Problems and Possibilities of Early Medieval Charters ed. by Jonathan Jarrett and Allan Scott McKinley (review)

Charters (or the collections of them called cartularies) are a major source of documentary evidence for early medieval history. But their use and interpretation, and indeed the trajectories they have taken in terms of preservation and transmission, are not straightforward. At least so suggest the editors of this collection. The chapters present evidentiary analysis of charters from a range of early medieval European areas including Anglo-Saxon England, Catalonia during the period of Carolingian rule, and monastic centres in Sweden and Carolingian Burgundy. Each in turn considers particular charters, the evidence they yield, and the problems they present to historians. The geographic centres under discussion comprise the so-called Urkundenlandschaft (‘charter landscape’), where historians can trace norms in the way charters were used and created across different geographical regions.

Several chapters point out that charters were often composed according to stock formularies; nonetheless there is significant variety in the content and scribal traditions across the charter landscape. The opening chapter lays out the problems and the potentials of using charters. Many of the chapters though have more to say about the problems of using charter evidence than their potential, but do make important points about working within evidentiary limits. The chapter by Martin Ryan on charters composed in England before the Viking invasions points out that the confusions that can arise from charters are in part a consequence of confusion in the minds of people from the period, and the fact that charters were often a formulaic record of more complex legal and familial situations that were both oral and written. Allan McKinley’s chapter charts a complex series of relationships in one family line in Alsace, again offering the caution that the formulaic language and structure of a charter may not reflect any historical uniformity in practice.

Subsequent chapters urge the consideration of charter evidence as ‘narrative’ evidence, narratives, or as evidence of a kind of representation of social relations, including charters from Swedish Cistercians and Burgundian scribes. Chapters on charters from Carolingian Burgundy (by Charles West) and Carolingian Catalonia (by Jonathan Jarrett) both suggest the charters are evidence of the extent (or otherwise) of Carolingian cultural influence in these areas and in some instances the retention of local usages. Further investigation of Carolingian royal charters (in the chapter by Shigeto Kikuchi) yields evidence on the use of honorifics.

Many of the chapters suggest what cannot be done with charters while also working with and through the often-extensive archival silences to draw out points of significance. One such is Morn Capper’s chapter on charters relating to the Mercian kingdom. She is dealing with a rare instance where the victors have not written the history – in this case expansionist Mercian kings such as Offa – but instead the history of the Mercians derives from the charter evidence of areas they conquered. Further strong use of charter evidence comes in Alaric Trousdale’s chapter on charters from the reign of Anglo-Saxon monarch Edmund, where the author notes that the systematic study of witness lists provides important means of untangling evidence of active factions. Many of the chapters are tentative analyses, pointing out for instance that many surviving charters have not yet been edited into modern editions, nor are the circumstances of their creation always clear (were there chanceries, for instance, or other arrangements? Is there such a thing as a ‘typical’ archive?). But the collection overall is a useful demonstration of diverse areas of the charter landscape and the different uses for the evidence charters provide.