David A. Woodman

‘Æthelstan A’ and the rhetoric of rule

Abstract In the years c. 928 to 935, sole responsibility for the production of Latin diplomas was entrusted to the royal draftsman known to modern scholarship as ‘Æthelstan A’. The documents he produced are entirely different from any previous example of the Anglo-Saxon diploma. Not only does he modify the very form of the diploma, but he writes in a Latin style that is marked by its sophistication, ostentation and learning, a kind of Latin that was a forerunner to the so-called ‘hermeneutic’ Latin that dominates Anglo-Latin literature of the mid-tenth century and beyond. Never before had the royal diplomas rhetorical properties been exploited to such a degree and it seems no coincidence that these documents appeared following King Æthelstans momentous political conquest of the North in 927.

Charters, Northumbria and the unification of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries

AT VARIOUS POINTS in the seventh century, the Northumbrian kingdoms of Deira and Bernicia, divided by the River Tees,1 were notionally joined under the rulership of Kings of the standing of Edwin and Oswald.2 Bede describes the advantages brought by such united political rule. But despite this hypothetical unity within the kingdom of Northumbria itself, the indications are that divisions remained and modern scholarship has investigated the tendency of the Northumbrian kingdom to come apart at the seams, as it were, whenever significant internal or external pressure was applied. The very title of David Rollason’s recent historical account emphasises this phenomenon.3 From its emergence in the late seventh and early eighth centuries as a kingdom of Europe-wide significance,4 historians have described the effects of major political events like the manifold civil disturbances of the mid to late eighth century,5 the