This article lists Anglo-Saxon charters, writs, wills, records of disputes and other miscellaneous memoranda from the 7th to 11th centuries. It is from three principal sources:
Sawyer's list has been digitised and updated as the Electronic Sawyer. The list in this article does not include charters discovered since Sawyer's 1968 publication and included in the Electronic Sawyer
In Anglo-Saxon scholarship today, documents are referred to by their Sawyer number (e.g. S 123). Older publications cite the Kemble number (K 123) or Birch number (B 123).
Ann Goodier made a study of the geographic distribution of the estates mentioned in the known Anglo-Saxon Charters, however this was never published. A map derived from her work appeared in Hill (1981).
The corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters was first collected by John Mitchell Kemble for their value to legal history whilst he was a law student at Trinity College Cambridge; these he published as the Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici in 6 volumes 1839-48. Facsimiles of some of the charters were published by the British Museum (1873âÂÂ78) and the Ordnance Survey (1878-1884). These demonstrated inaccuracies in Kemble's work and together with the discoveries of new charters in the intervening 4 decades, this provided motivation for Birch to revisit the corpus in his Cartularium Saxonicum (1885-1893). Florence Harmer published select documents in 1914. H P R Finberg and Cyril Roy Hart published county by county studies of Anglo-Saxon Charters between the 1950s-1970s. Sawyer's ' was published in 1968; it includes descriptions, academically ascribed dates and comments on authenticity but not the original charter texts. The British Academy's Anglo-Saxon Charters series began in 1973 with publication of the charters of Rochester cathedral. The series publishes the full charter texts together with bibliographic references and diplomatic and codicological commentary; the most recent volume (20) was published in 2021.
An ongoing parallel project by the Arizona center for medieval and Renaissance studies, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in Microfiche Facsimile (1994-2020; 28 vols), aims to publish all Old English manuscripts.
' project publishes Sawyer's original Annotated List via their website but has extensively updated the bibliography to reflect material published post 1968.
The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England project maintains a relational database of all named entities (e.g. people, places) mentioned in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon Charters, principally based on the work of Simon Keynes.
The table below gives Sawyer's original listing of the charters, here arranged chronologically starting with royal diplomas and writs, then non-royal grants by the laity, bishops and other ecclesiastics; and finally by miscellaneous texts, wills and boundary descriptions.
The following table lists Anglo Saxon charters together with their , Birch and Kemble numbers, which can be sorted to preference. Additional columns provide the ascribed date, grantor, grantee, description, language/place of production and reigning King; all after Sawyer (1968). The texts and bibliographic details are available in the Electronic Sawyer.