Select English Historical Documents of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

This 1914 volume contains a selection of some of the most interesting Anglo-Saxon documents of the ninth and tenth centuries. Included among them are the only two surviving wills of Anglo-Saxon kings, and the 'colophon' in the Lindisfarne Gospels, in which a priest called Aldred gives an account of the making of the gospel-book. The volume also includes the 'Fonthill Letter', addressed by Ealdorman Ordlaf to King Edward the Elder, to serve as evidence for use in a dispute about an estate at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and still extant in its original form. All of the documents are written in Old English, furnished here with translations and commentaries. The reissue of Dr Harmer's book is complemented by reissues of Dorothy Whitelock's Anglo-Saxon Wills (1930), and of Agnes Jane Robertson's Anglo-Saxon Charters (1939, 2nd edition 1956). Between them, the three volumes represent the surviving corpus of Anglo-Saxon documents in the vernacular.