The Godwine charter, granting to Leofwine the Red the swine-pasture of Swithraedingden (probably Southernden, Kent) for the rent of forty pence and two pounds and an allowance of corn, in Anglo-Saxon, single-sheet document on vellum [Kent (probably Christ Church, Canterbury), 1013-20]

An exceedingly rare and important witness to the earliest form of the English language, and apart from the Will of Æthelgifu and the Blickling Homilies (both Scheide Library at Princeton), the only complete text in Anglo-Saxon in private hands

provenance

(1) Christ Church, Canterbury. The presence of the bisected +CYROGRAPEHUM on this document indicates it is one of two original documents for the transaction (the other most probably lost up to a millennium ago). The deposition of copies of secular records in the archives of religious houses as a form of 'security-' or 'file-copy' is well attested in Anglo-Saxon England (cf. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 1968, no.1460). 

The identification of the estate here as Southernden, in Broughton Malherbe, Kent, is suggestive that the grantor is the famous Earl Godwine (c.990-1053), the most powerful English lord in the decades before the Norman Conquest. Godwine rose to power under King Cnut the Great (d.1035) and his immediate successors, being made earl of Wessex c.1018, and according to the twelfth-century historian Eadmer, the earl of Kent. He was step-father to King Edward the Confessor (c.1003-1066) and father to Harold Godwinesson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, killed in 1066 at Hastings by the Norman invaders. Domesday Book records that immediately before the Norman Conquest Broughton Malherbe and its estates were held by one "Ælfwine ... from Earl Godwine" (DB., Kent, 5:79). If correct, then he must have seen this document prepared, and probably committed it to the archive of the community himself, perhaps laying it with his own hands on the altar (as Edward the Confessor is recorded doing with another record from the same archive: Sawyer no.1047). This places it among the handful of Anglo-Saxon written records which can be connected to an individual about whom we know anything more than their name and their office, and makes it the only surviving artefact from the immediate circle of this crucial figure in English history.

(2) Sir Edward Dering (1598-1644), with his collector's mark of a cross within a circle on the dorse. Dering was one of the first serious antiquarians to collect charters after the Reformation (and owned one of the four copies of the Magna Carta). He presumably acquired the present document directly from the abbey in the belief that the estate concerned was Surrenden, his family seat (cf. C.E. Wright, 'Sir Edward Dering: A Seventeenth-Century Antiquary and his 'Saxon' Charters', in The Early Cultures of North-West Europe, 1950, pp.371-93). It was exhibited at the Society of Antiquaries in 1856 as the property of Sir Edward Dering M.P. (1807-96), and remained in his collection at Surrenden until the Dering sale, Puttick and Simpson, 4 February 1863, lot 1155, £20 to 'Hobart'; perhaps in fact acquired by another member of the Dering family; their sale in our rooms, 20 June 1989, lot 27; Schøyen MS 600.

text

This document records the grant of the swine-pasture of Swithraedingden (probably Southernden, Kent) by Godwine to Leofwine the Red, for the rent of forty pence and two pounds and eight ambers of corn. The witnesses are Archbishop Lyfing and Abbot Ælfmær and the community of Christ Church and the community of St. Augustine's and Sired and Ælfsige cild and Æthelric and many other good men within the city and outside it. This is the only record of this transaction, and is listed by Sawyer as his charter no.1220, appearing also in facsimile in Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters. Supplementary volume I, no.19.

This document stands apart from almost all other Anglo-Saxon written records to come to the market in the last few centuries. It is not a fragment of a leaf, or a Latin text with a few words glossed in Old English. It is a complete text, securely datable and localisable, in the earliest form of the English language. That language forms the root of all modern English, and was that spoken by Bede and King Alfred as their mother tongue. When the present charter was listed by Sawyer in 1968 it was the only pre-Conquest manuscript with a complete text in the Anglo-Saxon language remaining in private hands. The following year, the Will of Æthelgifu appeared in our rooms, 10 December 1969, lot 29, and is now in the Scheide Library at Princeton, along with the Blickling Homilies. With the exception of those two, the present manuscript is the only complete Anglo-Saxon text now in private hands, and is almost certainly the last intact record of the fundamental base of our language to come to the market.

literature

J.M. Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, 6 vols (London, 1839-48), no.1315; L.B. Larking, 'On the Surrenden Charters', Archaeologica Cantiana 1(1858) pp. 62-64 (with translation of the present text on p.63); A.J. Robertson, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 1939, no. 75, pp. 148-149 and 394-395 (also with translation of the present text); P.H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters, 1968, p. 356, no. 1220, as the property of "Mrs M. Sturges [born Dering] ... of Biddenden, Kent"; D. Knowles, C.N.L. Brooke and V. London, The Heads of Religious Houses in England and Wales 940–1216 (1972), p.236; S. Keynes, Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon Charters. Supplementary volume I, 1991, no. 19, pp. 6-7; H.R. Woudhuysen, 'Manuscripts at Auction: January 1989 to December 1990', in English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700, 3 (1992), p.273; D. Scragg, A Conspectus of Scribal Hands Writing English, 960-1100, 2012, p.65, no.802