saxon letters’, was found c. 1560 in the ruins of a wall at Lichfield, enclosed in a leaden case (see Anglia Sacra i. 445); another was printed by Dugdale, ‘ex ipso autographo penes decanum et capitulum Regiæ Capellæ de Windsore an. 1640’. There is also a transcript in a manuscript formerly preserved among the papers of Sir Henry Spelman (Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS. English 880, fols. 145r-148v). The text of Edward the Confessor’s writ (S 1155) is best preserved in an original Inspeximus charter of Edward III, also from Windsor (now Harley Charter 43. D. 29).
<Check with Nigel Ramsay re. (?) a Cotton copy. Wanley (Preface to his catalogue) remarks that he has searched in vain for the copy of the charter seen by Dugdale at Windsor.>
Charters of Wolverhampton
Writ. 1155.
Miscellaneous. 1380.
Select bibliography
Mon. Angl. i. 988-93; Mon. Angl. (rev. ed.) vi. 1443-6; VCH Staffs. iii. 321-31; MRH, p. 444.
- Harmer, Writs, pp. 403-7;
- D. Hooke and T. R. Slater, Anglo-Saxon Wolverhampton: the Town and its Monastery (Wolverhampton, 1986).
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