St Paul's was the principal church of London from its foundation in A. D. 604. This volume is an edition of all the surviving documentary material from St Paul's from the seventh century to 1066, with expert analysis and commentary on the history of the bishops and the cathedral community within the city and diocese, considered against the background of London's history during this period. The medieval archives of St Paul's suffered at times from neglect, and as a result the majority of the Anglo-Saxon charters of the bishop and chapter are preserved only as fragments in the notebooks of two seventeenth-century scholars who studied a crucial manuscript before it disappeared at the time of the Commonwealth. These excerpts are here edited with full diplomatic and historical commentary, which makes it possible to resurrect to some extent the full documents. The edition of the charters is prefaced by an extended introduction which provides an important new synthesis of the history of London and St Paul's in the Anglo-Saxon period, complete with an extensive bibliography.

This is the first critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon archive of the Benedictine monastery at Peterborough, established by Bishop Æthelwold around AD 970 on the site of an earlier house known as Medeshamstede. The archive comprises 31 documents ranging in date from the 7th to the 11th centuries.Alongside genuine royal diplomas, leases and an Old English will, are a series of spectacular forgeries that were created after the Norman Conquest as the monastic community strove to enhance its status and protect its endowment. A collection of hugely important memoranda, 'the Medeshamstede memoranda', preserve intriguing details of transactions that took place in the later 7th century, and a series of brief records illuminate the processes by which Æthelwold built up the endowment of the refounded abbey in the 970s and 980s. This volume contains authoritative editions of these 31 texts, plus a further 4 related documents. There is a full commentary on every text, with translation of all Old English documents and passages, and detailed discussion of boundary clauses. The Introduction provides a detailed elucidation of the history of the monastery in its two incarnations. This includes a ground-breaking new evaluation of the sources for the history of Medeshamstede, which overturns the conventional understanding of the status of this house and its supposed early 'colonies', and also much new material on the fate of this area of the East Midlands during the period in the 9th and early 10th centuries when it came under Danish rule.This volume will be of great value to those studying Anglo-Saxon and ecclesiastical history, to local historians, and to specialists in other fields, such as medieval Latin, Old English, and place-name studies.

St Paul's was the principal church of London from its foundation in A. D. 604. This volume is an edition of all the surviving documentary material from St Paul's from the seventh century to 1066, with expert analysis and commentary on the history of the bishops and the cathedral community within the city and diocese, considered against the background of London's history during this period. The medieval archives of St Paul's suffered at times from neglect, and as a result the majority of the Anglo-Saxon charters of the bishop and chapter are preserved only as fragments in the notebooks of two seventeenth-century scholars who studied a crucial manuscript before it disappeared at the time of the Commonwealth. These excerpts are here edited with full diplomatic and historical commentary, which makes it possible to resurrect to some extent the full documents. The edition of the charters is prefaced by an extended introduction which provides an important new synthesis of the history of London and St Paul's in the Anglo-Saxon period, complete with an extensive bibliography.

This is the first critical edition of the Anglo-Saxon archive of the Benedictine monastery at Peterborough, established by Bishop Æthelwold around AD 970 on the site of an earlier house known as Medeshamstede. The archive comprises 31 documents ranging in date from the 7th to the 11th centuries.Alongside genuine royal diplomas, leases and an Old English will, are a series of spectacular forgeries that were created after the Norman Conquest as the monastic community strove to enhance its status and protect its endowment. A collection of hugely important memoranda, 'the Medeshamstede memoranda', preserve intriguing details of transactions that took place in the later 7th century, and a series of brief records illuminate the processes by which Æthelwold built up the endowment of the refounded abbey in the 970s and 980s. This volume contains authoritative editions of these 31 texts, plus a further 4 related documents. There is a full commentary on every text, with translation of all Old English documents and passages, and detailed discussion of boundary clauses. The Introduction provides a detailed elucidation of the history of the monastery in its two incarnations. This includes a ground-breaking new evaluation of the sources for the history of Medeshamstede, which overturns the conventional understanding of the status of this house and its supposed early 'colonies', and also much new material on the fate of this area of the East Midlands during the period in the 9th and early 10th centuries when it came under Danish rule.This volume will be of great value to those studying Anglo-Saxon and ecclesiastical history, to local historians, and to specialists in other fields, such as medieval Latin, Old English, and place-name studies.