Charters of Glastonbury Abbey: (15 Anglo-Saxon Charters)

Glastonbury Abbey was the wealthiest and most influential monastery in later Anglo-Saxon England. It was a noted centre of scholarship, and claimed ancient origins which were later extravagantly embellished to link the house with such luminaries as St Patrick, St David and King Arthur. The historiographical evidence for Glastonbury is particularly challenging, because the accounts of the monastery's early history were revised and interpolated over centuries, as the legends grew. There are also complications in the study of its archive: the manuscripts are mostly late and corrupt, and the whole is overshadowed by the contents list of a lost cartulary (the Liber Terrarum), which included many more early charters than now survive. The present volume is the first critical edition of the sixty-one surviving charters from the abbey's pre-Conquest archive, which date from the later seventh century to the reign of Cnut. The texts are edited to a high standard, with comprehensive commentaries that include translation and elucidation of the Old English boundary clauses, and authoritative assessments of authenticity. There is a long introduction with analysis and synthesis of the documentary evidence for Glastonbury's history in the Anglo-Saxon period and for the accumulation of its endowment, including a section on William of Malmesbury's works on Glastonbury. The volume concludes with a series of appendixes which present all the evidence for the lost charters in the Liber Terrarum and in other sources.

Table of Contents:
Introduction The History of the Abbey The History of the Archive The Manuscripts The Authenticity of the Charters The Landed Endowment The Abbots William of Malmesbury and Glastonbury List of Charters Sigla The Charters Appendixes

About the Author :
S. E. Kelly is Senior Research Fellow, University of Birmingham.

Review :
impressively learned work. Anyone working on any aspect of early medieval Glastonbury abbey and its lands must consult it, but anyone more generally interested in the Anglo-Saxon period in Wessex will find many unexpected insights in this important set of records. Barbara Yorke, Southern History This splendid volume by Susan Kelly is ... substantial, 624 pages, reflecting the size and wealth of the abbey of Glastonbury, and the mass of surviving charters and documentation. ... this must be seen as a very welcome addition to the study of Anglo-Saxon Glastonbury. Teresa Hall, Somerset Archaeology and Natural History a formidable work of scholarship ... a great accomplishment and a very important addition to the Anglo-Saxon Charters series. Francesca Tinti, The English Historical Review